Andrew Conboy
Andrew Conboy enjoys sharing his passion for trees and their many benefits with anyone who will listen. He is an ISA-certified arborist who most recently worked on the Urban Forestry team at the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia.

In 2020, he created Colonial Canopy Trees, a non-profit organization that leads ecological restoration efforts in the greater Philadelphia area. In his free time, Andrew creates videos about environmental topics and shares them on social media.

Through his work, he hopes to inspire people and change the way we view and value our natural lands, native plants, and wildlife. He studied Environmental Science at Chestnut Hill College and Evolutionary Biology in graduate school at Lehigh University.

Karen Kabnick

After retiring in 2020, Karen Kabnick wanted to do everything she could to help mitigate the damages of climate change and habitat destruction. Karen met Andrew at a volunteer event and was thrilled to learn he, too, loved to rescue and nurture seedlings of native trees. They shared that hobby. She learned all about the countless benefits of trees and how to plant them from Andrew, friends, courses and reading, and wanted to use her new-found knowledge to help Andrew with Colonial Canopy Trees to restore our local canopy and re-establish wildlife habitats.

Rick Thaler
Rick Thaler was born and raised in Rochester New York. He tried going to college, but he didn’t stick with it. After looking for a job he was inspired by the Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC) and began to explore carpentry. His exploration of the carpentry trade led him to Corrales, New Mexico. It was in Corrales that he decided to resume his studies and attended the University of New Mexico but after one semester he dropped out again and started working in construction, building adobe houses, doing carpentry work, and making furniture. He was inspired by James Krenov, Sam Maloof, and Wharton Esherick, and deeply inspired by George Nakashima and his free-form but highly disciplined designs. Rick was also inspired by the solar renaissance in New Mexico and the idea of sustainable, low-waste building and living.

When Rick got married and his first child arrived he needed a reliable income and started working in a commercial wood shop. Eventually, he became a project manager and estimator, and after 10 years was able to buy the shop and ran the business on his own. Rick eventually grew the business into a $10 million-dollar-a-year business with 100 employees and did projects all over the southwest and around the country. Rick sold the business in 2019 and bought a portable sawmill to use as a hobby. After all of his carpentry work, he still thought of George Nakashima and his creations.

Rick’s son Jacob got interested in the sawmill and they started a business together making live edge slab planks. They wound up building a woodworking shop to go with the mill. Rick came full circle to his roots of making custom furniture. This time he had better equipment and an ideal place to work.

Live edge timber from local salvaged trees is now the backbone of their business. Rick and Jacob call it treeincarnation.net. They power the shop entirely with an array of solar panels. With all the carbon they are sequestering from tree rescues they are close to net carbon neutral in their business. Rick says they are a good example of combining sustainability, waste reduction, craft, and profitability for a right livelihood in environmentally difficult times.

Jacob Thaler

Jacob Thaler was born and raised in Corrales New Mexico. He never liked school and struggled to learn the way other people do. At age 16 he took the GED test and got his high school diploma. He worked at various jobs but realized that he didn’t want to work for someone else, so he opened his own business in Colorado. He had a successful business there from 2015 -2020. After finding that he had a daughter on the way he decided to sell his business and move back to New Mexico to be near family. Ariella was born right at the beginning of Covid, with a heart defect that required surgery at 10 days old. Jacob and his partner Angelica couldn’t work because they were in and out of the hospital for the next year. Now their daughter Ariella is a happy, healthy three years old now.

Jacob got interested in his dad’s hobby sawmill operation between hospital appointments, and they discovered that they liked working together. Jacob enjoyed both the mechanical aspect of running the mill and the joy of opening up ordinary logs and finding the beauty inside. They decided to make a business out of the mill with a focus on turning dead, downed, and unwanted trees into planks for sale. This part of the business quickly led to a full-scale furniture operation, along with custom milling for other people in the business. Jacob still runs the saw and operates the kiln and is learning the furniture-making trade from his dad and their shop partner. He is looking forward to growing the business and keeping it sustainable for the future.

Jeff Lowenfels is a humorous and entertaining lecturer. He is a reformed lawyer and author of Timber Press' award-winning and bestselling books, Teaming With Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to The Soil Food Web and Teaming With Nutrients: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition and completing the trilogy, Teaming With Fungi, The Organic Grower’s Guide to Mycorrhizae and Teaming With the Bacteria; The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Endophytic bacteria.

Hannah Lewis is the author of Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World, published in June 2022 by Chelsea Green. A French translation of the book was released in January 2023 by Editions Eyrolles in France. Hannah has a Master of Science in Sustainable Agriculture and Sociology from Iowa State University and a Bachelor of Art in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College. She lives in Minneapolis, where she works for the non-profit Renewing the Countryside to build sustainable local and regional food systems and to plant mini-forests.

