The forest

My daughter finds The Lorax genuinely terrifying; as, I think, she is supposed to do. All the more so since we’re well and truly in the future it was about. We know now what the ‘unless’ looks like. She hasn’t known a time before it. In the world she was born to, the rivers already run with waste. The sky thickens. The forests are going.

In the story, the trees, the animals, fish, and birds all depend on one another in the kind of simple circle a child can grasp. In the real forest, the web of life is vastly more complex — more animate, intimate, intricate, and abundant than we imagined. There is no emptiness or waste place; no exhaust. There is nothing outside it. We ourselves, contrary to centuries of exceptionalism, are not outside it. We are closer to it — ecologically and genetically — than we care to think about. The world is full of life on every scale, and old verities about sentience itself are being jostled and stretched.

Some fairly stunning research about forests has lately given rise to a florescence of books about trees. Suzanne Simard writes in Finding the Mother Tree about her discovery of the throbbing webs that lie beneath the forest floor and link the trees in complicated ways. Through mycorrhizae — fungal systems that thrive among tree roots — trees share nutrients and knowledge and even nurture. ‘Mother trees’ care for their offspring through whole lifetimes, as well as for the forest as a whole, to say nothing of what the forest itself does as our planet’s liver and lungs. In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben explains that trees will go on nurturing a stump for centuries after the tree has been felled. We used to assume trees were in competition with each other for land and light. By and large, they’re not.

Larkin saw threshing tree crowns as ‘unresting castles.’ Mary Oliver wrote of

that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water.

The unobservable mysteries are now known to be much more complex and collaborative. The forest, and what lives beneath its floor, holds something we might as well call intelligence. The subterranean castle is in fact more like a city or even a civilisation. Wohlleben says ‘there are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet.’ All of it nourishing. All of it cooperative. All of it vital.

In the same moment that we’re learning all this, we’re learning how much of it is threatened with irretrievable loss. Ancient trees are felled and land is cleared at a fearsome rate. We break and burn the forests like we really think there’s no tomorrow. Like so much else to do with climate change, we’re in a race between knowing and doing. I hope the more we know the more we’ll save. The more we understand what we stand to lose unless we change, the more we’ll change. My daughter gives me hope. She talks about how different things will be when she’s grown up. She talks as if we’ve already decided to live deliberately. To recover the forests and clear the air and restitch the web. She was born into this world, but she already lives in a better one.