adaptationforest.org
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'll learn to think the way a forest thinks — in relationships, in cycles, in patient attention to what's actually happening on the ground. We call this forest mind. And the work of acting on it, we call tending.
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.
Tending a forest begins with understanding what lives there and what it needs.
Go DeeperIf the forest is adapting, shouldn't we?
The Practice is our term for the infrastructure experiments happening within and alongside the forest — off-grid energy systems, water collection and filtration, low-impact shelter design, and the daily logistics of living lightly on a landscape.
The property hosts a distributed network of small utility structures, connected by a network of woods roads that double as walking trails. No single building dominates. The approach is modular, repairable, and designed to leave the smallest possible footprint on the soil and water systems that everything else depends on.
This isn't survivalism. It's a question: what does it look like to inhabit a forest as a participant rather than a consumer? The practice is tending — 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.
Branches fall. Light shifts. Snow covers. Mushrooms colonize. The work here is created in dialogue with these forces — geometric installations that play with the forest's own patterns of light and shadow, ephemeral sculptures from gathered materials that document their own decay, and interventions that reveal what was already there. Forest mind sees no boundary between the aesthetic and the ecological. A well-tended forest is already a work of art. The installations here just make that visible.
This is where the studio meets the stand. Where craft practice and forest stewardship share the same tools and the same attention to material, structure, and change over time.
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 an act of tending 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 tending in its most human form — showing up, paying attention, and sharing what you notice.
Go DeeperEverything happening at Adaptation Forest is grounded in peer-reviewed science and decades of forestry research.
We use the USDA Forest Service Climate Change Tree Atlas to assess species vulnerability. We measure carbon storage per acre and track it against regional benchmarks. We follow the resistance-resilience-transition framework for climate adaptation.
But we also believe that the best science is science you can see. This section translates the data — about tree species vulnerability, carbon sequestration, invasive species dynamics, and climate projections — into formats that any forest owner or curious person can understand and use.
Forest mind means letting evidence shape the story. Here's what the evidence says.
Go Deeper