The Ghosts of Forests Past
Shantell Powell
I am haunted by sylvan ghosts. I grew up in forests, and every one of them is being systematically destroyed. Huge swaths of habitat are removed from the earth every day, and every day ecological disasters increase. I remember trees which no longer exist. The towering white pines at my grandparents’ old home were cut down and replaced by a subdivision. The sugar maples of my father’s tap line were removed and replaced by a Christmas tree farm. These Christmas trees are cut down, sold wholesale, and discarded like trash when the holidays are over. The cedars, spruces, and balsam firs of my childhood home were bulldozed. They’re long gone, but I can still feel their bark, still smell their sap, still taste their tacky gum. I still remember my Dad boiling maple sap in the basement, distilling the trees’ gifts into rich, amber syrup. My tongue aches to taste it again, but Dad hasn’t worked the sugar bush since the 1970s. No maples grow where he lives now. He’ll never make maple syrup again.
All my life I heard about the tragedy of the vanishing Amazon jungle–how the lungs of the world are being destroyed. In 2016, I went to the Ecuadorian Amazon and a tour guide warned me to steel myself against the devastation I would see. But when I saw the areas being cleared, the stumps being burned, I thought, that’s not so bad. No worse than I see back home. And then the enormity of the situation hit me. The Amazon isn’t the earth’s lungs. All forests are, whether they’re boreal forests, jungles, cloud forests, mangroves, or underwater kelp forests. And the reason the Ecuadorian destruction didn’t faze me is because I have become acclimated to large-scale ecocide. My dad worked in the forestry industry, and I lived in remote and rural areas all over Canada. I’m used to making way for logging trucks, to walking through clear cuts, scalped mountainsides, and barren hills, and to seeing and smelling countless animals dead on the roads which stab through their homes like burning daggers. I’ve grown accustomed to extinction events. I’ve become desensitised. I’m working to overcome this.
I study trees wherever I go. In 2017 I went to southern Africa, and I saw tawny landscapes dotted with brush and punctuated by majestic baobab trees. I sat down in the savannah to draw them. These massive trees are festooned with vulture nests, and pockmarked with climbing holes carved hundreds of years ago. People scaled and still scale these trees to collect the fruit. Elephants strip the bark and devour it, and the baobabs persevere. They are thousands of years old. I asked my South African guide why they stood all by themselves and learned that once this area had been forested, but all the trees were cut down except the baobabs. Baobab wood is fibrous and spongy–worthless to the lumber industry. So now these ancient trees stand alone, survivors of a sylvan genocide. I wonder if they remember the trees which once surrounded them.
When I walk amongst trees, I sometimes collect their fruit and nuts, their leaves, their thorns, or pieces of their bark. I will gladly admit to being a tree-hugger. Sometimes I even lick trees. I press my tongue to the fuzzy berries of staghorn sumac to check to see if they’re ripe.
Winters grow milder and milder, and a lot of folks have been enjoying the unseasonable weather. I’m in Canada, known to the world for its snowy winters, and in January of 2023, my neighbours’ lawns were green. The ground should have been frozen and blanketed in white, but plants rose like green zombies. Trees began to bud. People asked me how I enjoyed the fine weather, and I told them that I hope it ends soon. I wanted it to drop well below zero. We need the cold here. Then they asked me why, all while looking at me like I’d gone mad.
Here’s why: I’ve been watching how trees handle the changing climate. When these false springs keep hitting, confused fruit trees flower out of season, and then crops fail. People and animals go hungry. With too many mild winters, trees are afflicted by invasive insects, pathogens, and fungal infections. Dutch elm disease, spongy moths, ash borers, spruce budworms, and more combine with rampant deforestation, and we lose even more trees. Conifers fruit heavily after too-mild winters, sending out new children in what could be death throes. They ask us to tend to these children just as they have always attended to us.
When the Europeans first came to what is now called North America, many were dying of scurvy. When you have scurvy, all of your old scars unknit themselves and open up. Your teeth fall out, too. It’s a terrible disease. Indigenous Peoples showed these suffering people how to harvest life-saving medicines from the generous trees. Even in the coldest of winters, the evergreens share their vitamin C with us.
The Royal Navy considered the trees more valuable dead than alive, and forests worldwide were cut down to feed the demand for timber. Even though the navy doesn’t make ships from wood anymore, forests are still considered more valuable dead than alive by industrialists. These green macro-organisms aren’t viewed as sentient beings but as natural resources to be plundered for monetary gain. The oldest trees in the world are still being cut down, but instead of being turned into ships, they’re converted into fuel pellets and toilet paper. With every destroyed forest, the world gets hotter. Storms worsen. Glaciers melt. Oceans rise. Our ecology is in a tailspin, and industry is making a killing. Profits are as high as the temperature.
But roots are rioting, microfilaments spreading like a mob, joining with mycorrhizal fungi to seize the means of production. They summon reinforcements, and the invertebrates creep closer, reinvesting the litter of the dead into the stuff of life. And from these teeming micro-masses the tree grows, her tap root reaching down, down, down into the depths. A living anchor, a life line, an umbilical cord connecting her to the earth and to us. So long as she is tended she will thrive, distributing her gifts of fruit and oxygen. And the bees will find pleasure in her blossoms, the birds will find sanctuary in her branches, and those who are weak from heat will find coolness in her shade.
The riotous roots of the trees knit together the soil so that when the rains come, the earth remains intact. And when the trees cluster together on the mountainsides, they hold hands and slow avalanches. And the mangroves weave together wetlands so that when coastal storms hit like a hammer, the land is not washed into the depths of the sea.
We can learn much from the trees. All trees are trees of life. All trees are trees of knowledge. We must reciprocate their generosity. We must tend and nurture them. We must bolster forests. All the earth can be a paradise if the lives of trees and all who care for them are prized as the treasures they are.
Bio:
Shantell Powell is a swamp hag and elder goth raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. A graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s horror residency, she’s a Brave New Weird winner, an Aurora finalist, and a Journey, Best of the Net, and Pushcart nominee. Her writing is in Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, Nightmare Magazine, and more. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods.