A Small Win for Forests

And the work goes on.

Nov 08, 2024

Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but it seems that a leader who tried to deny a fair and free election of the people has no business running for president, just as a billionaire shouldn’t be able to bribe voters with million dollar lottery-giveaways. But leader and billionaire did, and they won. And now we must proceed as though everything is normal, though it isn’t.

At the same time, it seems that the most powerful nation on Earth shouldn’t supply an unending flow of bombs to be shot at hospitals and refugee camps in an incomprehensively brutal campaign against a largely defenseless population. But it has been doing just that, now for over a year, long before this election. Further, the accelerating destruction of what’s left of the biosphere would seem to have a place in political dialogue, but it hasn’t for many, many years.

So a lot is wrong at the moment. The old certainties lean like relics amidst increasing strangeness. In such a milieu, Trump’s election seems more symptomatic than revolutionary. Put capitalism together with technological overreach and detach the culture from nature and look what you get.

Yet here in my state of Washington, a small good thing happened. Dave Upthegrove, who’s pledged to protect the state's Legacy Forests, won the race for Commissioner of Public Lands, meaning these scraps of still-natural forests will go on maintaining their linkage with what natural integrity remains. There are many ways to think of these forests, as refugia for beleaguered wildlife, as islands of cooling and hydration, as repositories of carbon. But it’s their rooting in what was, their connection to a fundamental “normal,” that seems so crucial at the moment. They are like strongholds of continuity in an an increasingly unrecognizable world.

I believe in the land, not just as a means of sustenance, but as a medium of instruction, as source and substance of what is sound. We seek truth because nature embodies it. We are capable of love because Earth put it in us. In all serious rituals of life, from weddings to funerals, we turn to nature. What is the antidote to a world going mad? It is the sanity of the land, and it’s time we turn toward it.

That doesn’t mean turning away from each other, particularly the people of Palestine. Or the immigrant communities fleeing destroyed landscapes and the breakdown of small farmer economies wrought by trade agreements like NAFTA. I admit, it’s a lot to take on, but we have to try. Even though, as Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume points out, Project 2025 is on it’s way and the work will get harder.

We’re going to need something firm, sustaining and beautiful to stand on.

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