Is a plantation forest a real forest?
In the summer of 1996, when my husband Seth and I lived in Central New York, we were hiking on a section of the Finger Lakes Trail when we were both so overcome by the strangeness of the stand of slim conifers we were walking through that we commented simultaneously, “There’s something wrong with this forest.” Seth turned at a 30-degree angle to the path and revealed to himself and me, “The trees are all in rows!” Viewing the forest from the same angle, I discovered that he was right. All the trees belonged to the same species and were of the same age, and they displayed an eerie uniformity that caused the whole forest to appear manufactured.
This was my first exposure to a planned forest community. As a child, I had lived in both rural Northeastern Pennsylvania, in a part of the Appalachian mountain range locally referred to as the Endless Mountains, and in New York City. The forests of the Endless Mountains enchanted me, with their chunky maples and horse chestnuts and groves of butterfly-leaved poplars, especially in their stained-glass autumns. My city refuges were the woodlands of the Bronx Botanical Garden, a combination of native forest and specimen trees identified with charming small plaques, and the maritime forest around Orchard Beach.
While these were not old-growth woods, they exhibited all the delightful disorder of nature left to her own devices, multiple species coexisting at every stratum, from soil-worshipping moss to the sky-seeking pin oaks. In our Pennsylvania home, the prevailing forestry practice was selective cutting, so I’d never encountered a clearcut, and the only crop-like plantings of trees I’d seen were Christmas tree farms. However, I had witnessed human colonies of uniformity before. Traveling from the mountains to the megalopolis took me past planned communities of identical homes like the suburbs Erma Bombeck described in The Grass Is Greener Over the Septic Tank: populated with residents as interchangeable as their homes—to the degree that she imagined getting lost in one of the identical cul-de-sacs and living for a few months in the house she entered before realizing that neither home nor family were hers.
More recently, Seth and I visited an acquaintance in an exclusive engineered neighborhood in Beaverton. As we walked up a hill to his house, at exactly 6 p.m., the sounds of crickets and frogs arose from the manicured streamlet in a neighbor’s yard. Our host confirmed our suspicions: if you purchased a condo with a “meadow feature,” you got a recording of crickets, and if a “water feature” accompanied your condo, you got frogs. Ironically, judging from the surrounding lowlands from which the manufactured burg arose as if ex nihilo, a wetland had been filled to make way for what my brother Will calls “trailer parks for the wealthy,” killing the real frogs and crickets but replacing them with sanitized recordings to complete the theme-park impression of both the natural world and a cozy small town.
If one’s perceptions aren’t perturbed by an artificial neighborhood, why would they be offended by an ersatz forest? I wonder how coincidental it was that the chosen trees not only stayed as true to type as if they had been produced in a factory, but created the minimum of mess: discreet piles of needles, no shredded bark or snapped-off branches, the forest floor kept clear of underbrush, courtesy of allelopathy, the chemical strategy by which the fallen needles of some pines make the soil inhospitable to any growth other than their own seedlings. (Is that how dwellers in gated communities keep out those who are “not like us”?) While attending a forestry lecture a few years ago, Seth learned that these trees probably came from cuttings of a single tree and hence, genetically speaking, the identical forest was not one type of tree but one tree.
An unplanned forest—or a forest planned by trees—exhibits an arboreal genius no human arboriculturalists can match. The wonderful books of the Irish botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger attest to the remarkable powers of trees, long understood by indigenous peoples (including the Druids whose teachings lingered in stories told to her in childhood) and belatedly “discovered” by scientists: the ways in which, for example, mature trees secrete chemicals that attract certain plants to grow nearby, plants that will benefit the whole forest community. In the book Grandmothers Counsel the World, Siletz elder Agnes Baker Pilgrim observes how the traditional lore of her people celebrates the power of grandmother trees to summon rain and how, very recently, scientists have corroborated this ability—after generations of disregarding this and other wisdom gleaned from indigenous peoples’ respectful relationship with nature.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, forest biologist and member of the Potawatomi nation, writes in Gathering Moss about the central role mosses play in the health of forests, especially in the super-saturated Northwest. The fly-fisher, writer, and ecstatic celebrant of nature David James Duncan honors the seminal role salmon play in our Northwest ecology—and the danger clear-cutting poses to the survival of this noblest of fish. Paul Stamets, Washington State’s high priest of fungi, theorizes that the mycelia of mushrooms—which can extend throughout a forest and thus can be considered one organism, even if it manifests as thousands of individual mushrooms—represents the nervous system and hence the intelligence of the forest.
How can human beings, with our arrogance so many orders of magnitude greater than our understanding or our reverence, hope to recreate the intricacies of these familial relations between different types of trees, plants, fungi, and fauna?
Those of us who inhabit over-developed nations have grown up with our senses steeped in the artificial, the ready-made, and the pre-packaged. Every experience comes with its cliché, its signature song, or its accompanying product, so why should we exert the effort to re-think, re-imagine, or to engage the world directly without these manufactured mediators? It’s easy to accept planned forests when we’ve already accepted planned communities and planned lives. Perhaps asking whether a designer forest is a real forest is such a dangerous act because, in answering the question, we would be compelled to ask if we ourselves are real too.
