Sometimes it seems like things move inexorably in the wrong direction. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to push back. Unruly edges are the places where human and natural communities (ideally in collaboration) push back and resist. It’s where they/we form new ideas, new models, new directions, and more.
For me, forest restoration is one of the most compelling places to find these unruly edges and microbes, trees, fungi, mosses, insects, and more try to take reorganize into a new, often different community. While I hope to explore many different forests here, there are two that are currently the focus of my attention. One is small patch of western North Carolina mountains where we are trying to steward an old Appalachian farm into a new farm forest. The other is a collection of reforestation plantations with native tree species in the Atlantic lowlands of Costa Rica. This is a place that I worked in the early 1990s and then rediscovered recently. Here I’m interested in understanding how a plantation becomes a forest.
