Another Forest Went Down This Week

I'm wading through grief.

I need a pair of blinders, of the kind that carriage horses wear. Every time I got in the car to go somewhere, I would fit the blinders to my head. That way, I could see the yellow lines and traffic signs, but I wouldn’t see the hellscape that is growing around me.

On Sunday I drove across the river to visit my mother for a few hours. A week had passed since I’d been there. In a week another glorious forest had gone down.

The week before, we lost forests. The week before that, others. The week before that, more.

As a tree goes, so everything in the forest goes: habitat, forage, perch, nest-twig, pollen, nectar, sap, shade, burrow.

Goodbye, tree. Goodbye, woodpecker hole in the tree. Goodbye, woodpecker chicks in the cavity. Goodbye, pine snake in the limbs. Goodbye, insects under the bark.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

I have lived in timber country for most of my adult life. I have borne witness to the wholesale clearcutting of forest after forest after forest. If you call a forest a tract of woodland delineated by property lines, I have witnessed the demolition of thousands of forests. Used to, I’d use the term “cutting cycle,” because I read it somewhere, as in: We’re in the middle of another cutting cycle.

The idea of a cutting cycle is a fallacy. A cycle is an increase, followed by decrease, followed by increase; and with trees, you’d want the increase to be long and glorious and vast, and you’d want the decrease to be small and painless and almost unnoticeable.

With southern tree-cutting, there is no cycle.

It’s war. It’s famine. It’s earthquake. It’s pandemic. It’s invasion. It’s cancer. It’s a holocaust.

We’re in a holocaust of the living world. I have witnessed a lifelong holocaust of the natural world.

And the cutting I am seeing RIGHT NOW is the worst of all.

Can it be that we humans see the writing on the wall? We see that it’s 85 degrees in February in southern Georgia. We feel a scary sucking dryness in the air. Then it rains—a deluge—and five inches of rainfall washes out the road.

Are we seeing that tree cutting will have to be regulated? And we want to cut down what we have before the regulations begin?

Are we in a frenzy to get the world mowed down to nothing because we see that we are going to be regulated—we cannot regulate ourselves?

We see that the world is quickly becoming uninhabitable, especially for the great numbers of us that live on it. Are we in a frenzy of denial? So we cut down everything now, before we can’t?

*

This is February, the middle of winter. In South Georgia, February is the coldest month of the year. February will take you down.

But our daffodils are blooming and we are out in shirt-sleeves.

*

The other day I saw the word “GRIEF” written somewhere and a gnawing pain began in my stomach. Just the word triggered me. Usually when I think of grief the metaphor that comes to me is of crawling on my knees. Grief brings me to my knees.

Yesterday, however, the abiding metaphor was one of wading. Right now grief has come in the form of floodwaters, and I am wading up to the waist in dark, swirling, dangerous waters.

Grief swirls around me, cold and dark, threatening to pull me in.

*

I see the beauty. Right now the blooms of Carolina jessamine are tumbling through the southern forests. When I walk, the ground is spangled with their golden trumpets. The air is awash with their perfume. Purple violets are starting to bloom. Along our driveway a long line of daffodils is blooming. Bluebirds are investigating nests.

I see all that.

I see the Japanese magnolia tree we just planted.

And it is nothing next to the waist-deep grief about the natural world through which I am wading.

Photo by the late James Holland.

I’m tired of the climate chaos being blamed on one generation or another. I’m tired of it being blamed on other countries. I’m tired of it being blamed on gas stoves.

I’m sick of consumerism. I’m sick of large white SUVs. I’m sick of new construction. I’m sick of warehouses. I’m sick of plastic. I’m sick of chemical spills.

I could go on.

I am sick to my core of another forest going down.

*

I am sick of clearcutting. The forester Leon Neel proved that selective tree forestry can work. Yet, forest owners aren’t going to protect what they own. They are going to transfer those trees into dollars as soon and as often as they can, because we are all in the death-grip of capitalism.

That is being proven to me every single day.

Therefore, in the face of this degree of destruction, the only thing left to us is governmental regulation.

So what are we waiting for?

*

On Valentine’s Day UVA Press released an anthology called Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World, edited by Paul Bogard. “Solastalgia” is a Latinate word for eco-grief. I have an essay in the book. My essay is called “Step-by-Step Instructions” and it says about what you would expect it to say. Feel the pain, shift your thinking, do something, heal. I’m looking forward to reading what other people have to say about eco-grief.

What You Can Do

The list is from the book.

Set yourself up in a life as sustainable as possible. Build a belief in your own resilience. Boost your preparedness. Prepare to do without. Prepare to travel less. Sell your car. Prepare that big ag is not going to feed you. Start growing food. Learn to cook. Go as long as you can without shopping.  Build to withstand extremes. Don't build a new house. Restore an old property. Install unit-based solar with no grid hookup. Dig a well. Decarbonize your economy. Use recycled wood. Learn to carve. Recycle paper. Actively create a support network. Have people over. Cook for them. Go on a walk with them. Host a tree walk. Go plant trees. Celebrate a birth or a birthday with a new tree. Give a tree as a wedding gift. For Christmas, not only buy trees for friends and family but plant them. Stop mowing so much. Cancel a flight. Stay home. Connect to your place. Lobby for federal logging restrictions. Fundraise to buy a vacant lot for an orchard. Buy a clearcut outside town and replant it. Buy a forest and save it. Protest a tree being cut. Put up a tree swing. Share the stories.

Lecture: Following Golden Strands

On Sunday, March 26, 2023 at 7 pm I’ll be giving a lecture via Zoom on Following Golden Strands. In a 75-minute live lecture I will talk about our relationship with spirit in many of its forms, from gut feelings to dreams to divination. I’ll examine deep sources of power, ways to tap that power, and ways to transfer it to our art, especially to our writing.

At work in every piece of good art is something beyond craft and mechanics. It can't be codified. It can't be seen. It can't be proven. But it's there, moving about. The thing is spirit. Invisibles. Magic. Mystery. Myth. The Imaginal Realm. The Dream-world. Intuition. The Unconscious. Even if you’re not a writer, I think you’ll find the lecture interesting.

We see spirit at work and we want to know where it comes from and how we employ it.  How do we engage the unconscious and get to the magic? Do psychedelics work? Can the ancestors assist us? Does wildness help? Does a land-centric life get us closer to it? We sign up for craft classes & enroll in workshops & read how-to books, yet almost never do any of these address this most vital part of art and craft.

This lecture is also about finding meaning in words, reanimating language, and turning to invisibles in order to help us rewild our stories and ourselves.

The lecture costs $10. Registration happens at my website. Once you sign up, you will be sent a Zoom link.

Thank you for walking with me through the grief. Thank you for witnessing the holocaust around us. Thank you for caring so deeply.

I wish all of us peace.