Miscellaneous ramblings, visions, unedited notes, thoughts, utterances while in the Andrews Experimental Forest:

Artists, philosophers, writers, composers; they are the myth makers of modern man—the griots—the storytellers, who may shape society. Scientists are in many ways the hunters, the practical knowledge collectors of facts and figures, percentages and statistics, relationships upon relationships in the other-than-human world. With this knowledge it is the Shaman, the seers—the bards—whom through their work interpret these messages of the super-natural; the realms of being that lurk beyond our perceptions of time, that work beyond our normal senses. The artists are interpreters and mediators between worlds—some are imaginary—they are visions, messages.

What’s the experiment? Observing and interacting with nature in ways that are not just logging it every 80 years. Experimenting, perhaps, with some different, long-term results. I think in two hundred years the human’s that are still around will have learned that time is a wise teacher. I have a book which talks about the idea of ‘green time’, as characterized by Tom Bombadil in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Bombadil certainly cares about the woes and happenings of his weary human and hobbit friends, and somewhat detests the goblin-oark corruptions and distortions of human psyche, but is at the same time ambivalent to the human time scale. His are issues and events much broader in scope, the movements of the earth, geologic, climactic.

Those that get to know the forest, the old growth along with younger forests, watching them grow and change together will have a broader view. Scientists speak in geologic terms and theories, the data shows how many thousands of years and what to call them; Holocene, Anthropocene etc. Many indigenous cultures simply refer to the Distant or Dream Time – what Carl Jung would perhaps interpret as the collective, mythic unconscious. Through myth, through dreams, we tell our stories over distant time. The stories of science enter into the elemental imagination.

In the presence of the natural world did human culture materialize and develop. The visionaries, the medicine men, the Shaman heard it speak to them, in the same way it spoke to Shakespeare or Sibelius, Walt Whitman or Oscar Wilde, John Muir or John Denver. All elements of life, especially those that lie beyond articulation, infuse the human imagination. The communion—accentuated by vision quests, the sanctity of dreams, the telling of stories that illuminate and interpret the miracles and the wonder of nature, as well as rituals that take place within a communal society—all mediate and blur the boundaries between self and the world. During the time of Homer, oral tradition still prevailed in the Medditerrian culture which would come to be known as Western Civilization. His epic poems were speech, spoken word—rhythmic, sonic, entities that mingled with the elements just as its hero’s, Odysseus and the Gods do. Embedded in these epic, chanted poems, were phrases, metaphors which captured the essence of experience and place.They were the cultural data passed down like a genetic code;

Sounds given to the air as seeds, 

grow into songs and dreams.

We are reminded at that moment of the wonder of life and our insignificance in the vastness of the cosmos, reminded that, as Prospero said, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Yet, this insight given, in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by Prospero is from the master, keeper of absolute power over the primitive Caliban and the spirit Ariel, and over the mystical and wild isle upon the wilderness of sea and storm; the natural stage, a wilderness of colliding forces. Chris Hedges writes “Power unleashed in the wilderness can prompt us to good if we honor the sacred but to monstrous evil if we do not.” And of what of the Janus moment of America, where the masters of wilderness battled in frenzied greed and genocide, in what Muir called ‘ravishing commercialism.’ The bison gone, the passenger pigeon gone, the prairie gone, the Eastern Woods gone, the free rivers gone, the predators gone, and along with them a native, indigenous culture which included all. And what of the Western Forests, the old growth, the redwood, the sequoia, the ancient Douglas Firs, Western Red Cedars, the Spruces, and what of the numerous creatures, known and unknown, that live and depend on these ancient forests, and what of the larger, metaphorical forest of rivers, mountains, oceans, air that we ultimately depend on as well, how has what we’ve done affect our future and what we’ll do next?

What we say here we say to the world. 

What we do here we do to ourselves. 