Steve Ebner

Steve Ebner’s love affair with wood began in 1981 when he started working as a carpenter in Philadelphia. After twelve years of carpentry experience, he started his own furniture shop which would lead to the creation of Manayunk Timber, Inc., the premier urban sawmill in Philadelphia.

With a decreasing supply of reclaimed timber from old factories, Steve believes the future lies in the inexhaustible supply of local trees. Recently, he and his team planted a 3,000-square-foot forest of native trees and bushes, designed to mirror a Pennsylvania forest, in what was previously a parking lot on the lumber yard’s premises. Steve hopes that visitors to Manayunk Timber will make connections between the importance of preserving native trees and the furniture and building materials that enrich our everyday life.

Steve is legendary in the wood business for his vast knowledge of reclaimed and native timbers. In the last six years, he has been joined by his daughter, Rebecca, in operating Manayunk Timber. Together, they have gained national attention with a video on urban sawmilling.

Rebecca Ebner

Rebecca Ebner is the manager of Manayunk Timber. Bringing several years of experience working in organic vegetable and animal farms and organizations focused on expanding access to healthy foods in Philadelphia, she joined Manayunk Timber in 2015.

Rebecca graduated from Barnard College in 2012 with a BA in Urban Studies and Environmental Science. She brings a passion for urban sustainability and community engagement, a commitment to Philadelphia, and an involvement in creative and artistic projects to her work with Manayunk Timber. Moving forward, Rebecca’s focus is the future of the company; she hopes to continue Steve’s dreams and make Manayunk Timber a sustainable part of Philadelphia’s small-business community for years to come.

Roby Babcock is the Marketing Director at Iseli Nursery, a wholesale dwarf conifer and maple grower located in Boring, Oregon. Roby has a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from the University of Oregon and a Master of Science in landscape architecture from the University of Arizona. After graduating from the University of Arizona, Roby managed an 11-acre cactus and tree nursery and did freelance design. When he returned to his home state of Oregon a decade later, he took a position at Portland Nursery and served in a variety of roles, including coordinating the displays and managing their ecommerce website. Gardening has been a passion since his childhood and he has created an expansive garden at his home that blends zone-defying cacti, agave, and succulents with specialty conifer specimens, manzanita, and plants native to the Pacific Northwest.

Roby is a photographer, and his passion has led to many opportunities, including his position at Iseli Nursery, in Boring Oregon. Roby is responsible for photographing new plants, updating the photo library, and documenting the garden. Developing social media content in combination with the Iseli website. He helps to communicate information about Iseli’s plants and goals as a company. Currently he is working with a team to produce the new catalog. He has also redesigned sections of the Jean Iseli Memorial Garden. This position has enabled him to learn about the hundreds of unique cultivars Iseli grows and the many steps in the process of bringing them to market.

Iseli Nursery has some exciting new offerings in the pipeline that Roby is excited to unveil. Be the first to hear about them in the coming months.

Carey Russell is a naturalist, photographer, and filmmaker.
He founded The Dendro Lab, a platform to foster a broader public
awareness of dendrology, and is the author of the soon-to-be-published Tree Identification for Everyone (And Why It Matters). As a photographer, he is the author of The New Arcadians: Photographs from Scout Camp and the upcoming photobook The Winter Forest.

While as a filmmaker, he has worked with director, Terrence Malick, as an associate producer and editor of The New World; assisted
cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki on The Tree of Life; and
directed and photographed the 10-part documentary series Tibetan
Stories.

Carey holds a master’s degree in forestry and is a
member of the International Dendrology Society. He’s a certified Interpretive Guide through the National Association for Interpretation and a certified Master Naturalist in New York State where he is also a licensed trail guide.

Leslie Berckes is the Executive Director of the Society of Municipal Arborists (SMA). She brings over a decade of experience in urban forestry to the organization, having served as the Executive Vice President and Des Moines Program Director for Trees Forever, a Midwest-based non-profit. Leslie is an ISA Certified Arborist and holds a master’s degree in Public Policy with an Environmental Policy emphasis from the University of Northern Iowa in addition to a bachelor’s degree in Marketing.

Jennifer Alger is President of Far West Forest Products and has been working with urban salvaged woods for over 25 years. She is the director of the Urban Wood Network Western Region, a membership network that connects tree managers, arborists, lumber producers, and makers to connect all links in the urban wood supply chain. She is also the founder of USRW Inc., which developed the first ever Urban Wood Standards for North America. These Standards will be a game-changer for the industry and for the first time allow Chain-of-Custody and certification for urban wood, known as USRW Certified Urban Wood. She has worked with an expert team of developers and customer experience specialists on the build-out of Urban Lumber Market with AncesTREE™ an inventory management system and enterprise application that will allow users to easily adhere to the industry Standards, track the chain of custody, manage their inventory, and better manage and grow their urban lumber businesses. Additionally, Jennifer has recently opened a store in California where Urban Wood Network members can sell their USRW Certified Urban Wood.

