Ethan Tapper knows what it means to care for a forest ecosystem. In The Forest Year: Finding Hope in a World Worth Saving, he explores the practices of staying, caretaking, and paying attention.

The Yankee Bookshop and Norman Williams Public Library are excited to welcome the author back to Woodstock with his stunning follow-up to the award-winning How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World. 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.

With lyrical meditations across all four seasons, we experience the beautiful interconnectedness of flowers, birds, fungi, and trees, and come to see how each is part of a living, breathing whole. Grounded in close observation and a deep sense of place, Ethan shows how tending the land is also a way of tending ourselves. At a time of uncertainty, The Forest Year offers a gentle, sustaining vision: that by becoming rooted—by noticing, returning, and caring—we can find both meaning and resilience in the natural world.

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Ethan Tapper is a forester, ecologist, digital storyteller, and author. 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. He 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 a punk band.

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“So much humility and wonder shines through Tapper’s prose…a well-earned, luminous, and ever-more-precious tribute to this northern forest.” — Helen Whybrow, author of The Salt Stones