Forests of the mind

Through the mists of an Oregon valley stalk deities that speak wordlessly of humanity's primeval love-hate relationship with wilderness.

They are like trophies, those big Doug-fir logs mounted on semitrailers rumbling down the Cascade slopes, headed toward the Oregon coast. Each of them is thicker than a man is tall--a giant ramrod of a trunk a third of a football field long. One of the semis pulls onto the interstate ahead of us, hauled by a bright red Mack diesel blatting through the morning-misty flats of the Willamette Valley. "My God," we say, "look at the size of that tree." And we speed by, watching it diminish in the rear-view mirror until at last it is gone from sight--but not yet gone from the hidden creases of our minds.

The awe is genuine, the reference to deity not merely a casual blasphemy, for a god had lived in that tree--a forest god feared and revered from the very beginning of our time on the planet, when protohumans left the forest, stood upright, and with an opposed thumb, a hungry belly, and year-round estrus came to dominate the world. We have been ambivalent about the forest ever since.

Now there is a crisis, a crossing point in history that perhaps goes beyond mere economics: Members of the species have taken to arguing with one another about whether we fell certain trees, in Amazonia or Oregonia, or leave them uncut (the argument was settled for that one Douglas-fir, of course) so that ecosystems can remain in balance for the sake of posterity. Accordingly, it is not altogether idle to speculate about what seems to be driving the controversy, for it brings murder and hatred. Chico Mendes is dead in Brazil, killed by those who would clear the forest for farming. In the lumbertown barrooms of the Pacific Northwest, violence is promised if the old-growth cannot be cut.

Is this just about money? Jobs for a tiny fraction of woods workers living in out-of-the-way places as rubber tappers or chainsaw operators? Or is something deeper going on in human consciousness, in our apperception of what a forest is, shaped by ancient needs and fears that lie too deep for cognition but are yet remembered?

Forest. The word means, simply, "the out of doors." From the Latin fores, coined in the days when most of known Europe was forested, not yet cleared or grazed off to become cropland, meadow, brackened moor, or a dry, rocky steep bordering the Mediterranean sea. Yet by the time of the Renaissance, the forest had been decimated--for firewood, furlongs, grazing land, timber for houses, and the insatiable demands for masts, keelsons, framing members, and planking for ships of the line and the merchantmen. It became a king's prerogative to set valued tracts of the dwindling forested land aside for his exclusive use. "A certain territory of woody grounds and fruitful pastures," an English legal scholar described the royal forests in 1598, "privileged for wild beasts and fowls of forest, chase, and warren to rest, and to abide there in the safe protection of the king for his delight and pleasure."

In modern Italian, forestiere means "stranger"--someone from another country. And so the forest is also a place of strangeness. Our own word foreign comes from the same root. And why wouldn't the forest seem foreign? Our species, homo sapiens and the collateral hominids, did not arise in the forest anyway. We are of the savanna--short grass and scattered trees--so perhaps we should be unsurprised that we feel so ambivalent about the jungles. Those other apes live there.

Prehistorians can date our ancestors with certainty to 3.5 million years ago in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. Some believe we date back even farther--to 5 million years. Thus the good place for humans during all but a tick on the geological clock (to account for the most recent period when this clever, ambitious species migrated from its place of origin to occupy niches not inherently suitable) has been in landscapes of short grass and scattered trees. Here our upright posture and keen vision allowed us to locate prey at great distances with clear lines of sight through the separated trees down to the lakeshore or river's edge from our hillside perch. It works the other way, too. Our adaptation to the savanna habitat (it was then a bit more wooded and lush than the driedout East Africa of today) enables us to spot the animals wishing to prey upon us soon enough to elude them (by climbing one of those trees) or kill them in self-defense.

Every species has a "right" habitat, and the savanna is ours, the open woods, not the deep forest. It may be revealing that in cities and suburbs we call natural areas open spaces, in the jargon of land-use planning, even though for the most part the open space is thick with trees. Ostensibly the word open means not built upon, but it could also strike a deeper, wishful chord relating to the most elemental needs for safety and food that the savanna habitat in the place of our origin provided.