NNRG’s Kirk Hanson and Seth Zuckerman have written a book that distills NNRG’s approach to forest stewardship into a single accessible handbook. Illustrated with photos, diagrams, and maps, A Forest of Your Own was published on April 1st and is now available for purchase.

Buy Your Copy

• Buy your autographed copy from NNRG. NNRG members get a 20% discount.
• For NNRG orders of 4+ books, please email outreach@nnrg.org for a discount code.
• Use the links below to order from Amazon, Mountaineers Books, Bookshop.org (which gives a percentage to your local participating bookstore), or Raincoast Books in Canada.

About The book

Whether you have wooded property already or only dream of your own patch of land, you probably know in your bones that forests are crucial to the Pacific Northwest and the health of the planet. This book lays out an approach to the care and stewardship of forests — ecological forestry — and explains both why it matters and how to practice it in Washington and Oregon. Between its covers, you will discover how to read and understand what’s going on in a forest, evaluate forestland before you buy, establish new stands of trees, manage a sustainable wood harvest, protect your forest from catastrophic fire, and much more.

Kirk and Seth have brought their combined decades of experience to bear in this project, the first comprehensive how-to and why-to resource for forest stewards in the Pacific Northwest. Whether the forest you have in mind is one that you own, or one that you share with fellow stakeholders in your nearby municipal, state, or federal forest, this book can make you a more effective citizen of Forest Nation.

“Brilliant. Eloquent. Authoritative. Seth and Kirk have written the only book you need in order to understand sustainable forestry in the Northwest.”

—Denis Hayes, co-founder of Earth Day and president at The Bullitt Foundation

Watch the Book Trailer

“An essential guide for anyone who loves forests, wants to be a hands-on champion for restoring all the benefits they can provide, or aspires to leave a loving legacy of forests for the future”

—Laurie Wayburn, president of Pacific Forest Trust

Meet The Authors

More events coming soon! Would you like to arrange an author slide show and reading in your hometown or at your company? Email outreach@nnrg.org. 

“Within these pages, readers will discover a practical roadmap to nurturing the very forests we cherish, and in return, how those forests nurture us.”

—Ann Stinson, author of The Ground at My Feet: Sustaining a Family and a Forest and president of the Washington Farm Forestry Association

About the Authors

Kirk Hanson serves as NNRG’s director of forestry. He has worked on behalf of small woodland owners for more than 25 years — first at the Small Forest Landowners’ office of the Washington Department of Natural Resources and since 2006 at NNRG. He frequently leads NNRG workshops for forest owners is a member of a three-generation family-owned forest. He blogs about his own family’s experiences managing 200 acres of forestland in western Washington.

Seth Zuckerman has served as executive director of NNRG since 2017. He has spent the last 30 years as a practitioner in West Coast forests and watersheds, and as a writer, telling the stories of people’s relationships with the rest of the natural world. His writing on forests, salmon, and the human communities that depend on them has appeared in The Nation, Sierra, Orion, The Christian Science Monitor, and numerous other publications. His roots are in Northern California, where he directed the Wild and Working Lands program for the Mattole Restoration Council from 2006 to 2011.

“Hanson and Zuckerman see the forest for the trees. They show us, step by step, how ecological forestry can help sustain the diversity of the Pacific Northwest’s forests while also meeting human needs at a human scale.”

—Chip Giller, founder of Grist

Reviews

For ecologically minded forest owners and prospective forest owners who’ve pined for a personal forestry consultant, Kirk Hanson and Seth Zuckerman’s new book, A Forest of Your Own, is as close as you can come to a real human. And remember, non-industrial private forest owners (a.k.a. regular people) own about 43 percent of Washington’s private forests and 36 percent of Oregon’s.

From finding a forest to purchase, taking inventory, and creating a management plan, to marketing your logs, this book thoughtfully addresses all the important questions, whether your goals are purely ecological, commercial, or a mix. And it’s not just academic. At every step, it provides concrete methods such as how to measure the height of a tree using a slope-finding app on your phone and a tape-measure. A Forest of Your Own has the potential to make landscape-scale improvements for wildlife, clean and cool water, and carbon storage—one forest at a time.

Kate Anderson – Senior Researcher, Sightline Institute, Farms and Forests

Take a Look inside