This is the forest primeval.
Well, it’s about as close as one gets in the continental United States these days. Six miles from the nearest car and some 10,000 feet above sea level lies Dad’s Lake, full of plump cutthroat trout and surrounded by ponderosa pine.
Up here, the trees do not grow copiously. They take root only where the rocky soil allows, leaving plenty of space for walking, pitching a tent or looking at the lake-waters darken as the sun sets behind the Wind River range.
Still, it is a forest, hence a fitting place to contemplate their terror and glory. More than money and power are involved when people fight over the deep woods. The forest arouses passions even more intense than pride and greed.
Such is the message of a most fascinating book, “Forests, The Shadow of Civilization,” by Robert Pogue Harrison. Though forests are often objects of political dispute, this is no political tract. It is an exploration of the relationship between people and forests in Western civilization, and of how that relationship changed as the civilization did.
More Top Picks Best Noise Canceling Headphones For Migraines
From the primitives who feared the forests but sought protection and inspiration in them to the modern who seeks sylvan solace to make up for his “detachment from the earth,” forests have frightened and attracted people for thousands of years, writes Harrison, a professor of French and Italian literature at Stanford University.
It may have been in forests, and because of them, he said, that people developed the first “universal institution(s) of humanity”-religion, marriage and burial of the dead. Today, deforestation threatens not just biodiversity but “a much deeper apprehension about the disappearance of boundaries, without which the human abode loses its grounding.”
Perhaps that is why, in discussing forests, the human being often loses civility. Not that there are no legitimate differences of opinion. Right now, one conservation group, the American Forestry Association, espouses preventive thinning of woodlands which have been over-protected from fires.
“The fuel loads are so high and the trees so thick,” said the association’s Neil Sampson, that the next fires will be “intense and destructive.” To prevent this, he urges selective logging, even where logging has not been permitted.
Not so fast, says Greg Aplet of the Wilderness Society. Yes, the “natural process of fire has to be restored.” But past mismanagement “doesn’t mean a full-scale assault on the forest,” complete with new logging roads.
That’s a reasonable policy dispute. Less admirable is the misinformation campaign of the “there are more forests than ever” school, a subsidiary of the anti-environmentalism found in some conservative circles.
“There are more acres of forest in the U.S. than at anytime since the 1950s,” proclaims a report of the Heartland Institute. “Annual timber growth in the U.S. now exceeds harvest by 37 percent.”
This is a falsehood. Many of those “acres of forests” have no trees on them, having recently been clear-cut. They’re still “forest” unless converted to other uses. There is a lot of timber growth, in tree plantations with neat rows of white pine or another single species. That’s a usable resource. It isn’t a forest.
But as Harrison points out, the other side of this debate is also flawed. “Ecology, as a cause and not a science, risks falling into attitudes that seem naive,” he says, especially in its romantic insistence that human beings are simply part of nature.
Not really, Harrison says. Because of reason and language, “we dwell not in nature but in relation to nature.” Otherwise, “we would not need to discover the facts of life.”
Even as he dismisses the pseudo-science which denies the reality of de-forestation, Harrison laments that environmentalists “are forced to speak the language. . . of usefulness,” that “they must contrive a thousand convincing or unconvincing arguments in favor of the utility of forest conservation.”
But a forest is more than useful. It embodies qualities which can barely be explained, much less quantified. By their density, forests kept peoples apart from one another, and so “served to localize the spirit of place.” In our era of “detachment from the past (and) detachment from the earth,” of “steady alienation from the spontaneity, joy and authenticity of origins,” forests “evoke memories of the past.” They do not simply remind us of natural and human origins; they somehow suggest the reality of those origins.
Anyone who doubts that need only come to Dad’s Lake of a summer sunset, to watch the pine crowns grow black, to hear the cries of distant coyotes and to feel the soft evening breeze which rises, it seems, from another place, another time.