A forest in the Taconic range · North Berkshires · Massachusetts
A 200-acre experiment in tending what comes next.
Every forest is a record of change. Ice ages, fire, clearing, regrowth — the trees standing now are the ones that adapted to what came before. We're entering a period of change unlike any in the forest's memory, and the question isn't whether the forest will adapt. It will. The question is whether we will.
It starts with forest thinking — seeing in relationships and cycles rather than straight lines. It continues with tending — the patient, hands-on work of caring for what's alive. And it asks for adaptation — because the world is shifting under our feet and the old ways of living aren't keeping up.
Forest thinking. Tending. Adaptation. Three practices for a world that needs all of them.
A note on attention
There is a state of mind that shows up reliably when people spend time in a landscape without a screen in their pocket — looser, more associative, more willing to make unexpected connections. Writers and researchers have been describing it for a long time under different names: mind-wandering, the default mode, the state where walks produce ideas that desks don't. It is not mystical. It is the ordinary functioning of a brain that has been given room to do what it evolved to do.
The rest is mechanics. The algorithms that shape most screen time are designed to hold attention continuously, which means they foreclose exactly the gaps where that state opens up. A forest does the opposite — not because it is magical, but because it is indifferent. It has nowhere to direct your attention and no incentive to. The openness you feel in it is the absence of something rather than the presence of something.
This is part of what a forest is for. Not the only thing, and not a cure for anything. But a place the mind can go when it needs to do the work only an unheld attention can do.
Spring 2026
Spring is arriving on schedule and ahead of it at the same time — buds breaking, the first ephemerals up through the leaf litter. The early weeks are going into invasive species removal in the project areas, targeting barberry thickets and buckthorn margins before they leaf out. In the Norway spruce stand, thinning is underway — clearing dense growth in a two-acre block and opening ground for a seedling planting later this spring. Some crop-tree release work is continuing in Stand 3, freeing the most promising oaks from lateral competition. A new trail is being cut along one of the main stream drainages, opening year-round access to the corridor and to the cold-water habitat and quiet that comes with it. The lower trails are being cleared of winter's accumulated blowdown. The season feels, as it usually does here, like there is more work than time — which is exactly right.
Two hundred acres of northeastern hardwood forest, rising from 1,200 to nearly 1,800 feet in elevation.
Red maple, sugar maple, white ash, red oak, birch, beech — the full cast of a northern hardwood forest, each species facing its own reckoning with a changing climate. Some of these trees are well-suited for what's coming. Others are not.
The emerald ash borer is already here. Beech bark disease is pervasive. The Norway spruce planted decades ago are falling to wind they weren't bred to withstand. This forest is not a wilderness — it's a working landscape shaped by centuries of human use, from Indigenous stewardship to colonial agriculture to industrial logging to, now, something new.
Adaptation Forest is an ongoing experiment in how to steward this land through the transition ahead — using the best available science, a willingness to intervene where necessary, and the humility to step back where the forest knows better than we do.
The forest is not only trees. Barred owls mark the extent of old-growth patches; brook trout in the headwater streams gauge water quality more reliably than any test kit; wood thrush calling from the interior signal that the forest is large enough to hold them. Read more about the wildlife →
Understanding what lives here — and what it needs — is where any serious work on this land begins.
Work here is coordinated with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the New England Forestry Foundation, and Mass Audubon's forest ecology team.
Go DeeperThe first structures are simple. Everything else is what they make possible.
A shed, a lean-to for shade and rain, tent platforms nested among the trees. Battery-powered chainsaws and brush cutters, a gas saw for the big trees, portable solar keeping everything charged. This is the starting vocabulary of a larger conversation.
What comes next is more ambitious: a barn and workshop, a portable sawmill turning the property's own timber into building material, a series of small off-grid cabins dispersed through the forest — non-permanent, built mostly from wood harvested on site, designed with large windows that make the canopy feel like it's in the room with you.
The practice is care — applied not just to trees but to the systems that let us inhabit a landscape without degrading it.
Go DeeperArt made in a forest is art made with a collaborator that doesn't hold still.
The art practice here is just beginning. The first piece is small: colored rope radiating from a single point on a fallen ash tree, catching light between the standing trunks — a family installation from summer 2022. The choice of a fallen ash is not incidental. The forest is full of ash in various states of decline, and whatever comes next here starts with noticing what's already on the ground.
A well-tended forest is already a work of art. What's taking shape here extends that logic — land art, light work, and ephemeral installations grown from specific knowledge of specific places. Forest thinking sees no line between the aesthetic and the ecological. Both require the same quality of attention.
Go DeeperA garden is taking root.
Somewhere between the wild forest and the cultivated row lies the food forest — a designed ecosystem that produces food, medicine, and habitat by mimicking the structure of a natural woodland. At Adaptation Forest, we're planning an intensive cultivation zone that draws on permaculture, agroforestry, and traditional ecological knowledge.
The garden will be small in footprint but deep in design — seven layers of productive planting, from canopy nut trees down to root crops, integrated with native medicinal species, seed-saving programs, and soil-building practices.
Every planting decision is also a climate adaptation decision — and a commitment that looks decades into the future.
Go DeeperA forest this size can hold more than trees. It can hold a community.
We envision Adaptation Forest as a place where people come together — for guided walks that read the landscape like a text, for performances staged among the trees, for workshops on everything from chainsaw use to bird identification to mushroom cultivation.
The trail network connects a series of natural gathering spaces: stream crossings, rocky outcrops with seasonal views, the remnants of old stone walls that mark where pasture once met forest. These are places where a small audience can sit on the ground and listen — to a musician, a scientist, a poet, or just the forest itself.
This is care in its most human form — showing up, paying attention, and sharing what you notice.
Go DeeperSpecies vulnerability assessments draw on the USDA Forest Service Climate Change Tree Atlas. Forest management follows the resistance–resilience–transition framework for northeastern climate adaptation. Technical oversight comes from Mass Audubon’s forest ecology team, working through the Woodlands Partnership of Northwest Massachusetts. Read more about the science and methods →