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The Forest Year

Finding Hope in a World Worth Saving

Coming Soon

Contributors

By Ethan Tapper

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Oct 6, 2026
Page Count
224 pages
Publisher
Timber Press
ISBN-13
9781643266558

Price

$14.99

Price

$19.99 CAD

Tapper's groundbreaking first book How to Love a Forest (called "beautifully written" by Bill McKibben) offered an optimistic vision for tending the woods. His new book, The Forest Year, lives inside the practice of staying, caretaking, and paying attention. Following a forest and its steward through a year of life, the book explores flowers, birds, forest ecology, and biodiversity while reflecting on what it means to be rooted in place, community, and the ecosystems that sustain us at a time of profound change. 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 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. 

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Praise for How to Love a Forest
"If Aldo Leopold were a 21st century Vermont forester with one good eye and a contemporary understanding of power and privilege, this might be the sort of book he'd write." —Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager

“Ecological wisdom abounds in Tapper's story of restoration: wisdom that needs to be spread far, wide, and fast.” —Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Nature's Best Hope

“Eloquent and thoughtful while also being informative and brimming with lush descriptions…Readers will see forests through new eyes after reading Tapper's compelling and compassionate call to action.” —Booklist

  • "So much humility and wonder shine 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

Ethan Tapper

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.

Learn more about this author