Thanks for another thoughtful essay. To me you are once again bringing up the reason we live where we do. You do run into people who would be satisfied to have a fake creek and natural recordings and we are bombarded by prepackaged notions. Many chose to be lead along and channeled in predetermined directions and would not have a problem with a designer forest. Fortunately there are also a great number of people who — especially here in the northwest — want to experience nature in its natural state even though they live in the city and flock to the mountains, lakes and streams when they have a chance. We have chosen to do what it takes to live here full time.
When I moved to Oregon I was stunned by the clear cuts. My uncle owned a “Tree Farm” in Maine that was selectively harvested (a different part each year so he always had some timber income), but was always a “full natural forest”. While I still don’t understand why clear cutting is better (I always equated it to the arrogance and disregard you mention), except for someone’s pocket book, I love living here in the woods near the mountains and shore.
When I was growing up I used to visit the US Botanical Gardens regularly with its artificial stream and planted environment, but a walk in the local woods was just as enjoyable. I don’t know if the people who enjoy a designer forest or canned nature are “real”. I just know that my wife and I and our neighbors live where we do because we enjoy real nature.
I do miss the “stained-glass autumns”, along with fire flies and box turtles from my youth, but we are not moving anywhere else anytime soon.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments, as always, Rod. I appreciate your insights on what’s real and true, in society as well as in nature.
I remember when I first heard about how mega-malls tout themselves as great places to get one’s daily exercise by walking (and, incidentally, lugging bags full of unneeded stuff one has just purchased), especially as you don’t have to deal with the pesky aspects of the outdoors: you’re neither too warm nor too cold (if you fall into the “average”-temperature-preferring majority from their focus group), and of course you don’t get precipitated on. I’m waiting for them to create a centerpiece fountain with Authentic Moss (R).
Much of the Tillamook and Clatsop State Forests are natural forests,they may have been logged or burned but they naturally re-seeded themselves. A tree farm is not a forest it lacks the varied age trees,the under structural diversity,etc.. It we behoove us and future generations to do what we can to prevent forest lands from being turned into tree farms. Although the State Forestry Department does not totally clear-cut or employ slash burns and herbicides as frequently as it has in the past it still “manages” forests with partial clear-cuts, thinning,etc.. Some things just need to be protected and left to do what they do naturally. All animals do not belong in zoos and circuses,the same should go for our forests. We need more wild lands as our population grows,we need to conserve what we have.While other states try to re-create what they so thoughtlessly destroyed,such as the Midwestern prairies, we in Western Oregon have the opportunity to save what we have before it’s too late.
Kilchis, thank you for your thoughtful words in defense of “true blue” (or is that true green?) forests. My husband and I will be testifying tonight in support of proposed legislation to designate certain parts of state forests as high-value conservation areas…I hope this is the first step to a partnership between forest-loving citizens and the state that should be preserving (rather than just managing) them on our behalf.
The forests behind our house are corporate-owned rather than state-run; they used to belong to Weyerhaueser and are now owned by a patchwork of companies, some local and others not. They seem to have a practice halfway between the weird cyber-forest I saw in New York and state management techniques: they replant some areas with seedlings of the same species and leave other areas to re-grow. So far, the re-growing ones don’t appear too successful; there’s more Scotch broom than conifer seedlings. I suspect the pesticides are involved. There’s even one hill that seems to be colonized by algae. I call it Algae Mountain.
Thanks again for the information and insights!
Margaret,
As you well know, there are a number of arguments on the other side of this coin that I won’t bother to enumerate. Suffice to say, I find myself in the middling of the subject; my hope is that you will be successful in your efforts to designate some of the areas as high-value conservation. My hope also, is that the existing tree farms and locations designated for clear-cuts are left to carry out their operations for the benefit of our economy. The other side of me wishes they’d stop expanding it every year.
I may just write about some of my personal “bushland” experiences – I grew up in Western Australia – as a young man that were formative in who I am today at some point. What’s needed is less one-sided, often polarized discussion to squeeze a little more consensus out of our state politics.
Keep fighting, but remember to listen and evaluate the counter arguments for many of them are just as important, just as valid and are unfortunately so very necessary for our economic benefit.
Thanks for sharing your thoughtful perspective, Mike. I’d be fascinated to learn about western Australia and your experiences there; I’ve never been to that part of the world.
As I’ve grown older (and I hope wiser), I’ve discovered how multifaceted are the questions of how we can each arrive at a more respectful, reverent way of interacting with the natural world of which even the most dedicated mall rats of the human species are a part. In our collective journey with nature, we encounter surprising similarities between people from different positions on the political spectrum, which is why I prefer meeting people as people rather than categories.
I had a delightful experience a few years back, when a huge snowstorm kept my husband, me, and some loggers from working. We were snowshoeing on a logging road behind our house and discovered a logger and his children having a blast tobogganing down a steep hill. It was heartening to see how much joy he and his children got from being outside, just as we were. It’s all too easy for druid types like me, the descendants of those Celtic tree priests, to dismiss this gentleman as a boorish person who disrespects trees, but he was a kind person and a solicitous father who worked hard to provide for the children whooping it up down that hill.
More and more over the years, I appreciate these moments that bring us together for a common purpose–and a common joy.