Forests and Trees

The forest isn’t a thing unto itself, but simply, the world. We often construct the wilderness as just that, a single noun referring to a location, yet the opposite is true. The forest emerges, the landscape formed by continuous movement of constant natural processes, processes that never stop to rest or cease, today’s landscape being only the passing appearance created by the movement of all things.

Those who realize this have a nasty habit of pretending this is unique to “the wilderness” - making the same mistake they began with moving past. Rather, there is nothing “external” or “disconnected” from this. Humans emerged from the same oceanic soup as every other living thing, and their civilization came from their hands and behaviors, no different from a termite mound or beehive. The mistake of much naturalist and environmentalist writing is to externalize the very thing which they study from themselves, to construct nature as something they are not as much a part of as everything else that breathes, eats, and moves!