Join Vineyard resident and professional forester Bob Perschel for a talk about his fifty-year quest in pursuit of something larger than all of us. In his four-decade career, Bob helped conserve six million acres of New England’s forests and led efforts to establish forest management practices that may offset 30% of the region’s carbon emissions. In this talk, he will share stories and poems from his new book, Numinosity: A New England Forester’s Search for the Ineffable, engaging the audience in an exploration of the transcendent experiences that can guide our personal lives and environmental policy in a time of climate change. He will also offer background on some of his book excerpts, illuminating how they are directed to aid environmental leaders and activists in guiding our society both to form closer personal connections with nature and to make better choices.

About Bob

Bob Perschel is a forester with a distinguished career in land conservation. He envisions a closer relationship with the natural world, and a landscape of wild reserves surrounded by exceptionally managed forests that provide the climate-friendly products needed in a changing climate. Over the course of his career, he worked in the forest industry, served as a consulting forester, and led The Wilderness Society’s land-ethic and network-of-wildlands programs.

He also chaired the 53-member Northern Forest Alliance and helped found the Forest Stewards Guild, a national organization of ecologically focused foresters. The guild is notable for being the only professional society whose code of ethics places responsibility to the land above all else. More recently, as executive director of the New England Forestry Foundation, he led the

development of exemplary forestry standards, using climate-smart management techniques to offset 30 percent of New England’s carbon emissions.

Today, as a speaker and author, he is committed to fostering a deeper connection with the natural world. His first book, Numinosity, is an anthology of poems and prose inspired by transcendent experiences in New England’s forests. He is now working on a second poetry collection and a model of environmental leadership that integrates both the emotional and intellectual dimensions of human experience. Bob holds degrees in psychology and forest science, from Yale University. He lives in an oak forest on the north shore of Martha’s Vineyard.