How to Love a Forest

Highland Center for the Arts, The Greensboro Conservation Commission and Galaxy Bookshop Invite you to a special reading and discussion with Ethan Tapper, author of ‘How to Love a Forest’. Signed books will be available for purchase.

Only those who love trees should cut them, writes forester Ethan Tapper. In How to Love a Forest, he asks: what does it mean to live in a time in which ecosystems are in retreat and extinctions rattle the bones of the earth? How do we respond to the harmful legacies of the past? How do we use our species’ incredible power to heal rather than to harm? How do we reach towards a better future?

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.