When Ethan Tapper began his first book, How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World, the Bolton naturalist arose each morning to write from 5 to 6 a.m. before starting his day job as a forester. The book, which won the 2025 New England Book Award for nonfiction, examines Tapper’s efforts to heal Bear Island, the 175-acre forest in Bolton he purchased in 2017, which had been degraded by unsustainable logging, invasive species, soil erosion and overbrowsing by deer.
Tapper’s current book was born of the same work ethic. When How to Love a Forest was finished, the 37-year-old writer was not. He still arose each morning at 5 a.m. to keep writing about the natural world.
The result is The Forest Year: Finding Hope in a World Worth Saving, which comes out October 6. Like Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, the new book documents a year of seasonal changes at Bear Island, heralded by the appearances of birds, bees, flowers and other living things. In the process, Tapper explores deeper themes about place, community and land stewardship.
Seven Days spoke with him about the release of The Forest Year.
Did you adopt a particular method of chronicling the seasons — or did you just write what you observed during your normal daily activities?
Every person who spends a lot of time in nature does this all the time. We observe the seasons because we’re interested in what’s happening at any given moment. And you realize that there are all these special things that happen at different times. Botanists and people who love flowers wait for the ephemeral wildflowers, the first flowers of spring. They only exist in this brief moment between when the soil thaws and when the trees get their leaves. If you’re a birder, bird migration does this most powerfully because it, too, is such a profound marker of the seasons.
Did spending a year chronicling a forest’s life cycle change your perspective on your own life cycles?
Yes. It’s a generational thing. People my age feel like we’re supposed to be in motion all the time, and if we stay in one place, we’re settling; we’re boring; we’re unambitious and old. I have felt this pressure, too, even as I’m investing myself in these forests of Vermont and this place I call Bear Island. So I thought, What would happen if I just decided to stay? You start to realize that there are all these riches of this world that cannot be attained by going far, only by going deep. You develop a really deep relationship with these places and seasons that are so profound and powerful.
Forests have been evolving for millions of years, whereas humans are relative newcomers. Is there hubris in claiming stewardship of forests when they’ve been around so much longer than we have?
We can pretend that we don’t have an impact on ecosystems, that humans are not managing them. In fact, we’ve been managing them so heavily and so intensely that, weirdly, humans are now probably their best hope for survival. But there’s nuance here, which is that you can be the steward of an ecosystem while also having deference for its ability and right to be itself. I’m helping ecosystems rediscover how to be themselves. I’m giving them the tools to recover these attributes, habitats, species and natural processes that have been lost as the result of the very shortsighted and exploitative human management of the past. ➆
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Seeing the Forest for the Trees | Three questions for Ethan Tapper on his new book, The Forest Year: Finding Hope in a World Worth Saving“
This article appears in September 30 • 2026.
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