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.

In his tender and fearless literary debut, Tapper proffers a more complex vision. He writes that we must take action to protect ecosystems, and that the actions we must take will often be counterintuitive, uncomfortable, even heartbreaking. In striking prose, he shows how bittersweet acts—like loving deer and hunting deer, loving trees and felling trees—can be radical expressions of compassion. In this poetic and visionary book, Tapper weaves a new land ethic for the modern world, reminding us that what is simple is rarely true, and what is necessary is rarely easy.

Countless decisions await. There are no perfect solutions; only endless bittersweet compromises. How to Love a Forest offers a clear-eyed, hopeful vision of a world in which so much is wrong and so much is worth saving.