A local forest that is adjacent to an elementary school is one of my favorite forests to visit. A once popular trail has become overgrown. The teachers not as eager to take the children into the forest as they were years before.

When you visit a place on a regular basis you can begin to read the forest like you would a book. Over time the landscape tells its story in stages of succession.

At one time this forest was fenced in to seperate children from the hunters. Here the forest makes determinations upon its own future disassembling a fence that is no longer considered.

This fallen down fence is a great representation of the current state between modern industry and ancient forest. It is maybe neither good or bad. It simply is as it is. No wishful thinking will change the complicated push and pull between the order of nature and the chaos of modernity.

Thankfully in the midwest boreal forest we have a great opportunity to enable the forest to return to either a mature structure or without active intervention it will likely get transformed into a completely new bio system.

Now you may think I am alluding to climate change. Climate change is certianly something people become very impassioned about. Because of my relative in ability to do anything meaningful and provable about climate change I prefer to focus on the things that I know make a positive difference in the environment.

That which has been my biggest motivation to start this regional team has been the recognition of the heavy influence that invasive species have had on the regional landscape. A regional landscape whose Old Growth trees protected by Public Ownership is not protected from by default.

Here on the back side of this lower bush is a vine which is called DogsBane or Dogs Strangling Vine. This vine travels from well light edge regions of forest and grows up into high canopies towards the light. These vines are slowely pulling their way towards the deepest forests.

Here you can see it growing around the small maple right of center in the picture. Soon these vines will be growing up the side of the White Pine Trees. The tallest trees on a hillside in the region.

The Primary motivation of this business and website will be teaching private citizens how to take stewardship over a section of land, to return the skills of forest stewardship to a culture that is become less dependent and more surrounded by the natural world.