In the year 2015, we live amidst unprecedented change and have unleashed unknown powers. Many of the Shamans are gone, the leaders do not lead but continually spin in a vacuum of power that serves forces of death. The visionaries have been exiled to the margins, indeed into the wilderness of the human soul. In this exile many artists, writers, philosophers, poets, dreamers find rebirth. If we are to hope to have any future in the next 200 years we must take a critical look at the past 200. We must come to grips with the failures, and poverty of being we have wrought on ourselves. Transforming eco-systems into products, constantly consuming life forms in useless ways. The question is not how do we keep the forest and forest-products. The question is what do we really need? Are we cutting down trees to fulfill a real human need, or a material, abstract need? Chopping a tree down to make a totem pole every 8o years, or a cabin every 50 or so, or harvesting a few stands to make limited quantities of material is very different from cutting down forests to be turned into commodities in a global marketplace, governed not by real-world, ecological concerns, but abstracted material concerns. A trees real value can never be assessed by money—it is ironic and sad that one is made from the other—for money is not a system of true value. True in this sense being what is valuable to life-affirming relations. The currency of the earth is much more profound than the Dow Jones and GDP. Forest policy does not answer to the ‘market’—the market answers to the forest. After all, the earth created the goods for our markets, and the earth can take them away. The answers are not in whether the spotted owl should be allowed to exist anymore (which we say it should through something called the ‘Endangered Species Act’) or in ‘sustainable forestry’ but in our willingness to face truth and adjust our thinking to address real human needs and problems. The real problem in Forks, Washington or Blue River, Oregon is not whether everyone has a, quote, “job”, but whether their human needs can be met within the available resources without diminishing those resources for future generations. This includes future generations of spotted owls, as well as humans. It is only over time that we realize that environments shape our own form, and that we would not be fully human without the presence of spotted owls or any other creature we have lived among and evolved amongst and shared the world. It is the cognitive dissonance of environmentalism, science, and industrialized society to think we can have our cake and eat it too. To both save forests and species whilst over-consuming, over-populating, and converting everything into economic commodities completely divorced from the needs of life. It has been the bane of American Conservationism to spiritualize and place intrinsic value in nature, while refusing to admit the failure of our extractivist, infinite-growth-economic model to account for human needs, human happiness, human well being. Jobs first, environment later. As if, we actually breathed, ate and pooped money and “economic growth’ actually solved problems (Where the history of the last 200 years shows us that this system is a catastrophic failure in every relevant way). How will we ever house everyone and provide enough toilet paper if we don’t harvest trees? Well, perhaps, we can live in smaller houses, and use less toilet paper (or find an alternative), and find more rewarding, less destructive ways of amusing ourselves then plowing over the earth in snow-mobiles and ATV’s, powered by the gas-breath of even more ancient organisms. Perhaps, we can grow and harvest other things like hemp or mushrooms that can co-exist with the forest community. Perhaps, by just being in the forest we are happier, healthier, wiser, more creative, more empathetic, more grounded, more harmonious people. This was the idea behind parks anyway. Well, what if we made our communities in a way where we didn’t really have parks anymore; where nature and human culture inhabit  the same space, there is no ‘other’ to fetish or fight over, to protect or exploit, to abstract or extract, but just is. This is world where the meaning of culture and of consciousness is expanded to include everything, not just what we deem to be pretty or useful; it’s the most profound iteration of self-respect.

People of forest communities and economies must resist the de-sacralizing urge to convert their environments into other peoples waste and those scientists, environmentalists, and policy makers must dare to assert visions for society. The ecological crisis is also a cultural crisis. A tree is not a thing that can be measured in board feet or dollars but a member of a family, an ancient family, a system, a culture that provides for many. We only know the tree by knowing the forest and we only know the forest by first not cutting it down. To many cultures the owl is a totem of revelation and wisdom, of death and rebirth The owl sees things others can’t and decides the fates of other creatures, whose power helps shape the forest. It’s role in saving the old growth forest is apt and, perhaps, un-coincidental in our reevaluation of our relationship with the world we share. Theodore Roosevelt said that when he heard of spieces gone extinct it was like “some great work of art had been lost” —when we lose a species we lose the ability to learn and grow with that being, to learn and become more of ourselves. Just as art and myth, music and poetry, speak to us across time and help us to know more of who we are, so to does the natural world. Without communion with the spotted owl, even if that communion is a fleeting glimpse, a periphery flash upon the eyes, or an invisible relationship, connected through myriad other processes, we will not know what it means to be fully human: to live in the elemental dreams and myths of nature.

