Forests Are The Lungs Of The Earth Quotes

Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by 2030, only ten percent of the Earth’s tropical forests will remain.

In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother’s hand, who is holding her mother’s hand. . . . ” Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor looks like that of a chimpanzee. I loved picturing one of Octavia’s arms stretching out to meet one of her mother’s arms, and one of her mother’s mother’s arms, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s. . . . Suckered, elastic arms, reaching back through time: an octopus chorus line stretching not just hundreds, but many thousands of miles long. Back past the Cenozoic, the time when our ancestors descended from the trees; back past the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs ruled the land; back past the Permian and the rise of the ancestors of the mammals; back, past the Carboniferous’s coal-forming swamp forests; back past the Devonian, when amphibians emerged from the water; back past the Silurian, when plants first took root on land—all the way to the Ordovician, to a time before the advent of wings or knees or lungs, before the fishes had bony jaws, before blood pumped from a multichambered heart. More than 500 million years ago, the tides would have been stronger, the days shorter, the year longer, and the air too high in carbon dioxide for mammals or birds to breathe. All the earth’s continents huddled in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet still, the arm of Octavia’s ancestor, sensitive, suckered, and supple, would have been recognizable as one of an octopus.

— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

The boat fairly flew; we sweltered side by side in the stagnant superheated air; the smell of mud, of mush, the primeval smell of fecund earth, seemed to sting our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open un immense portal. The light itself seemed to stir, the sky above our heads widened, a far-off murmur reached our ears, a freshness enveloped us, filled our lungs, quickened our thoughts, our blood, our regrets — and, straight ahead, the forests sank down against the dark-blue ridge of the sea.

But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words “I” and “myself ” must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many “growing communities” are as disastrous as cancer.

The channel of Roaring Run itself was less than six feet wide. He stood at the edge of the brook watching the water undulate as it coursed over the moss-slicked rocks. The aroma was primeval, of earth and decaying plants and water and rotten wood. Mike loved the smell. He took a deep breath and held it in his lungs.

Like trees, we are in an inextricable relationship with the earth for the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. As American naturalist John Burroughs wrote, “We are rooted to the air through our lungs and to the soil through our stomachs. We are walking trees and floating plants.” When we forget this, we become disconnected and ungrounded. We need to reestablish the connection by taking in energy from Earth and the cosmos and releasing energy that’s been stuck inside our bodies. Energy does best when it is free to flow.

Nothing could be detected; but by stooping down to the earth and peering up towards the sun, a dark shade could sometimes be seen: this was an infuriated savage, and a slight rustle in the dense vegetation meant a spear. A large spear from my right lunged past and almost grazed my back, and stuck firmly into the soil. The two men from whom it came appeared in an opening in the forest only ten yards off and bolted, one looking back over his shoulder as he ran. As they are expert with the spear I don't know how it missed, except that he was too sure of his aim and the good hand of God was upon me.

In Brazil, the rainforests of the Amazon are being destroyed at an alarming rate by bulldozing and burning. There are many excellent reasons to prevent this continuing – loss of habitat for organisms, production of carbon dioxide from burning trees, destruction of the culture of native Indian tribes, and so on. What is not a good reason, though, is the phrase that is almost inevitably trotted out, to the effect that the rainforests are the ‘lungs of the planet’. The image here is that the ‘civilized’ regions – that is, the industrialized ones – are net producers of carbon dioxide. The pristine rainforest, in contrast, produces a gentle but enormous oxygen breeze, while absorbing the excess carbon dioxide produced by all those nasty people with cars. It must do, surely? A forest is full of plants, and plants produce oxygen. No, they don’t. The net oxygen production of a rainforest is, on average, zero. Trees produce carbon dioxide at night, when they are not photosynthesizing. They lock up oxygen and carbon into sugars, yes – but when they die, they rot, and release carbon dioxide. Forests can indirectly remove carbon dioxide by removing carbon and locking it up as coal or peat, and by releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Ironically, that’s where a lot of the human production of carbon dioxide comes from – we dig it up and burn it again, using up the same amount of oxygen. If the theory that oil is the remains of plants from the carboniferous period is true, then our cars are burning up carbon that was once laid down by plants. Even if an alternative theory, growing in popularity, is true, and oil was produced by bacteria, then the problem remains the same. Either way, if you burn a rainforest you add a one-off surplus of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but you do not also reduce the Earth’s capacity to generate new oxygen. If you want to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide permanently, and not just cut short-term emissions, the best bet is to build up a big library at home, locking carbon into paper, or put plenty of asphalt on roads. These don’t sound like ‘green’ activities, but they are. You can cycle on the roads if it makes you feel better.

