A community of forests
Volunteering in Nepal has taught Sappi forester Ethan Olson a lot about how he wants to live his life.
He’s been to Nepal three times to help local people raise and plant trees, but he’s ended up learning as much from them as they have from him. “It has inspired me to adopt some of their subsistence ways of life back here in Maine,” he enthuses. “I’ve started a garden with chickens and rabbits and I go foraging in the forest for mushrooms and other things including chaga, a naturally occurring growth on birch trees that has medicinal properties.”
Ethan has always loved being outdoors and wanted a career where he could work in the open air, surrounded by the ever-changing beauty of the woods. His role as a Sappi forester requires a delicate balancing act – cultivating a good yield of timber for the landowner while never losing sight of the health of the land and the nature it supports. He says it’s vital to consider the landowner’s goals, “but also to look at what the land wants to produce. How can we improve it and boost biodiversity? We assess it for habitat needs, using real-world science on the ground. We are managing the forest for an outlook that is decades in the future.”
When we leave the trees will live on for years and years, so the impact is much broader than just the people we directly interact with.
Ethan Olson, Forester, Sappi
In 2022, wanting to share his expertise with communities in other parts of the world, Ethan decided to volunteer with SeedTree, a charity that provides agroforestry education, community planting and scholarships. Since then, he’s visited Nepal three times, helping to establish tree nurseries – stocks of young seedlings that are patiently tended until they are ready to be transferred to the wild.
Ethan has loved getting his hands dirty at the Kankoli Community Forest next to Chitwan National Park, an area famous for the incredible richness of the species that make their home there, including Bengal tigers and one-horn white rhino. The focus here is to “fill gaps in the forest and improve it with better trees”.
Another group to benefit from his involvement is the Jawani Women’s Group, a cooperative of women who own pieces of land and pool their resources to farm more effectively. SeedTree helps them introduce tree species that not only provide fruit and animal fodder but have the valuable side-effect of increasing shade and water reserves. The group is a long-standing partner of SeedTree, receiving donations of seeds and expertise so the women can generate a reliable, nature-based income to support themselves and their families for the long term.
Ethan gains huge satisfaction from knowing his contribution will sustain both people and nature well into the future. “When we leave, the trees will live on for years and years, so the impact is much broader than just the people we directly interact with.”
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