In front of the steamrollers of industrial civilization and progress, one of the last sensible worlds populated by terrifying imagery and enchanted fantasies is disappearing before our eyes: that of the forests. Those that were a fiefdom of the lords who lined the hanged there, or a shelter to escape persecution. Those that represented the darkness where one could abandon one’s hungry offspring or the dense shelter from which to set out on the assault of the existent. Those that harbored mysteries populated by dryads and werewolves or that saw the warship builders and other master forgers come through to strip them en masse. Those that saw in Sherwood daring bandits plundering the rich, in Ariège Demoiselles (*) with soot-covered faces burning and plundering castles, in Courlande of revolutionaries continuing to strike fierce blows against tsarist tyranny, but also witnessing in the Alps or Poland the death by frostbite of migrants driven out by European border guards.
Fundamentally, forests are also ambiguous because of their very etymology, since forest stood for first and foremost the outdoor space not used by villagers-the word savage itself comes from silvaticus, meaning sylvan-before designating vast wooded areas reserved for the nobility and monasteries protected from peasant uses. By a singular inversion of meaning, the word forest, the perilous unknown that Roman civilization could not subjugate, ended up qualifying in a few centuries the territory par excellence of religious and feudal rule, before finally becoming a generic and rather vague term.
For, if by forests we refer to immense natural expanses of trees left more or less to themselves that form an autonomous ecosystem at once rich and complex, almost a distant echo from the tales of our childhood, how then to define those sad alignments of conifers, all of the same age and size, on needle-strewn ground where birdsong is muted? And in loitering in the shadow of majestic poplars, how to imagine that these trees had the misfortune in 2006 of being the first whose genome was entirely sequenced, to use their development in the world of poplar groves for cellulose or biofuels, in the form of immense clone plantations? And since it is necessary at all costs to reinvigorate the economy by feeding the market for carbon offsets (i.e., permits to pollute elsewhere), can we still call the recent industrial planting of 40,000 hectares of fast-growing acacias imported from Australia by Total a forest … destroying the Gabonese savannah to plant a state-of-the-art lumber factory on top of it ? Finally, if we get a little closer, for example to the radiant forest land of the Commissariat for Atomic Energy (CEA) located in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, how can we not fall on the nugget of state exploitation of public forests ? Since it is right next to the Cadarache Nuclear Center that the ONF’s National Genetic Resources Pole and Experimental Nursery is located, where the state agency clones the DNA of the trees it considers most interesting in terms of climate warming resistance, in order to then replant their copies just about everywhere. And in parallel with this, it is ONF’s own sorcerer’s apprentices who are introducing into old fir, oak and beech forests (particularly in the Grand-East and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté) new exotic species in so-called “islands of the future,” ranging from Manchurian ash to Arizona cypress, under the pretext that those forests cannot adapt to climate change on their own. The air burns, the water is lacking, and what’s more, the bark beetle proliferates in the immense single-species spruce forests planted in the plains by ONF for 50 years? Simple, let’s hastily modify the forests in the same mad rush toward artificialization of all living things (including humans) instead of tearing down the techno-industrial system responsible for all this devastation! Flexibility and resilience, are they not the mantras of the neolanguage of power?
Of course, it is not as of today that “nature” has been elevated to a separate subject by the civilized so proud of their culture of domination, a barbaric “nature” to be analyzed, classified, measured, exploited, rationalized and ordered, until it has become – in the image of the forest – increasingly mythical as its domestication and uprooting from its ancient daily relations with it progresses. All the way to the creation of reserves, parks and other recreational and equipped “natural spaces” in order to preserve its nostalgic memory among citizens in need of greenery. So, yes, there are fewer and fewer recalcitrant and lush forests and more tree fields, whose ultimate goal remains their frenzied industrial exploitation (when they are not simply bulldozed for highway projects or the relentless extension of coal mines, as in Germany). The 2014 UN World Climate Summit, where many countries pledged to reforest no less than 350 million hectares by 2030, has mostly translated in practice into mass plantations of trees that can be cut down regularly for lumber or paper, and obviously not to provide more space for freely evolving forests. As for the famous France relaunches plan of fall 2020 that followed the great confinement, of which 200 million euros were intended to “help forests adapt to climate change” by planting “50 million trees in two years,” it is nothing more than a government subsidy to timber industrialists to finance their gigantic felling of forest species deemed unproductive in order to replace them with good old douglas monocultures.
In the hellish cycle of ecological catastrophes that have now moved to the stage where they retro-fuel each other almost irreversibly, something that no techno-wand will be able to stop, forests have become today in spite of everything the symbol of the onward race toward the abyss. Reduced to “reserves of biodiversity” to be saved for some, “warehouses of trapped carbon” to be grown or fruited for others, and “resources of cubic meters of wood” to be extracted for the last, forests embody the loss of any relationship with an environment of which we should inherently be a part. Could it be why when a Mapuche fiercely and steadily destroys the machinery and trucks of forest exploiters on Chilean state-dominated territory, that speaks to us? Is that why the devastation of industrial conifer (cedar and douglas) plantations in Corrèze amuses us? Is it also why the fires that have been striking the harvesters and bearers of forestry cooperatives and ONF in recent times, from Nièvre to Ile-de-France, cheer us? For to wrest from the world of industrial devastation a radically different relationship between individuals and their environment is surely to vibrate ideas and actions together, but also to give space to the untamed forests of our imagination…
[Avis de tempêtes, no. 53; 5/15/22]
(*) The Demoiselles were peasants dressed in women’s clothing, long white shirts, their faces covered with soot and masks or animal skins, and who carried out guerrilla actions against the new forest code of 1827