Trees, People, and the Pioneer Valley — Alumni Profile, Bob Saul ’80

If there is one thing to know about Bob Saul ’80, it’s that he loves trees.

This past summer, I worked on Bob’s tree farms, which are largely located here in the Pioneer Valley (though there is one particularly large property in New Hampshire). While I suffered for over two months from a perpetual poison ivy rash that crept up my arms and legs, I’d say it might have been worth it even without the monetary compensation I received, if only to get to know Bob.

Bob can talk forever, and one of my favorite things about working on the farm was hearing his stories about everything and anything. He is the most lovely person, and, as his “best bud” Jim Brassord (former Amherst College chief of campus operations) put it, “a bright spirit” who is incredibly easy to talk to.

Bob has built a professional career in agricultural and timberland investment, and used much of what he’s made from that to plant trees on what he once described to me as his “immortality project” — five tree farms spanning 204 acres altogether. While some of these will be harvested for lumber, some he wants to become old-growth forest.

The questions he thinks about in his career also extend into his work as a creative writer, where he frequently writes about nature and the climate. (He has grown quite dedicated to his craft — one of the first things I learned about Bob was that he is not to be disturbed before 11 a.m., as that’s his daily writing time. As he put it, if he doesn’t get to write for his two hours in the morning, he becomes “a very cranky person.”)

“[He] has so many different identities that make him such an interesting person,” Brassord said. “You know, he’s a farmer, he’s a community volunteer, an athlete, a philanthropist, an educator. He wears just so many different identities so well.”

Life Before Amherst

While Bob has now spent over half of his life in the Valley, he grew up in New Jersey. His family started out as lower-middle class but became upper class as his father worked his way up the financial industry. Though Bob’s parents valued education above all else, Bob wasn’t always the best student.

“There was a period of time in ninth grade and 10th grade where … I got busted for all kinds of little transgressions, and I was definitely going down the wrong path,” he said. “My father intervened, and I ended up going to [the] Hotchkiss School for my junior and senior years. And that was a real transformation for me.”

At Hotchkiss, he threw the javelin. “I loved practicing it. I loved the craft of it. I was always very fast, but not that strong, and so I developed a technique which used my speed and didn’t rely so much on strength,” he said. “I studied all these European javelin throwers, and I became sort of a student of the javelin … And that was my focus. And it wasn’t because I was a great athlete. It was because I was just obsessive about learning to throw the javelin.” Bob would carry this over to his time at Amherst, too.

Bob also became more academically motivated at Hotchkiss, in part because of the encouragement he received from his teachers. “I had a few who took me aside and said, ‘You know, you’re pretty smart.’ And I was like, ‘Really? What does that mean?’ And they said, ‘Well, you’re curious.’”

He continued to get this feedback from professors at Amherst, and he found over his time here that it could not have been a better place for someone with a curious mind. “I didn’t have in mind that I wanted to become a professor or a scientist,” he said, “but I wanted to know about science. I wanted to know about English. I want to know about philosophy, and I was very much of a liberal-arts-type learner.”

Sowing Seeds at Amherst

While Amherst ended up being a good fit for Bob, before starting here, he knew practically nothing about the school — he didn’t even know the college’s colors. “To my surprise, when I showed up at Amherst, the colors were purple and white, and I’d thought they were red and white.”

Bob was “one of those people who could turn down Middlebury, turn down Williams, turn down Dartmouth, and come to Amherst,” he said. “But, I think Amherst became the clear choice because — and this is part of the naivete of being a kid — I was like ‘Oh, my God, I’ve applied to all these places that are in the middle of nowhere. What is my most urban option?’ And I looked at the Five College area, and I was like, ‘I’m going there.’”

Though he took classes across a breadth of disciplines, Bob graduated as an English major, which he felt was quite a “natural path” for him. “I’ve always been a reader, and … I can almost say I’ve always been a writer, and those things are still very important to me now,” he said.

However, because he felt that he was wandering through the open curriculum without enough focus, Bob took a year off between his sophomore and junior years at Amherst. During this time he hitchhiked across the country and back, worked in a strip mine in Wyoming for six months, and then traveled around Europe for five months. He returned having decided to do pre-med and thinking he might become a medical professional. This, of course, did not happen. “Though I did a lot of work to almost get there,” he said, “in the end, the sight of blood was a little more than I could take.”

Outside of his academic life at Amherst, and throwing the javelin on the track and field team (he is the college’s record-holder for old javelin), Bob did a lot of hiking and skiing, though he also did “lots of miscellaneous things here and there [when he] had the time.”

(At this point in the interview, we had to diverge slightly from my torrent of questions so Bob could tell me one of his stories.)

“One thing a friend and I did sophomore year during interterm is we hitchhiked to Boston with a dime in our pocket — because then you had one dime to make a phone call if you really got in trouble. So we hitchhiked to Boston. We broke into … a science building at Boston University to sleep. It was cold — wind chill factor unbelievable. We, the next day, got a job cleaning out old grocery stores. Got paid in cash. We stayed in Boston for four days working that job, and by the time we left Boston, we each had $500 in our pocket, and we hitchhiked back like conquering heroes. We thought we were the coolest people in the world. No one understood why we did it, and I’m not sure we did either. We just wanted to see if we could survive by our wits, and we sort of got lucky.”

