The Dying Forest

I took a hike yesterday in Lassen National Wilderness, Northern California.

The creek had run dry. Many of the trees were dead and dying. Tree corpses lay everywhere, their arms outstretched, still reaching out to give and receive, as they had fallen. Some standing trees were brown, singed dead by their own heat. Others were still green, but many or most of the lower branches were dead: they were focusing their energy upwards, towards the sunlight.

Everywhere the buzz of flies, and big ants crawling with their heavy job of clearing this up.

Initially, I just didn’t like it, like a consumer. “This isn’t pretty! Why have I come here?”

Then I became more aware of what I was surrounded by. I began to weep, bitterly.

We are in an Epic War, I realised. It’s happening here, now, all around us, and right here uphill from the beautiful lake.

It’s like being a German citizen in 1940. It’s just like that, but much worse.

On one level, it seems like a war of Humans Vs Nature.

The weapons are strange. Our weapons seem to be the making of our sources of comfort, pleasure, and freedom. Our cars, plane rides. Our fridges, air con, dryers, meat. And it’s all of us, well, all of us privileged enough to have these things; it includes me. Sure, there are little islands of peace here and there, like Dharmalaya. But mainly, we are all in this war. The victims at first glance are the trees, the waters, and the fish and animals who depend on them. Nature’s retaliatory weapons are strange; heat, floods, typhoons, fires, tsunamis.

But back up a second; these distinctions are ridiculous. Both the Oxford and the Google dictionaries define Nature as ‘all the trees and rivers and animals and systems and everything apart from humans.’

I was born from Eros and womb, live in cycles, and will die and rot and become, I hope, soil enrichment. I breathe air, drink and pee rivers, eat and poo earth via plants and animals. I am nature. Nature is me.

So it’s a stranger war, I think as I walk in rivers of heat, the soil scorching my bare feet. 

These trees are so close to the lake. But the lake is a storage system not a distribution system. Rain and rivers are the distribution systems, but the rain has stopped and the rivers are dry.

It’s somehow a war against ourselves, and nature hurts everywhere as she suffers and retaliates. If our sources of air, heat, food and water struggle, we struggle.

I was told recently of science that found that every plant has a song. I could feel the song of the forest; of thirst, heat, weariness, sadness as the standing trees were surrounded by the corpses of their kin, none cleared away. They seemed to miss humans, who would clear dead wood and make fires from it, to gather around and share songs and stories, weave tribe. 

For perhaps six thousand years, Native Americans lived here, planting oak for their acorns (from which they made flour), and having managed fires to reduce the firs to make room for sunlight to reach the oaks. This relationship has been replaced in the last hundred years by the Nation Parks, a managed leisure system. I pay $20, come and put up my tent, walk on the trails, and look at the trees. But I don’t tend them; and they miss us. The miss the Native Americans, whose way of life never created this heat, this thirst, this neglect, this tragedy, this death.

“Climate Change” seems an abstract term referring to weather reports, scientists and graphs. A better term might be, expanding-death. It’s actually a gradual growth of death and dying, the way the light comes gradually across the lake when the sun rises. For a while it’s just at the other shore, but before long, you know, it’ll reach most everywhere.

I think of the argument that, “it’s ok, the earth will be ok. We’ll all die but the earth will right itself in due course. This is just what is happening, it’s too late, we’re killing ourselves and maybe we need to.”

Huh. But, what of the song in the process? Honestly this Epic War we are living in is like the Holocaust multiplied by, say, a billion. A billion because it’s not only humans who are dying from it, over time; it’s the trees, rivers, fish, animals and birds. Over half of animals living on earth have died in the last 40 years, basically my lifetime. As a student I read about “ecological homogenisation” - the process by which with climate change, delicate and magnificent species cannot survive but rats, ants, and pigeons flourish. 

Twenty years later, in this wood of ants, flies, little wood squirrels and rotting trees, here we are. And this forest is but one patch in the pattern that is dappling the globe.

So to participate and letting the death-spread continue is like doing just that in the holocaust. But worse. 

STOP THE FUCKING WAR! I think. DISMANTLE THE WAR! LET SOMETHING ELSE GROW THROUGH!!

This must be the priority of our time!

What does that mean, I wonder? Well, obviously shifting to renewable energy for our heating, aircon, fridges and dryers. That seems underway, though we could be faster.

Then, much less driving, and more fast trains and little swipe-in, swipe-out city cars for the first-and-last-mile.

(This is the traffic my town, Berkeley, greeted me with (not in rush hour) when I got home).

Dismantling the war also means pretty much taking the planes out of the sky.

Ah. Dum de dum. Oh look a butterfly. I avoid the topic and think about something else for half an hour.

Then gently return myself to the question. I am part of the war. What part do I play in dismantling the war?

My life depends on two transatlantic flights a year.

I have what I consider to be a better life on the American West Coast than I see that I could have in the UK at the moment. But I want to stay close to my family and friends and their wonderful children, and I visit bi-annually.

What is it to stop flying?

We have to stop our seeking behaviour.

What is it to stop our seeking behaviour?

It is to feel good being at home. To live in a field we like to be in.

In this home; the region. In this home, the culture. In this home, the town. In this home, the building or place. In this home, the family or housemates. In this home, the body. In this home, the self.