Paul Cox is the Vice President and Principal at Environmental Design, Inc. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University and attended the University of Houston to study international business and the Spanish language. Paul is a certified arborist through the International Society of Arboriculture, and he is credentialed as a consulting arborist.

His experience in the tree industry includes contract negotiations, tree preservation, plant health care, project management, and tree relocation to name a few. Paul’s responsibilities have included high-profile sites which include the National September 11th Memorial in Lower Manhattan, the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Governors Island Park installation in New York, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas.

Paul’s current responsibilities include multiple business units operating in the Eastern United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, and Europe.

Michael Taylor is an experienced Nursery Manager and Grower passionate about helping nurseries improve plant quality and workflows. He is currently working on projects across North America that increase tree production capacity for reforestation, urban forestry, plantation forestry, and wildfire restoration.

Michael does consulting work with the Blackmore Company which comes up with “solutions designed for the advancement of agribusiness.” The company’s automated machinery addresses tree seedling root issues while improving the overall quality of the seedlings.

A self-proclaimed tree nerd, Michael enjoys diving deep into the physiology and morphology of plants to understand their needs. He is a stickler for root architecture and believes we shouldn’t have to trade quality for production.

When he’s not helping people grow trees, he lives in Florida where he helps grow high-end tropical foliage at his family’s nursery. Prior to moving to Florida, Michael spent 15 years in the forestry profession in the Pacific Northwest managing large scale bareroot tree farms, greenhouses, and seed processing plants. Michael earned a Master of Science in Forest Science in Nursery Management and Reforestation and a Bachelor of Science in Forest Management from Oregon State University.

Anthony Sebastian Buscaino was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is a third-generation Italian American. His ancestral roots are from Sicily and Calabria.

During his summers attending university, he worked with a horticulturist as a gardener in various parks, church grounds, residential properties, and rooftop gardens. During his studies, Anthony became intrigued with horticultural therapy. Through a Directed Studies Program at Temple University he participated in an internship at New York City’s Rikers Island Prison Complex for the Horticultural Society of New York’s GreenHouse Program. Anthony acted as an instructor working directly with incarcerated individuals. Shortly after his internship, he graduated from Temple University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Landscape Architecture.

After graduation, Anthony applied for an internship at New York City Parks. Since that time he has been working as a designer and project manager for the Capital Projects Division. His team works in the Borough of Queens where Anthony has worked on plazas, playgrounds, triangles, ballfields, gardens, pathways, and dog parks.

He continued his education while working for NYC Parks and received a permaculture design certification and took his tests to receive his landscape architecture license.

In addition to Anthony’s full-time position as a landscape architect, Anthony’s zeal for creating art has led him to exhibit his artwork in groups and solo shows throughout New York City.

Tom Smarr is the Executive Director at Jenkins Arboretum & Gardens in Devon, Pennsylvania. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Studies from the Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania and a Master’s degree in Urban Horticulture Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle. He has worked for established institutions such as the University of Washington Botanic Gardens in Seattle and the Native Plant Trusts’ botanical garden “Garden in the Woods” in Massachusetts. Tom’s most notable work has been leading horticulture at newly opened urban parks such as the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in Boston; the High Line in New York City; and The Parklands of Floyds Fork in Louisville, Kentucky.

About Jenkins Arboretum
Jenkins Arboretum & Gardens is one of the region’s great horticultural and environmental botanical garden assets, encompassing 48 acres, over a mile of trails, and a diverse plant collection that is specialized in Eastern North American Native plants, plus rhododendrons and azaleas from around world.

Jenkins is located in Devon, Pennsylvania and is open every day of the year and always has free admission.

Kristin Biddle is a horticulturalist, Trustee, and Chair of the Horticultural Committee at Andalusia Historic House, Gardens and Arboretum. Biddle earned a degree in Horticulture from Temple University, Ambler, Pennsylvania, and brought her passion for gardening to several public gardens, including The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Wave Hill, The Mt. Cuba Center, and Historic Bartram’s Garden. She then served as a trustee on the boards of The Mt. Cuba Center, Bartram’s Garden, and The Ambler Arboretum. Biddle has worked at Andalusia since 2005 and focuses on maintaining its historic gardens, manages the Garden Volunteer Program, and sometimes gets to garden.

Merissa MacDonald is a Certified Arborist through the International Society of Arboriculture and the Southwest Tree Program Coordinator at Bartram's Garden, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In her work, she leads a cohort of high school urban foresters and encourages them to explore green Industry jobs from arborist to landscape architect and any job in between.

