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Episode 5: Our Identity, Our Forests

Let’s return to our human-forest connections. Familiar voices consider why Vermont woodlands matter from a variety of perspectives.

Theme music written and performed by Joanne Garton.

Music featured in this episode:

  • Bells Bobbing Along by Daniel Birch
  • The Bridge by Chad Crouch
  • Thirteens by Blue Dot Sessions
  • Thoughtless by Blue Dot Sessions
  • Pictures of the Floating World by Bogong

Featured guests (in order of appearance): 

A special thanks to everyone featured in this series. Your words, wisdom, and stories made this series what it is. Thank you.

Episode Transcript:

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcription. They may contain errors, so please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Steve Hagenbuch: Forests for New Englanders, they're part of who we are.

Jared Nunery: The forests of Vermont really are Vermont's identity. They are Vermont. You have a state that's nearly 80 percent forested - that is who we are.

Steve Hagenbuch: Think about the joy you get when you're out on a mountain bike ride and you know, you hear the song of some bird. You don't know what it is, but if you don't start hearing those things, you recognize that and say, gee, woods are really quiet today.

Jared Nunery: And then on top of that, our culture is also intertwined with that forest from...you think of Vermont, you think of maple syrup. Well, there's our forests. You also then think of the different wood products that we produce.

Steve Hagenbuch: Our history is so much based in the forest, and today, our economies, and our livelihoods, and where we live, and the things we like to do, the recreation we like to participate in. So many of us, myself included, are connected to the forest in some way.

Kate Forrer: That was Steve Hagenbuch, conservation biologist with Audubon Vermont, and Jared Nunnery, Orleans County Forester with Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. Welcome to Heartwood Vermont, a podcast that connects Vermonters to our forested landscape through stories and answers your questions about our forests, forest management, and the forest economy. I'm Kate Forrer...

Lisa Sausville: and I'm Lisa Sausville.

Kate Forrer: Lisa is the Executive Director of Vermont Coverts,

Lisa Sausville: and Kate is a Community Forestry Specialist with the UVM Extension.

Kate Forrer: Together we'll be your hosts as we explore our woods. This episode brings us back to our connection to Vermont's forests. We'll be hearing from familiar voices about why our forests, the ecosystem services they provide, and the products that they help create matter.

Christine McGowan:  Imagine if an airport was made of wood using mass timber...your heart rate slows, your blood pressure is lower. There have just been some really interesting scientific studies on that human response to natural materials like wood. This concept called Biophilia, which is really this idea that as humans, we actually respond so much better to the natural world. So all the more reason for us to think about ways that we can bring more natural material like wood into our lives and use it for building, whether it's building a home or building an airport.

Lisa Sausville: This is really fascinating. Let's dig a little bit deeper into this concept and this idea of Biophilia.

Kate Forrer: So Biophilia is a term coined by Eric Fromm, and it describes the passionate love of life, and all life. E.O. Wilson actually took the concept further to hypothesize that there is an innate human instinct to connect with nature and other living beings. Cool, right?

Lisa Sausville: It is really cool. So Christine is referencing this idea that is becoming popular with architects and designers to bring this biophilia lens into the built environment. The idea is to use nature as a vehicle that's going to create an emotional connection between people and the buildings that they occupy. In this case, we're talking about wood.

Kate Forrer: This reminds me of the stories and the connections that we heard from folks in Episode One, and the idea of mass timber that we heard in Episode Four. Biophilia suggests that people can have a strong connection to wood as a material, especially in buildings and homes.

Lisa Sausville: I agree, I love that they're bringing this concept back into it. I mean, I have an old farmhouse that was built in 1832, and in the basement, you can see the logs that are the floor joists. And I have wood flooring throughout my house, like the old wide barn board, and I just - I love the feeling of being in my house.

Kate Forrer: And being surrounded by all that wood.

Lisa Sausville: Yeah, absolutely.

Kate Forrer: It's true. Maybe I'm a tree geek, but I definitely feel a difference when I'm surrounded by natural materials like wood.

Ruth Ruttenberg: I absolutely love these big old maples. I mean, they just - the real luxury of my life is a hot tub, and I situated the house and the hot tub so that I could look both at a very, very large birch tree that's on my property and a number of these old legacy maples. Just sitting there looking at 'em blows me over.

Kate Forrer: That was Ruth Ruttenberg, a landowner in Northfield.

Ruth Ruttenberg:  I put the house where I put it to minimize the number I had to take out. A lot of the inside of my house has maple slabs from those two trees. There are like tapholes in the dining room table and in the wood on my vanity and in the bathroom and stuff like that.

Peggy Farabaugh: I love maple. It's beautiful.

Christine McGowan: Whether you're looking for something like as a gift, a toy or something for like a baby. Just that light color, I think is gorgeous.

Peggy Farabaugh: We try to convince customers not to stain wood because it's just so pretty and Vermont woodworkers, they're known for simple, elegant designs that are really refined. I mean, the finishes in Vermont-made furniture are incredible.

Kate Forrer: Each species is so different. The grain patterns, the color. Lisa, do you have a favorite type of wood?

Lisa Sausville: Well, when it comes to shopping or looking for wood, I'm always drawn to birdseye maple. But, I don't know, Kate my forester friend, can you tell me what makes that interesting patterning in that maple?

Kate Forrer: We don't exactly know what causes it. The most prevalent theory is that it's caused by unfavorable growth conditions for the tree. So the tree actually starts to grow numerous new buds in order to get sunlight or to get more sunlight. But with the poor growing conditions, the new shoots are actually aborted, leaving these small circles or knots in the grain that actually resemble a small bird's eye.

