by Robert Pogue Harrison
288 pages, paperback, University of Chicago Press, 1993, $25.00
Forests is a wide-ranging exploration of the role of forests in Western thought. Harrison describes how the governing institutions of the West--from religion to law, family to city--established themselves in opposition to the forest. Consistently insightful and beautifully written, this work is especially compelling at a time when the forest, as a source of wonder, respect, and meaning, disappears daily from the earth.
Praise for Forests
"Forests is among the most remarkable essays on the human place in nature I have ever read. Elegantly conceived, powerfully argued and beautifully written, it is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature, or about the future of our earthly home, should fail to read it."--William Cronon, Yale Review
"Forests is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."--John Haines, The New York Times Book Review
"This book is as deep with history as an ancient grove of trees, and as majestic, and open, and delightful."--Bill McKibben
"Elegant and thought-provoking."--Simon Schama
Quotes from Forests
"Medieval chivalric romances tend to represent forests as lying beyond the confines of the civic world and its institutions of law. But early on in the Middle Ages many forests had already come under the jurisdiction of law. The word 'forest' in fact originates as a juridical term. Along with its various cognates in European languages (foresta, foret, forst, etc.), it derives from the Latin foresta. The Latin work does not come into existence until the Merovingian period. In Roman documents, as well as in the earlier acts of the Middle Ages, the standard word for woods and woodlands was nemus. the word foresta appears for the first time in the laws of the Longobards and the capitularies of Charlemagne, referring not to woodlands in general but only to the royal game preserves. The word has an uncertain provenance. The most likely origin is the Latin foris, meaning 'outside.' The obscure Latin verb forestare meant 'to keep out, to place off limits, to exclude.' In effect, during the Merovingian period in which the word foresta entered the lexicon, kings had taken it upon themselves to place public bans on vast tracts of woodlands in order to insure the survival of their wildlife, which in turn would insure the survival of a fundamental royal ritual--the hunt.
"A 'forest,' then, was originally a juridical term referring to land that had been placed off limits by a royal decree. Once a region had been 'afforested,' or declared a forest, it could not be cultivated, exploited, or encroached upon. It lay outside the public domain, reserved for the king's pleasure and recreation. In England it also lay outside the common juridical sphere. Offenders were not punishable by the common law but rather by a set of very specific 'forest laws.' The royal forests lay 'outside' in another sense as well, for the space enclosed by the walls of a royal garden was sometimes called silva, or wood. Forestis silva meant the unenclosed woods 'outside' the walls."
"In a remarkable passage of The New Science, Vico explains:
Every clearing was called a lucus, in the sense of an eye, as even today we call eyes the openings through which light enters houses. The true heroic phrase that 'every giant had his lucus' was altered and corrupted when its meaning was lost, and had already been falsified when it reached Homer, for it was then taken to mean that every giant had one eye in the middle of his forehead. With these giants came Vulcan to work in the first forges--that is, the forests to which Vulcan had set fire and where he had fashioned the first arms, which were the spears with burnt tips--and, by an extension of the idea of arms, to forge bolts for Jove. For Vulcan had set fire to the forests in order to observe in the open sky the direction from which Jove sent his bolts."
"As an obstacle to visibility, the forests also remained an obstacle to human knowledge and science. By burning out a clearing in the forest, Vulcan prepared the way for the future science of enlightened times:
Thus in their science of augury the Romans used the verb contemplari for observing the parts of the sky whence the auguries came or the auspices were taken. These regions, marked out by the augurs with their wands, were called temples of the sky (templa caeli), whence must have come to the Greeks their first theoremata and mathemata, things divine or sublime to contemplate, which eventuated in metaphysical and mathematical abstractions.
"The lucus, then, was the original site of our theologies and cosmologies, our physics and metaphysics, in short, our 'contemplation.' The temples of the sky were the first tables of science. Science meanwhile has advanced a great deal since the time of its divinatory origins, but has it in any way altered its nature? For all its strides and breakthroughs in abstractions, science has never yet lost its initial vocation, nor has Vulcan ceased laboring to keep the eye of knowledge open. One way or another science preserves its allegiance to the sky. Space travel remains its ultimate ambition. It predicts the eclipse, contemplates the stars, observes the comet, telescopes the cosmic abyss. One way or another it continues to scrutinize the auspices, attending upon the celestial sign; and one way or another the vocation as well as criteria of science remain that of prediction."
"Forests cannot be owned, they can only be wasted by the right to ownership. Forests belong to place--to the placehood of place--and place, in turn, belongs to no one in particular. It is free. Of course nothing can guarantee that a place's freedom, like its forests, will not be violated or disregarded, even devastated. On the contrary, this natural freedom of placehood is the most vulnerable element of all in the domestic relation we have been calling logos.