Bob also ran a maple syrup co-op through his time at Amherst. “I cobbled together a group of crazy students who would go around and help me collect sap, and we would boil the sap all night, underneath the stars, out just beyond where the tennis courts are … and then we would distribute the maple syrup to everybody who had participated.”

(These sap-boiling hangouts also lent themselves to romantic nights for some people, Bob told me. “I still at alumni events have people coming up to me and saying, ‘You know, I always had a crush on so and so, and she and I had our first kiss down by your maple-syrup fire.’”)

Bob himself met his now-wife, former Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Katie Fretwell ’81 at Amherst, though not by the maple-syrup fire. “I studied hard, and I trained hard, and those were sort of the primary foundations of Amherst for me. But I was always chasing my girl, too, and that was a full-time job,” he told me. “She was in the library in Merrill, and so, suddenly, that was where I studied, the library in Merrill.” He fell in love with Katie early into his time here, and the pair got married in 1982, not long after graduating.

Investing in Forestry and Agriculture

After Amherst, Bob taught at a school in the suburbs of London for a summer (which in many ways functioned as an excuse for him to travel around Scotland, Ireland, France, and Spain). When he returned, he went into a bank training program — “which I hated so much,” he said, lasting eight months there before his marriage to Katie functioned as a great excuse to leave. The pair traveled around the Middle East for three months, and then after a period where he worked as an assistant to the town manager in Danvers, Massachusetts, Bob decided to go to graduate school.

Bob attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, graduating in 1985 with a master’s in public policy. He then started a furniture company from scratch in Pittsfield. “It was a pretty big company,” he said. “We had about three and a half, four million dollars in sales. And then the recession of the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s, 1990s, hurt sales. And so I liquidated it.”

Katie becoming the dean of admissions brought Bob and her back to the Pioneer Valley, 34 years ago in 1990. After managing Thornes Marketplace in Northampton for six years, Bob landed a job with a then-new timber investment management organization, GMO Renewable Resources.

He and two partners built it into a $3 billion company over the course of 15 years, before selling and closing up shop. After moving between a few different partnerships, Bob got a job for the investment firm Fiera Comox as a partner in agriculture. He worked for the company up in Montreal for three years and is still working for them, though now remotely.

“My professional career is based [outside of Amherst], but all of my partners have allowed me to stay here, so I haven’t had to move to have a very enriching professional career. And that’s just dumb luck,” Bob said.

Not everyone attributes Bob’s success so purely to luck. “People who work with Bob immediately see he’s got a lot of charisma and energy and passion,” Jim Hourdequin, a friend and colleague of Bob’s, said. “And Bob — he is somebody whose word you could take to the bank.”

Planting Trees, Building Forests

Bob’s tree farms sport rows and rows of maple, white ash, oak, black cherry, and — his favorite — black walnut.

His “tree career,” as he called it, spans around the same time as his professional career in agriculture and forestry investment. In 1991, a year after moving back to Amherst, he bought his first plot of land that would become a tree farm (the one that I largely worked on this summer).

“I can remember looking out of plane windows for the first time, you know, 40 years ago, and seeing all those squares on the ground … as you cross the country, and just thinking, ‘I would just love to make an imprint on the landscape,’” he said. “And then I saw a play where a guy said to another guy, ‘What I really think the most important thing a person could ever do is build a forest,’ and I was like, ‘There’s an idea.’ And that just stuck with me.”

While climate justice was not as discussed in 1991 when Bob was starting his tree career as it is now, and he wasn’t immediately driven by altruistic intent, he now looks out at his farms and thinks about how they both create habitat and sequester carbon. He also explained that his farms are a way of “putting [his] money into something that’s not Wall Street.”

While the farms do currently generate some income for Bob as he harvests trees selectively to keep the forests healthy, “I’m going to be dead and gone by the time these things are truly harvested for any value or for the benefit of the greater Valley public by putting it in the Kestrel Land Trust,” he said. “And I like that because I’ve had such a privileged background, that just any way, any small ways I can give back [is] incredibly rewarding.”

Really though, Bob’s tree career stems first from his love of trees and soil. “I just love planting trees and taking care of them, and so I’ve taken much of the money that I’ve made in my professional career and put it into [the farms],” he said. “There’s this appeal that you as a human agent, can put a biological machine into the ground and with, I estimate, about 45 minutes of attention over the lifetime of the tree, that you can get it to grow straight, tall, and healthy, and that is a very big payback for some very small amount of human effort … Forty years from now, it’s 75 feet tall, it’s this big around [Bob held out his arms in a circle with a diameter of two feet or so], and its roots are all over the place. It has just been working hard, and you got that going.”