Despite all this, the wilderness calls to me more strongly with each passing year. Those distant mountains, always lingering in my peripheral vision, and the ancient forests. Immortal lungs of the earth.

Solid unbroken forest is all around me, stretching far beyond my vision, for hundreds of miles. It is one of the few such forests remaining in the world. The forest regulates the water flow from the frequent heavy rains. It prevents floods, providing steady runoff in to the trout-filled streams. It used to support salmon runs. Such a forest is also the diffuse lung tissue of the earth to which we are irrevocably bound. It is not our “environment.” It is us.

It is a full moon night. The moonlight is soft and silver. You are in an open field, and everything glows around you. The silky grass comes up to your waist, swaying in the breeze like the waves of the sea. You stroke your hand across it slowly, its greens and its silvers, the soft strands of it against your palm. You take a deep breath. Deep, deep. You let it out slowly. Your lungs fill with the scent of the night. The rich earth, the fresh air, the smell of the forest. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. With each breath, you can feel yourself filling with moonlight. It is casting its kind glow on all the shadows inside. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. You walk forwards. The grass and dirt are soft beneath your bare feet. You wade through the grass. Everything is calm but filled with life. With the tranquil energy of the moonlight. You look around. This place is yours. You belong to it as it belongs to you. You are safe here. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. As you look around you realize—you are part of this land. You are the moonlight that streams down. You are the grass that sways. You are the leaves that murmur. You are the earth and you are the air. You are no more and no less than it. You have been filling yourself up with problems and fears. With I shoulds and shouldn’ts. But here, you see how simple it really is. You are the force of the raging river, the might of a mountain, the strength of a tree. You do not expect more or less from them than what they are. Their existence is enough. So is yours. You are a creature of the moonlight. You are a creature of the earth. You let yourself be with that feeling. With that knowledge. That power. That at the most fundamental of levels, you are the same as the earth around you. You are another creature, free to live in balance with itself and the world. You have no duty here. You are not that important. You are important enough to let yourself live. Let yourself be. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. You fill yourself with moonlight. With the calm it brings. The peace. All the pieces of you that have been rattled through the day are settled at night. You take a deep breath. You let it out

The sun seemed to take a long while to sink from the sky. The colors of the heavens were blood red, surrounded by shades of orange and pink. As the moon appeared, the clouds covered it like a thin veil. A ring appeared around the moon like some terrible omen. The forest was dark, eerily silent. Tendrils of fog wound low to the ground around tree trunks and bushes. A gentle wind lazily pushed the clouds, brushed at heavy branches, and tried vainly to disperse the smell of smoke that lingered persistently in the forest. The wind fingered the black ashes and burned beams, the blackened stones, all that remained of what had once been Mikhail Dubrinsky’s home. Two wolves nosed at the blackened remains, lifted their muzzles skyward, and howled mournfully. Throughout the forest other wolves answered, sang out their grief. Within a few minutes, the echoes of their tribute died away. The two wolves circled the charred ruins and sniffed at the two shadowy sentinels they found standing sharply alert near the wrought-iron gate. The wolves swung quickly away, finding something menacing in the two lethal figures. They trotted briskly back into the darkened interior of the forest. Silence once more blanketed the mountains like a shroud. The forest creatures huddled in their dens and holes, rather than face the smell of the ashes and the death of the home of one who was so much a part of them. Below the earth two bodies lay motionless, lifeless. Into the silence, a single heart began to beat. Strong, steady. Blood rushed, receded. A long, low hiss of air heralded the working of lungs. Dark eyes snapped open, and Mikhail searched the grounds above him.