We have, as a global civilization, taken on a epic task of re-shaping the world and we have succeeded in altering the course of the earths story, we dare to meddle in the shapes of elemental dream, to remake landscapes, manipulate genes, change weather, and influence which species will live and which will cease, to decide biologic legacy; we have scaled the surface of Green Time. It is when Middle Earth faces existential ruin that even the ambivalent keepers of the forest, the Ents, after much deliberation decide to fight. In the film Princess Mononoke, the Deer God, the giver and taker of life, is also seemingly ambivalent to the greed of humans and the plight of the forest culture which must fend for itself the best it can in the face of extinction. And the Old Growth forests of the Northwest do not rise up in the fury of hurricanes to warn us of our impending doom, nor do they uproot and destroy the towers of Mordor in our cities and Financial districts. They sit, deceptively silent and still; by the time their voices reach us it may be too late for us. They speak slowly, and care little for the human scale. They appreciate us and our capacity to vibrantly live among them, if we so desire. But tree consciousness is a very different dimension than ours, or rather they experience a different dimension of our shared reality. At the same time a dimension that can be sought and felt perhaps through science and art, and time. And in these contemporary myths, in the end, the forest was saved, though not without sacrifice.  We think we can choose whether we want to share the world with others. We don’t have a choice. We are born into a world of reciprocity—the eros of physical forces pull us to the earth—the forests breath is our breath and it breathes with us, in us. As Derrick Jensen reminds us, “there are forces who do not wish us well.” Unfortunately, those forces appear to be running the show. They are the forces behind the commodification of the sacred, the forces that warp the human being into monstrous, unrecognizable forms, that trap the human into slavery of all forms; to money, to screens, to the material, to the profane. Some say we have even assumed control of the weather and the fate of the earth.

How can we ever assume to know a world, a human being, yet being made?

It is true, the Old Growth forest is a changing, shifting, amorphous thing. Over eons of floods, fires, storms, earthquakes, asteroids, as Craig Childs calls it; our ‘apocalyptic planet’ constantly being reborn. Trees in an Old Growth forest in some ways never die, for trees spend half their existence as slowly rotting logs. More trees grow from nurse logs, and giant moss covered, earthen virescent masses, neither moss nor earth nor tree, criss crossing the forest floor below towering, leaning giants. Here the ancestors are not in the sky but among the living. These are natures epic poems, they are what scientists call ‘biologic legacies’- they are the culture from which we were born and once our exhausted civilization finally collapses, like the tree we too will sink back into the earth—or whatever is left of it. It is obvious that we desperately need to recover this culture before we annilhate ourselves. It is difficult to imagine and is something that must be intuitively known, felt, experienced, that we are one with all other life; that in the forest nothing truly is separate. Nutrients are stored in trees for a while and then slowly dispersed to other organisms, other trees. In the the Old Growth forest we find a metaphor for our own relationships, art itself is a receptacle of experiences and relations passed down over generations. The indigenous peoples of the Northwest sacrificed a tree, and carved into that tree animals stacked on top of one another; a clear metaphor for the ecological relationships inherent in the culture of the forest. Art and nature combine to tell a communal story. The tree gladly changes form to totem pole, such a tree is an honorable ambassador between human culture and the natural world. In the forest it matters a great deal how things are recycled, shared, how things change form. Everything is in a cycle of regeneration—for those of us that live in or near forests, we are a dynamic part of this cycle, breathing the air and drinking the water, and communing and sharing an elemental imagination with other beings, even with other generations across the abyss of time. When we live with trees, how we use their energy matters. 

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Only altered in form. 

When we cut a tree down, we better have a damn good reason. It better house, or feed, or sustain something meaningful, not fill a quota on a commodities chart, or sit in a Home Depot waiting for someone to remodel their kitchen or shipped around the world, or get mulched into little cups and plates that are meant to be used once and thrown away. It better contribute to our culture the same way it contributes to forest culture. Trees are not things, but beings. Trees and forests are not crops but communities. And the Forest Service has an impossible task now of “managing” an eco-system, as if such a thing were actually humanly possible, and shirks away from the real truth that humans must manage themselves in relation to the forest. Should we keep using forests in the future? Can we, ethically cut down a tree? I believe so, as long as we respect the life we take by truly living in return.