Sherry Chandler

Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

Oh, maaaan! I am always on the shadow side of everything. I’m not just woman. I’m an old woman. I’m a Southerner who, if not working class, certainly has working class roots. And I love a forest. This love seems to run contrary to the path of civilization, which contains its roots in the word city.

In his discussion of Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Univ Chicago Press, 1992), Matthew Battles of Britannica Blog says:

In Forests, Harrison shows how deforestation is written into the DNA of civilization. Gilgamesh, the first hero in world literature, embarks on a quest to kill Humbaba, the demon of the forest, who lives in the mountainside cedar groves harvested to the last by the ancient Sumerians. (It’s telling that Humbaba offers to become Gilgamesh’s slave if he will spare his life.) Actaeon and Artemis; Romulus and Remus; Hansel and Gretel’s sylvan witch–our oldest stories stir with the antipathy between town and timber. And as the ancient forests fell, so did those civilizations that both feared and depended upon them. The Mediterranean basin is sunstruck and bereft of shade today because of the deforestation wrought by the Mesopotamians, Greeks, and Romans–in the process bringing about climate change that did as much as barbarian hordes and new religions to unwork civilization. And of course, those episodes of deforestation took place over thousands of years; our heaviest clearcutting is a matter of decades.

If the fate of civilization lies in forests, perhaps its preservation does as well. As atmospheric scientist Kevin Gurney testified in an Earth Day meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, existing forests soak up as much as one-third of our carbon dioxide emissions, providing a brake on climate change we can’t afford to do without. An associate director of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center, Gurney proposed a policy by which developing countries could help stave off climate change by preserving their forestlands–in return receiving credits, which they could sell to pollution-spewing developed nations trying to lower their carbon footprints.

In their different ways, Harrison and Gurney agree: not only our fate, but our freedom may be found in forests. The Magna Carta, after all, came into being in part to preserve equal access to the food and fuel of England’s woodlands. The woods have long offered refuge to freedom fighters, to outcasts. And these incubators of sylvan biodiversity offer freedom from illness, too, in their vast and as yet mostly untapped pharmacoepia. But as Harrison’s Forests so elegantly demonstrates, the woods of the world are safeguards of enchantment as well.

More and more reasons to heed Dave Bonta’s plea to leave the trees the hell alone.

P.S. I walked over to the university library today bent upon checking out this book so I could check it out (so to speak) but, wouldn’t you know it?, the book was not on the shelf where it was supposed to be. It’s been that kind of day.

I had to fill out a search card, but I am not optimistic. Haven’t had much luck with searches in the past.

1. Portrait of a warrior
2. Raven’s Shadow
3. More chains
4. The Shadow Self
5. Speed

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