Most of my life I
have been a forest boy. On my mother’s
wildlife sanctuary in eastern Zimbabwe I ran barefoot through squishy bogs
sheltered by massive albizias and cussonias and figs; every year I return there
to climb my favourite strangler-fig bridge.
I was early made aware of the complex ecosystem that prevailed there –
from the moths to the bats, from the somango monkeys to the mongooses, from the
snails to the eagles. I learned to
evaluate these interconnections for their place in the system, not for their
human use. My mother would point out a
fallen Rhoicissus fruit, bitten once
by a monkey and discarded.
“People say, ‘Look how wasteful they
are’, and hate monkeys for it. But look
at what’s happening to the fruit. Some
of the seeds have been ingested by the somango, to be defecated – planted –
further off. A bushbuck has come along
and nibbled a bit more of it; they’d never get this food without the monkeys. Nor would these tiny fruit-flies, which are
food for someone else; nor would these chongololos. As it rots, it adds unique nutrition to this
forest soil. What’s wasted?? Nothing!”
And we’d lift handfuls of that
clean, black, fragrant, light, leafy soil to our nostrils: there is no other smell
quite like it. It’s very light, almost airy; even
the biggest trees that come down are mostly light, rotting quickly, recycling
into new growth quickly. Cut away that
growth, remove the perpetual leaf-fall and the perennial mist that aids decay,
or the bushpig- and hornbill-droppings that enrich, and this soil runs out of
nutrients in two seasons.
Humans have been confronted with
this lesson for thousands of years, but have apparently not learned it.
The hillsides enclosing the
Mediterranean were once heavily forested – but as Pliny described the environs
of Athens in the Critias in the
fourth century BC:
In comparison of what then was, there are remaining only the bones of
the wasted body ... all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen
away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left. But in the primitive state of the country,
its high mountains were high hills covered with soil ... and there was
abundance of wood in the mountains.
Where did the wood
all go? To make ships for Athenian
navies. This did not change down the
centuries. In his wonderful book, The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the
imagination (2016), British nature-writer Richard Mabey notes how English
oak forests were decimated to make English warships. Similarly, in Landscape & Memory (1995), Simon Schama, whose Polish-Jewish
great-grandfather was a lumberman, chronicles how, as Poland was successively
occupied by German and Russian invaders in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the Bialowieza forests were plundered on a massive scale: in the years
of the First World War alone, 5 percent vanished, 5 million cubic metres of
wood shipped to Germany, and no small proportion reduced to “walls of fire” by
heavy artillery.
Manufacturing massed
weapons of war is a long way from cutting clearings in forests for early human
settlements, as Robert Pogue Harrison has related in my favourite of all
forest-y books, Forests: The shadow of
civilisation (1992). For millennia,
Harrison shows, forest was what people carved civilisation out of, and
therefore began to distance themselves from it.
It was seen as dark, threatening, dangerous. But that’s only one side of it: forests have
always simultaneously been resources, not just for wood, but for fruits,
clothing materials, a pharmacopeia of balms, as well as the richest imaginable
source of cultural imaginings: forest is epic
and fecund with mystery, always has been, from Gilgamesh to the Brothers Grimm and beyond.
Having explored swathes of this
extraordinary cultural landscape, Harrison concludes:
As the order of [human] institutions follows its course, or as huts
give way to villages and then to cities and finally to cosmopolitan academies,
the forests move further and further away from the centre of the
clearings. At the centre one eventually
forgets that one is dwelling in a clearing.
The wider the circle of the clearing, the more the centre is nowhere
... The global problem of deforestation
provokes unlikely reactions of concern these days among city dwellers, not only
because of the enormity of the scale but also because in the depths of cultural
memory forests remain the correlate of human transcendence. We call it the loss of nature, or the loss of
wildlife habitat, or the loss of biodiversity, but underlying the ecological
concern is perhaps a much deeper apprehension about the disappearance of
boundaries...
