Ethan Tapper
speaker
102 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Ethan Tapper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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One of the things that I talk about in How to Love a Forest and that I named the first chapter of the book after is this idea of reimagining forests.
So I think that a lot of us, you know, if I asked you, what is a forest?
Everybody would know the answer to that question, you know, and then sort of if I pressed you on it, everybody would crumble, right?
Because we really actually just have this really sort of superficial idea of what these ecosystems are.
And usually when we think about them, we think about them as like a bunch of trees.
It's a place with this bunch of trees.
But when I talk about the forest, what the forest is to me is like a coral reef.
In this analogy, the trees are like the coral.
They're this living structure around which this community is built.
But of course, if any of us were to sort of think about or describe or picture a coral reef, we would never be like,
It's just a place with a bunch of coral.
We would think about it in terms of this incredibly dense and diverse and beautiful community of life that's woven around that living structure.
That's what a forest is to me, right?
It's not just the trees, but it's also the trees and the plants and the animals and the birds and the bears and the fungi and, you know, even the natural processes that are a part of those ecosystems, the way they change over time.
So within an individual tree, it's very interesting.
I first came to this concept by listening to an interview with a botanist who is referred to sort of almost offhandedly this idea that some people see trees as colonial organisms, meaning that they are less like an individual entity.
than a colony of these semi-autonomous branches.
So it led me down this rabbit hole to discuss this concept that's called branch autonomy.
And basically, the long and the short of it is, yes, a tree is a single organism.
And at the same time,
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