Our cultural and scientific memories of what a "normal" forest should look like arose at a peculiar moment in history, a moment when deer, for the first time in millennia, had been extirpated from the forest. ... "Overbrowsing" by deer may be returning the forest to its more usual sparse, open condition.
The lush forests of imagination are historical aberrations. Should we then welcome their collapse? Later, ruminating on forest management:
We are tempted to use nature as a model, but nature provides a Baskin-Robbins of justifications. Which flavor of forest life-cycle would you like: the annihilating force of an ice age; or an ancient, undisturbed mountainside; or the dancing mischief of a summer tornado?
Nature, as usual, is not providing the answer.
Rather, we are thrown back to a moral question: what part of nature do we wish to emulate? Do we aspire to the uncompromising, all-controlling weight of an ice sheet, imposing our glacial beauty on the land, retreating every hundredth millennium to free the forests' slow regeneration? Or do we seek to live like fire and wind, cutting swaths with our machines, then moving on for a while, hitting at random intervals, at random locations? ...
In the nineteenth century we stripped more trees from the land than the ice age accomplished in one hundred thousand years. We hacked the forest down with axes and handsaws, hauling it away on mules and railcars. The forest that grew back from this stripping was diminished, robbed of some of its diversity by the scale of the disturbance. This was a windstorm on the scale of an ice age but similar to a tornado in its crude physical messiness. ...
I believe that the answers, or their beginnings, are found in our quiet windows on the whole. Only by examining the fabric that holds and sustains us can we see our place and, therefore, our responsibilities. A direct experience of the forest gives us the humility to put our life and desires into that bigger context that inspires all the great moral traditions.
Can the flowers and the bees asnwer my questions? Not directly, but two intuitions come to mind by contemplation of a multifarious forest whose existence transcends my own. First, to unravel life's cloth is to scorn a gift ... in favor of a self-created world that we know is incoherent and cannot be sustained. Second, the attempt to turn a forest into an industrial process is improvident...
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature (Viking, 2012), 30-31, 64-66