Her work also includes community organizing around tree plantings in collaboration with partners at PHS (the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society). The goal is to increase the current 8% tree coverage rate of Southwest Philadelphia, with a focus on the neighborhood just outside Bartram’s Garden.

Merissa has a passion for landscape design and community planning and incorporates the two into her urban forestry curriculum.

Sara Street is the green guru of First Community Foundation Partnership of Pennsylvania. As the manager of Williamsport’s local nature preserve, Rider Park, she fills the roles of forest ecologist, wildlife biologist, environmental educator, working maintenance foreman, volunteer coordinator and more.

With degrees in landscape architecture, ecological restoration, park management, and landscape technology, Sara brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to her role. As the steward of nearly 900 acres, she is responsible for encouraging forest health and longevity, managing invasive plants and pests (like spongey moth and hemlock elongate scale) and planting native plants to enhance the park’s biodiversity. She encourages wildlife habitat by encouraging landscape types that aren’t present at Rider Park (like a shrub dominated savanna on the edges of the forest and meadows). Sara also maintains trails, coordinates volunteers, and shares her passion for nature and wildlife with visitors.

Even when she’s not on the job, Sara spends a lot of time outside—hiking, gardening, swimming in the West Branch of the Susquehanna and Loyalsock creeks and attending soccer events with her son.

“I lived and worked in northwest Washington state, and the trees there are very impressive in stature, height, and density. But the range of species pales in comparison to the richness of North Central Pennsylvania. I adore walking through the forest, looking at patterns and identifying trees!”

Rebecca Johnson is an ISA Certified Arborist and a true arborholic. She is addicted to helping trees and the people who care for them. Rebecca regularly provides education to fellow arborists and the general public. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Texas Chapter of ISA as its president and is a private consulting arborist, teaching homeowners about proper tree care. Rebecca has been involved with the Certified Arborist prep courses since 2011 and was part of the cadre responsible for bringing the Certified Arborist prep class to Austin, Texas in 2015. She currently coordinates the Austin class.

Rebecca was recognized with the 2020 ISA President's Award for her work with Women in Arboriculture. She is a TCIA Certified Treecare Safety Professional, Tree Risk Assessment Qualified, and holds the Texas ISA Oak Wilt and Wildfire Risk Reduction qualifications, and has a degree in Forestry from Oklahoma State University. She spends her free time looking at and admiring trees and spends quality time with her family and pets.

Ethan Olson is the owner of Walburn Run Nursery located in Brockway, Pennsylvania. His main plant focus at his nursery is on fruit and nut trees along with berried shrubs and edible herbaceous plants. Presently, Ethan spends the majority of time growing and collecting the American chestnut (Castanea dentata). His mission is the preservation of a diverse chestnut germplasm in hopes of getting this once great species back into the environment as a productive component to the northeastern forest ecosystem. Ethan has a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from Temple University and is an avid outdoorsman.

With more than 14 years in the horticulture and arboriculture industry, Rob Shaut joined Casey Trees, an Urban Forestry non-profit, in March of 2018. He has contributed to the operational efficiency and the expansion of their scope of work. Thanks to the leadership of Rob, Stormwater Low Impact Development and Best Management Practices are now an integral part of the Casey Trees portfolio, along with tree installation, pruning, and maintenance. Previously, Rob completed the two-year Professional Horticulture Program at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, studied at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and received a Bachelor of Science from Clemson University in business management. He spent five years working as a project manager and garden designer for Shimizu Landscape Design, a Maryland-based design and build firm. He worked for two years as a project manager for Cotswold Gardens, a design and build firm in West Grove, Pennsylvania. Rob is a certified Arborist and Tree Risk Assessment Qualified. He is currently a member of the MAC-ISA Board of Directors and the TREE Fund Board of Directors. As the Director of Tree Operations at Casey Trees, Rob focuses on increasing canopy coverage, storm water mitigation, heat island mitigation, and phytoremediation. Casey Trees targets lower canopied areas and equity emphasis areas around our nation’s capital.

John Perlin is a Professor and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Physics at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of the newly released edition of A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization.

Perlin says, “It is my hope that the new edition of A Forest Journey will make clear the imperative humanity faces, because losing our forests would not merely be the end of nature, it could mean the end of us.”

Originally published in 1989, the book’s comprehensive coverage of the major role forests have played in human life …….earned it recognition as a Harvard “Classic in Science and World History” and as one of Harvard’s “One Hundred Great Books.”

In the new edition, Perlin cites data on how humanity has cut down half the trees on the planet in the last 12,000 years, and that deforestation continues at an alarming pace with 15 billion trees removed per year. That’s 500,000 square miles of forested land lost since the first edition of A Forest Journey was released.

Perlin is also the author of three other books: A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology; From Space to Earth: The Story of Solar Electricity; and Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy.

Perlin lives in Santa Barbara, California.