Lisa Sausville: Oh, that's cool. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to it. You know, the wildlife biologist drawn to birds eyes. Who knows?

Kate Forrer:  I thought there might be a connection there. Birdseye maple is just one example of the type of figuring that we see and wood. Just like people, no two trees are the same, and so how and where a tree grows, the diseases that it's exposed to, the strain or injury that it sustains, create variation or irregularities in the grain pattern of the wood.

Lisa Sausville: Ken, whose a sawyer, he also talks about his favorite woods, let's hear from Ken.

Ken Gagnon: On the hardwood side, ash is one of my favorite species because it really is a beautiful word. It grows really straight - it has a lot of qualities that allow it to be used for a number of different things. Then on the softwood side, over the years, there's a couple of species that have caught my eye that they don't get much of, and one of them is larch. We are oftentimes looking for something that's rot resistant, so larch or tamarack is one of those species that I find, you know, particularly interesting.

Alan Calfee: Forests in general, globally are very, very critical ecosystems. Some people talk about forests as the lungs of the planet. Forests have very critical roles using carbon dioxide and sunlight and water to produce oxygen, which is obviously something that's important to us. They also have critical roles and water quality. And then there's just the myriad interactions and all the forest ecosystems around the world between a whole host of other organisms besides just plants. Fungi, amphibians, and reptiles, and mammals, and birds and all these amazing, amazing, complex creatures that live in what really makes up a forest. And then they have the added benefit of also producing products that we use in our everyday life. You can see the white pine rafters behind me - well, not on the podcast, but there are white pine rafters behind me. We all live in structures that use a lot of wood. The forest products have a somewhat unique feature in that they're renewable.

Kate Forrer: That was Alan Calfee, a consulting forester with Calfee Woodland Management. These benefits that Alan describes are known as ecosystem services. It's things that our forest provides so we don't always recognize, such as food, fuel, clean air, erosion control, flood abatement, as well as things like opportunities for recreation, education, and cultural enrichment.

Christine McGowan: Clean water, carbon storage - those trees are holding carbon and the soil in those forests is holding carbon. It's so important that we keep our forests as forests so that along with all those other benefits, we do have this quote-unquote, carbon sink of forested areas that are really absorbing carbon and not pushing it out into the atmosphere.

Kate Forrer: Throughout this podcast, we've been on our own journey understanding the role of Vermont's forest, the professionals that work in it or for it, and some of the services and products that it provides. I think it's safe to say that our relationship with the woods is complex and personal.

Lisa Sausville: So tell me, Kate, what do you love about the forest

Kate Forrer: Where we are right now, is a forest that I came to a lot in my younger years as a professional. I think for me, the forest has always been a place that I've retreated to, both in terms of, you know, finding a place to just collect my thoughts and kind of recenter after a long day or in the middle of a long day or even on a short day. I love the smells. We just picked up a pine cone. I love the smell of pine pitch. I love the feeling that I get looking up at a big white pine tree that's standing before us here and realizing that, you know, I've only been here for a short time, and these trees, many of them have been here much longer. And I don't know, I'm going to get all philosophical...

Lisa Sausville: Look at this hemlock with the sapsucker holes...

Kate Forrer: Yeah! This hemlock here is growing kind of right on top of a bunch of rocks, and the roots are sort of coming out of the soil and sort of have it buttressed a little bit...and thinking about what the conditions were here like when it got its start...   This has been Kate

Lisa Sausville: and Lisa,

Kate Forrer: and you've been listening to Heartwood Vermont, hosted by Vermont Coverts, UVM Extension, and UVM Center for Research On Vermont.

Lisa Sausville: This podcast was produced by Leah Kelleher and made possible by funding from Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, and the Working Lands Enterprise Board. We hope to be back soon, sharing more stories and reflections on our woods, everything it provides, and what we can do to care for it.

Kate Forrer: We'll leave you with a few final reflections from the woods.

Jared Nunery: There's a certain just calmness in the woods that I find. Stopping for a moment, and yesterday a mixed flock of chickadees and sparrows and the kinglet as well, just kind of surrounding around me while I was in mixed-wood forest on the edge of a wetland, and took a moment and realized, you know what? This is a nice place to be, especially in a time when the world's pretty tumultuous. There's always just quietness in the woods that's really nice too. So, endless classroom and also just peace and tranquility.

Sabina Ernst:  It's nice to have the cycles of nature to look forward to. I feel like that has been one thing that has really gotten me through this pandemic is knowing that the phoebes are coming back and that they will be there in mid-April, and that they do come back in mid-April. Just watching the cyclical seasonality happen the way it's supposed to has been really comforting during all of the unrest and stress and uncertainty of this pandemic. So many more people are able to get out and enjoy nature. That is definitely a silver lining of this pandemic, is that people feel so much more connected to outdoor spaces.

Steve Hagenbuch: Whether you're a landowner, a forest landowner or not, think about how forests and all of the living things that are part of that forest, from the birds to the trees, how they really do play a role in your lives, kind of on a daily basis, whether or not you realize it. Come back to that repeatedly and just kind of have that mindfulness of this is a very important resource for all of us to take care of.

Kate Forrer: The fiddle music that you heard in this episode was written and performed by Vermont musician Joanne Garten. To hear more of her work, check out her album, Bee's Knees. Do you have a story to share about your connection to our woods or have a question about Vermont's forests? Give us a call and leave us a message at (802) 476-2003, extension 210. We'd love to hear from you and share your stories and explore your questions in future episodes. 

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