The Forest Year - by Ethan Tapper (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Tapper's groundbreaking first book How to Love a Forest offered a pragmatic and hopeful vision for our relationship with forests and other ecosystems. His new book, The Forest Year, lives inside the practice of staying, caretaking, and paying attention. Following the author's forest through a year of life, the book explores flowers, birds, forest ecology, biodiversity, while also reflecting on stewardship, community, and what it means to be rooted in place. The Forest Year is a meditative and lyrical ode to the land, weaving complex scientific and ecological concepts with beautiful narrative prose, making nuanced ideas easy to understand and deeply resonant. Both place-based and practice-driven, Tapper writes not as an armchair philosopher or an academic, but as a working forester and ecologist stewarding real forests in real time, blending emotional insight with ecological rigor. A moving account of what it means to persist in the face of change and to love a place through work, compromise, sacrifice, and humility, this book will inspire readers to think deeply about where they live and who they are.

Review Quotes

"In The Forest Year, Ethan Tapper returns to his beloved Bear Island to chronicle a full year of his experiences as he restores its wounded ecosystems. Ethan is a rare man who has learned to look deeply into the heart of nature, see it for what it is, understand his place in it, and accept his responsibility to heal it. With touching prose, he shows us what a deep love of the natural world really is. Set another place at the table, Wendell Berry; Ethan Tapper has arrived!"--Douglas W. Tallamy, author of How Can I Help?

"So much humility and wonder shines through Tapper's prose, along with a keen sense of time, this time, and what it means to live deeply, with care and purpose, on a fragile planet. The Forest Year is a well-earned, luminous, and ever-more precious tribute to this northern forest we are both so lucky to call home."--Helen Whybrow, author of The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

"In The Forest Year, Ethan Tapper takes us through the seasons and the hard work of healing a damaged landscape, showing that restoration isn't transactional, it's a relationship; one that begins when you see yourself as part of an ecosystem and commit to its health long after you're gone."--Griff Griffith, Conservation Storyteller and Host of Animal Planet's Wild Jobs

"This is a beautiful book, full of respect for the land and a quiet call to rise to the occasion of stewardship; paying attention where it is due. If many in Ethan Tapper's generation follow his model of being in the world, the world will be in better hands."--Kenneth M. Cadow, author of Gather

"The Forest Year is a much-needed reminder that nature's quiet hope is always within reach, hiding in something as simple as a flower or in the wings of a migrating bird. Ethan Tapper masterfully weaves together his experience stewarding Bear Island, his forested home in Vermont, with sharp observation and tender reflection, inviting us to reconsider what it truly means to put down roots and grow where you're planted."--Andrew Conboy, @Andrew_The_Arborist, urban forester and founder of Community Canopy Project

"In The Forest Year, Ethan Tapper models natural history not on fleeting experiences with exotic trophies, but rather deep curiosity towards familiar neighbors. And for this humble approach, he is rewarded with durable connections to the expansive world of plants, birds, and the passing of time."--Jacob Suissa and Ben Goulet-Scott of Let's Botanize

About the Author

Ethan Tapper is a forester, ecologist, digital storyteller, and the bestselling author of How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World. For more than a decade, Ethan has been recognized as a thought-leader in the world of ecosystem stewardship, winning numerous regional and national awards for his work. More recently, he has been recognized as a writer - since its publication in 2024, How to Love a Forest has been named the winner of the 2025 New England Book Award for nonfiction, and received international acclaim. Ethan's message of relationship, responsibility and hope reaches millions of people each year through his writing, social media channels with hundreds of thousands of followers, and the hundreds of walks, talks and keynotes that he delivers across North America each year. Ethan works, writes, hunts, birds and runs a small consulting forestry business from his home at Bear Island - his 175-acre working forest, homestead, orchard and sugarbush in Vermont - and plays in his punk band, The Bubs.