In other words, the
ecological crisis of deforestation – one of the major drivers of global climate
change – a form of change without boundaries – is also a profound crisis of the
human ‘imagination of belonging’.
‘Climate change’, precisely because
it is so nebulous, is easily derided and even denied by ignoramuses like Donald
Trump. Better to confront them with less
ambiguous evidence from lower orders of change, where things are visible and measurable. Such people often seem to think that natural
bounties will somehow last forever, when all the evidence is to the
contrary. Ask the passenger pigeon – or,
in our own time, the bluefin tuna, which is almost gone. It is now estimated that the planet has lost
half its non-human species in just the last 40 years. Sixty percent of simians, our closest
relatives, are now critically endangered. A large portion of that loss is due
to the destruction of tropical forests, the last land repositories of great
biodiversity.
There is little sign of the trend
slowing. Don’t believe that the
Congolese or the Indonesian forests are somehow endless: one of the most
heart-breaking things I have seen recently is footage of desolate orang-outans
clinging to single trees, all that’s left of their great rich forest habitats,
ploughed down and burned out for the sake of palm-oil plantations. Don’t believe that the Amazon jungle is
somehow immune to depredation: a fifth of it is already gone to cattle-ranchers
and miners and subsistence settlers and unnatural fire. The Brazilian government plans no less than
fifty dams on Amazonian rivers to supply humans with electricity. As if dams have not been proven again and
again to be short-lived and ecologically catastrophic – they will, if they go
ahead, very likely precipitate the demise of the Amazonian climatic ‘lung’.
European invaders of North America
believed that the timber resources of that vast continent were essentially
infinite. One of America’s finest
novelists, Annie Proulx, has chronicled the progression of American lumbering
in her latest magisterial novel, Barkskins
(2016). It is an epic, fascinating and
depressing story – and not only because of Proulx’s genius for polishing off
her characters in ever more imaginative ways.
She describes the appalling conditions and perils of woodcutters in
Quebec and Maine in the seventeenth century, the retreat of the forests before
new swathes of white settlers and ever-more efficient machineries, as demand
for timber for warships, then railway ties, then housing, then paper,
mushroomed. The forest wasn’t
inexhaustible after all; the ecological damage was profound and irreversible. Even in the nineteenth century, as one of Proulx’s
characters comes in from Germany with ideas of replanting and sustainability,
he is derided. One of her last,
twentieth-century characters, in contrast, studies both forest ecologies and
the indigenous knowledges of the Mi’qmak peoples who were all but obliterated
along with the rich matrix of their habitat.
The advent of the ecological
sciences, little more than a century old, seems as helpless as Romantic poetry
to stem the tsunami of commercial exploitation, driven by myopic profiteers who
simply couldn’t give a shit. Indeed,
Robert Harrison regards the academies with disdain, as iconic of our furthest
imaginative remove from the realities of forest-dwelling. More subtly, people’s aesthetics can shift:
George Monbiot, in his defiantly forward-looking book Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life (2013), laments how the
open spaciousness of his native Welsh Cambrian Mountains are today defended as
a great last “wilderness”, even though in fact they have long been comprehensively
denuded of forest and biodiversity by woodcutters and sheep-farmers: “Whenever
I venture into the Cambrian Desert I almost lose the will to live. It is like a land in perpetual winter.”
As I drove through the dustbowl of
the Free State in December, I thought about how we in South Africa have also
denuded vast territories for agriculture.
Instead of living in clearings in forests, we now fight to preserve tiny
patches of forest – a mere 7 percent of what we had a century ago – in the midst
of species-poor modified countryside that we too often have come to accept,
even aesthetically admire, as ‘natural’.
We have, in short, become numb to loss.
In a thousand different ways, as all
these wonderful books suggest, reforestation is one vital component of a
restoration of our own humanity, our human sense of belonging.
As for me, it’s the first necessary step just to go down the
hill to my local forest fragment, climb a wild plum with the cat, and breathe
in through every pore the canopy’s colours and smells and infinitude of
sounds...
*******
Excellent article, Dan.
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