Caledonia Wild! Winter 1999
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Trees for Life magazine, Caledonia Wild! Winter 1999-2000 |
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Vision
At the beginning of October, we held a rather unusual event at Plodda Lodge, our field base near Glen Affric, when we buried a time capsule which is to be opened in the year 2100. In the capsule were greeting cards with messages, written by local schoolchildren, Trees for Life staff and greeting card company executives, which reflected a shared care for the planet's forests.
In the midst of the environmental devastation of our times, it was sobering for me to imagine what the world will be like when the time capsule is opened, and writing my message was both a literal and symbolic statement of hope for the future. I, of course, will never know if our vision for the return of the Caledonian Forest on a large scale -the practical expression of that hope - will be fully achieved, as it is work which extends far beyond my own lifetime. A hundred years from now, it will be the people who open the time capsule who will know whether we, and all those of us on the planet working to reverse the current tide of global ecological destruction, have been successful in our efforts.
With the imminent arrival of the new millennium, and all the expectations, worries and fears associated with it, I've become increasingly aware of the lack of a positive vision which exists in much of our society. Although the Earth's ecosystems are deteriorating daily, through exploitation, pollution and a myriad other human impacts, the leaders of government, industry and other major institutions in every country are still pursuing the chimera of unlimited economic growth. This myopia is leading us all towards disaster, as the concerns about the planet's capacity to support life are either ignored or marginalised.
I believe that we need to fully embrace the global challenges confronting us, and address them through practical action based on a vision of hope for the future. I've been inspired to formulate one such vision, for the 21st century to become the Century of Restoring the Earth (detailed in this magazine's special feature), as I believe that the most urgent task facing us is the healing of our planet. If such a vision can be implemented, then the people who open our time capsule will live in a healthy, abundant and restored world, where wild forests, natural ecosystems and all our fellow species flourish once again. Will you join us in helping to make that a reality?
Alan Watson Featherstone
Imagination itself
I collapse into a comfortable cushion of heather, exhausted. We've been removing fences all morning, cutting away wire, pulling up posts, and carrying it all in heavy bundles uphill to the road. Forest restoration is hard work. I feel it in my back, my arms, my shoulders. I close my eyes and let myself sink into the thick mat of heather until I all but disappear. While the others shuffle off to a well-earned cup of tea, I listen to the patter of rain through leaves and the bittersweet wail of a black-throated diver calling from out on the loch. The spicy scent of bog myrtle and damp earth drifts over me. I open my eyes and gaze straight into the spreading canopy of a 300 year old Scots pine. Its trunk is large and gray, as solid as a Doric column, yet its branches are bright orange, twisting like flame. Along the banks of the loch, other Scots pines spread horizontally, more like African acacias than pines, their needles gathered along outstretched limbs in chlorophyll-tinged clouds. Beautiful.
My weariness fades. I recall something Paul Kendall, one of our focalisers, said four days ago, during our group's introductory walk through a stunning grove of Glen Affric's ancient woodland. He pointed to a particularly handsome Scots pine and said that when pines are given space, unlike the trees crowded in tight timber plantations, "they can be imaginative in their growth." The thought stopped me in my tracks. Trees imaginative! As much as I love woods, even to the point of coming to the Highlands from California to plant them, I'd never thought of trees imagining their way into the sky.
A week from now I will feel different. I will walk into a glen north of here in the company of a private forester hired to plant Scots pine for an absentee landowner. On the desolate, treeless hills where he has begun his work, the forester will say nothing of imagination. He will talk strictly of soil types, planting regimes, projected costs, of nitrogen deficiencies and rainfall totals. He will show me pie charts and four-coloured graphs. And I will slowly come to realise that his plan is missing something inexplicable, something vital.
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Adam Powell, our other focaliser and a keen naturalist, nearly stumbles over me on his way to tea. I sit up and he asks if I've seen the divers courting on the loch. He hands me his binoculars for a closer look. All week Adam has been quietly pointing out the intricate detail of life in a Caledonian Forest. He has shown us gleaming clumps of emerald moss, taught us the difference between a silver and a downy birch, explained the eerie nocturnal drumming of the snipe. His love for this place is palpable, shines in his eyes, and cannot be reduced to charts and graphs. His eyes reflect not only knowledge, but a deep, abiding sense of wonder. In the gentle presence of Paul and Adam, I've begun to question my own omore pragmatic devotion to nature, my reluctance to admit imagination and wonder (at least in public). I believe a fine line is crossed when we assign human traits to trees, when we immerse ourselves in sentimentality rather than science. Often that line divides the thoughtful from the merely misinformed. And it can provide those looking for a way to discount the credibility of the whole environmental movement with easy targets. Yet in this Scottish forest I've begun to see that to include only the quantifiable,the chartable and graphable in my view of nature, is to miss the soul of the matter, or more accurately, the soul in matter.
That inability to see imagination and wonder in trees has made it far too easy to cut them down - whether the Scottish Highlands or, where I grew up, the pine forests of Idaho. Is there a single landscape in the world enriched by that view of nature, by that blind pragmatism, a single place more complex, more diverse, more anything than it was before?
Our tea break is over. I push myself to my feet, grateful to get back to work, grateful for another chance to make amends. A few weeks from now and missing this forest, I will walk into a used bookstore on a rainy Inverness afternoon, absent-mindedly thumb through the worn pages of an old book, and find this quotation by William Blake: "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity ...; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination Nature is Imagination itself." Yes.
Guy Hand is a freelance environmental writer and photographer, and wrote this piece after taking part in a Conservation Holiday last spring.
Guy Hand
See Caledonia Wild! magazines, for excerpts from other editions.
Published: Winter 1999-2000
Last updated: 25 August 2010