The Pioneer Valley Institute will present author and ecologist Tom Wessels at its annual meeting on Wed., Nov 4 at 7 o’clock in Greenfield Community College’s Sloan Theater on the main campus. The program, based on Wessels’ book Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England, is free and open to the public. There will be a brief business meeting at 6:30 to which all PVI members are urged to come.

This program introduces us to approaches used to interpret a forest’s history while wandering through it. Using evidence—the shapes of trees, scars on their trunks, the pattern of decay in stumps, the construction of stone walls, the lay of the land—it is possible to unravel complex stories etched into our forested landscape. This process could certainly be called forest forensics, since the process is very similar to interpreting a crime scene.

Wessels is an ecologist and founding director of the master’s degree program in conservation biology at Antioch New England. He is former chair of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation that fosters environmental leadership through graduate fellowships and organizational grants. He serves as an ecological consultant to the Rain Forest Alliance’s SmartWood Green Certification Program. Tom has conducted landscape level workshops throughout the US for over 30 years. His books include Reading the Forested Landscape,The Granite Landscape, Untamed Vermont, and The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future.

The Pioneer Valley Institute is based at GCC and is partially funded by the GCC Foundation.