Introduction: The Surrounding Forest

Summary

ANIMALS AND PLANTS breathe in symbiosis. Intricate parts of a whole, woven into the extremities of the earth's living mantle, humans inhale as the forest exhales: plants, as Emanuele Coccia describes them, are the ‘breath of all living beings, the world as breath’, in which all earth's beings are immersed.1 Waving, not drowning – the forest and its trees dance counterpoint with human communities to the earth's hum. Exquisitely entangled, together, we stand the best chance of combatting the current global crises: climate change, loss of biodiversity, and emerging new diseases, according to a recent United Nations report. On the face of it, tragic panoramas of burning bush and wildfires in Australia (2019–2020), Russia (2021), and Europe (2022), still fresh in mind, sap resolve from even the most stalwart optimists of these posthumanist times. Trees cover only 31 per cent of the earth's surface and, despite declining rates of deforestation, that area is shrinking. Still, as humanity hurtles towards an alarming future, the forest and its trees – notably reduced in numbers – are perhaps our best allies. The promise of this alliance was recognised at the World Climate Summit in 2022, where world leaders pledged to eliminate forest loss and to support restoration and sustainable forestry. Their commitment to three ‘forest pathways’ promotes greater human engagement with forests, thus stimulating a return to historical levels of plant-human collaboration that bring to mind those experienced at the time of the European Middle Ages.

Human dependence on the surrounding forest was doubtless more evident to many populations in the past, when many more people lived in closer contact with it, drawing on it as a source of light and heat, for food, and for the raw materials necessary for building and crafting. We are, of course, equally dependent in the present. Indeed, ‘if plants disappeared from the earth tomorrow, human life would continue for no more than a few weeks […]. On the other hand, if we were the ones that disappeared, in a few years plants would repossess all the land previously taken over from the natural realm, and in a little less than a century every sign of our enduring civilisation would be covered in green’002E