Wilderness Works Too: The Promise of Passive Rewilding with Shelby Perry, Northeast Wilderness Trust
Free and in-person at NBNC

Tickets Required – Register Here

Forest management can have a lot of different objectives, from wood products to habitat enhancement. But what happens when your management objective is to protect the autonomy of nature?  Passive management, also called passive rewilding, is the practice of standing back and letting nature direct the ebb and flow of life. Learn about the value of passive rewilding through both human and non-human lenses, grapple with the incongruity of human and forest timelines, and consider the merits of building future old forests, even if we might not live to see them ourselves.

About Shelby: Shelby Perry is Director of the Wildlands Ecology Program at Northeast Wilderness Trust, an initiative of the trust aimed at conducting, supporting, and sharing ecological research pertaining to wildlands, along with inventorying ecological values on the trust’s protected lands.  She is a frequent speaker around the northeast on the topics of wildlands, rewilding, and old forests, and has twice co-taught old forest ecology classes for North Branch Nature Center’s Biodiversity University.  When not working in them, Shelby can usually be found playing in wild forests, exploring them on foot, in snowshoes, or through the lens of her camera.

About our Naturalist Journeys 2025 Winter Presentation Series: This year’s series focuses on making healthy and sustainable forests in Vermont. How should we weigh competing forest management goals? Is timber harvesting at odds with biodiversity? Can felling a tree save a bird? When can logging be a radical act of compassion? How do Vermont’s ecological foresters make choices? What happens when we restore a forest’s wild autonomy? We hope you’ll join the discussion. The series runs December through February.

In-person events will be livestreamed on our YouTube page.

Naturalist Journeys is made possible by our sponsors:

Hunger Mountain Coop
802 Coffee
Onion River Outdoors
Washington Electric Co-op
Stone Environmental
Waite-Heindel Environmental