The CEES Seminar and Cardinal Sustainability Summit Keynote Address

The CEES Seminar Series and the Cardinal Sustainability Summit present:
Ethan Tapper, Forester and Author

Cardinal Sustainability Summit Keynote Address

How to love a forest, the bittersweet work of tending a changing world

How to Love a Forest walks us through the fragile and resilient community that is a forest, introducing us to wolf trees and spring ephemerals, to the cryptic creatures of the rhizosphere and the necrosphere. It helps us reimagine what forests are and what it means to care for them. This world, Tapper writes, is degraded both by people who do too much and by those who do nothing. As the ecosystems that sustain all life struggle, we straddle a status quo that treats ecosystems as commodities and opposing claims that the only true expression of love for the natural world is to leave it alone.

In his tender and fearless literary debut, Tapper proffers a more complex vision. He writes that we must take action to protect ecosystems, and that the actions we must take will often be counterintuitive, uncomfortable, even heartbreaking. In striking prose, he shows how bittersweet acts—like loving deer and hunting deer, loving trees and felling trees—can be radical expressions of compassion. In this poetic and visionary book, Tapper weaves a new land ethic for the modern world, reminding us that what is simple is rarely true, and what is necessary is rarely easy.

Countless decisions await. There are no perfect solutions; only endless bittersweet compromises. How to Love a Forest offers a clear-eyed, hopeful vision of a world in which so much is wrong and so much is worth saving.

Friday April 25th 5:00pm.
Hudson 106
Reception, book sales, and book signing prior to the talk at 4:30

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