Over the pandemic, Bob was awarded one of Harvard’s 2020-2021 Charles Bullard Fellowships in Forest Research, where he researched “shifts in the definition of ‘fiduciary responsibility’ during an era of climate emergency.” During the fellowship, Bob interviewed 35 of his colleagues — including 15 who invest money and natural resources, 10 climate scientists and academics, five activists, and five public officials or regulators — about climate change and how land use needs to change in the climate-emergency era. “And being a creative writer, I turned all of those interviews into five characters and made it into a play,” he said. “They all argue with each other about everything from existential risk, human mortality, communism, socialism, capitalism, progress, and it’s 110 pages long. It’s sort of a mess, but I go back and I read it, and go, ‘This is really fun.’”

“The forest products industry is dominated by people who are strictly finance people or people who have professional training [with] forestry and Bob brought really more of a liberal-arts perspective,” Hourdequin said. “He’s very much an outside-the-box thinker — somebody that doesn’t just accept at face value some of the widely held assumptions and beliefs in the industry, and is willing to challenge some of those.”

Bob spoke to this as well: “In the applied-sciences world … there often isn’t that wonderful liberal-arts mindset of looking at the thing from various angles … And I would say that it’s a huge advantage to think about every natural asset from all angles, and that’s especially important during the climate crisis. If you just look at it as an asset that’s going to make you money, then you’re going to miss the opportunity to do both something good as well as something that can make you money.”

“A lot of folks are stuck in that sort of productivity mindset, and that was several of the characters in my play. And then there are others who are very much overcaught in the idealistic mindset — they want to rewild everything, let everything grow. But if we stop making food here, because we protect everything, we’re creating starvation in certain parts of the globe by driving up food prices, by taking food off the market. So, everything has a ripple effect globally, and I think that [friction] is what I was trying to convey.”

Writing about the Climate Crisis

Bob’s creative writing life really began when he started traveling for his job with GMO Renewable Resources back in 1997. “Suddenly, I’m on airplanes all the time. I’m in hotel rooms in the evenings. And I got tired of reading, to be quite honest, and I just wanted to do something different and creative,” he explained. “So I started to pay attention to what I was reading, started to write a few short stories.”

“I don’t fundamentally like business or finance, but I do fundamentally like writing. … So every time I would take a business trip, and I had to go to Washington State or California or New Zealand or Australia, I would start to look forward to the time in the airplane where I could just write. And it was just the greatest outlet … to keep my soul alive … keep me thinking about human beings and the human condition, and start to invent stories about what people I saw were experiencing.”

About nine years ago, Bob began attending writing workshops, including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference a number of times. In these workshops, he became more aware of craft, of “what makes good writing,” and what he wanted to write about.

Bob’s writing, including a novel he is currently working on, tends to examine similar themes and questions as his play for the Bullard Fellowship.

“I am fascinated by how the human being has trouble coping with the biggest existential problems about its own existence. And climate is my thing, and nature is my thing. So I’m writing mostly about our challenges when it comes to us people, as human actors, coping with some of these economic externalities, and it sort of tails with my distrust of the Wall-Street world … this idea that Wall Street and the stock market and bond markets aren’t really paying much attention to the fact that we’re in the middle of a screaming, hellish crisis with forests burning and oceans flooding, hurricanes intensifying and unpredictable weather patterns,” he said. “What are the implications for these changes, in our economy, in our psychology, in our community, in our social structures? Do they dissolve? Do people react in certain ways that are extreme?”

While Bob expressed uncertainty at whether he’d want his working novel published in the future, he did say, “I think if I’m going to go through this titanic effort of really pushing a novel up the hill, I would like to get to the point where I felt good enough about it that if it were to see the light of day, I would be very proud of it.”

Rooted in the Valley

Throughout all of the many passions and adventures Bob has had, one of the most consistent things has been his love of the Pioneer Valley.

“The feeling of home is very, very valuable to me. And I like traveling, and I like seeing other places, but, boy, I just love being at home,” Bob said. “I get so excited about all the projects and all the stuff that there is to do here in the Valley. It’s just a fantastic place.”

Bob feels lucky that his professional life has been flexible enough that he has been able to stay in the Pioneer Valley. It means that he and Katie got to raise their two children here (Bob coached 32 the teams they were on), and that he has gotten to know the people well.

“I think if I had one defining skill or attribute, it would be that I really, really like people,” Bob said. “I find them so interesting and, much to the dismay of my children, and even to some extent, my wife, I will go up to anybody and ask them anything and just introduce myself.”

“Bob is a very social, social being,” Brassord said. “This summer, he felt a need to connect with this wide range of friends that he’s accumulated over the years, he pulled together a get-together party for close to 100 people from all different walks of life. I think the most notable thing is he invited like 100 people, and normally you’d then get like 50 people that attend. But I think he had 120 people that attended … It goes to show that Bob is really appreciated and really loved by so many people in this community.”

The size of Amherst is perfect for his personality, Bob said. “You can sit outside at Amherst Coffee and see five people you know, or you can be introduced to two people you never knew.”

Bob loves the feeling of connection to other people fostered by Amherst’s town community.

In fact, it happened that just before Bob and I talked, he was on the phone with a pagan witch who organizes ceremonies in the area, and they found that they know “like seven different people in common.”

“That’s the beauty of the Valley,” he said.