Cultural influence on forest perception

By KATE LINDROOS CONLIN

Since opinions concerning the management of natural resources may be informed by a prevailing cultural concept of “nature,” a serious inquiry into the formation of, and belief system behind, this concept is necessary. The modern idea that the “natural” world is either safely or perilously tucked away elsewhere and therefore is something that can, with pious effort, be kept preserved, intact, and wholly unaffected by human influence is a misleading at best, and damaging at worst, approach to understanding the world and our place in it.

Colonists in Massachusetts viewed the woods as something meant to be domesticated and thereby “improved.” This sentiment persists today in the false dichotomy of the forest as either an exploited resource or a wild land safe from the poison of human influence.

Of course, we in the modern age know that domestication of the land w a s n’t “improving” it, but to swing the pendulum the other way and now insist that to leave something untouched is always to “improve” not only denies the reaches of human influence both historic and present-day but also exists within the false dichotomy of the natural vs. unnatural that we should actively reject. Ironically, in our quest to reclaim a world we imagine to have lost or to be in danger of losing, we in our flawed imagining drive that nail head down a little further.

An accounting of our collective and individual usage of natural resources, followed by an accounting of where those resources originate and how they travel, affecting people and natural systems along the way, must occur. On a cold winter night, it is a special kind of connection to know that the wood warming my home was from a tree we felled and that trees now grow in its place. It is an accountability that, admittedly, in many aspects of my life, dictated by capitalism and the division of labor, is missing.

In considering our woods, there are many lines drawn that do us all a great disservice as their drawing positions us as either “for” or “against” and simplifies and flattens resulting arguments that often adhere to pre-formed narratives. There are those who valiantly “protect” and there are those who ruthlessly “demolish.” Notably, those deemed destructive are often those who labor in the woods and were drawn to do so out of reverence and love.

Here in Western Massachusetts exists a great forest, a regrowth of what was once heavily cut and what was left to return in patterns dictated by that cutting. Our forest has our fingerprints all over and like fingerprints it takes a skilled practitioner to piece together a timeline of events on any one piece of ground and to then recommend management options suited to that specific site and meant to benefit a range of intentions, not all of them financial or human-centric.

Let’s consciously break away from simplistic views of what the woods are or should be and instead re-position ourselves as participants even in places where we claim to tread lightly. To glamorize an idea of nature is to falsely remove it from this equation of accounting.

Let’s also move away from the idea that, if only we tried hard enough, we could absolve ourselves from the ongoing and historic sin of being human in what can oftentimes and rightfully be considered an overpopulated, corrupt, and mismanaged world, thereby falsely claiming a sense of purity and exemption. Capitalism would like to convince us that we can purchase our redemption in the form of recycled toilet paper wrapped in plastic and the like. We must challenge this.

Let’s question our willingness to imagine a space that might absolve us when, in fact, “nature” is as much in your living room or in the glow of your computer as it is in the woods you might visit, in that all of our movements however small rely on and impact the life and energy of this world, where this tantalizing but ultimately unreal idea of absolution might itself obscure both our specific evils and any possible salvation.

I continue to be shocked by the loud, insular, single-issue, and predictable anti-management rhetoric in our area and puzzled by what it proclaims at its core, which is that some local and necessary resources (i.e. local agriculture) are valued while others are vilified. It is a shaky hierarchy based on murky and romantic notions of a constructed morality and worldview that serves most of all to console those who have ironically and unwittingly already lost what they most fear losing.

Kate Lindroos Conlin is a resident of Buckland.