How do you love a forest? Ethan Tapper has thoughts.
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Thanks for listening to USA Today's The Excerpt. Today is Wednesday, July 8th, 2026. Last summer, we went into the woods with Forrester and author Ethan Tapper, and it was one of your favorites. This episode originally aired on August 6th, 2025. With climate change, the threat of wildfires, and human encroachment, among other things, our trees and forests are in desperate need of guardians. From tropical rainforests often referred to as the lungs of the planet, to the ancient bristlecone pine forest in California's White Mountains, home to some of the oldest living organisms on Earth, what's being done to protect our woodlands? Here to discuss what he's called the bittersweet work of tending to a changing world is Forrester and author Ethan Tapper, whose book How to Love a Forest is available now.
Ethan, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for having me. Forests are, of course, So much more than trees, there's an abundance of biodiversity both in and beneath those canopies. What has your work as a forester taught you about the balance between plants, animals, microorganisms, not only in the forest, but on Earth?
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.
You wrote about how we humans are unitary organisms while trees are modular organisms. I want to understand that a bit better. When we look at a single tree, what sort of collective is there and how has that informed your work?
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, Many of the branches within that tree have their own energetic economy so they can like take care of their own needs before exporting resources to the rest of the tree when they're photosynthesizing.
And they sort of live and die on their own. And I just thought of this as a really interesting way to also talk about our societies.
For better or worse, humans have helped shape forests. What led to your change of heart regarding whether the best way to care for forests was to simply leave them alone or to act?
I think that a big theme behind how to love a forest is this concept, right? That I think in our culture, you know, we've seen the way that people have harmed ecosystems. And so it makes sense in some ways to... to think that the way that we must care for these ecosystems is by just protecting them.
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