Caring for and Healing the Earth

Forests and Forestry

The North American Forests

from Our National Parks by John Muir, 1901

The forests of North America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.  The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed to be favoured above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.  To prepare the ground, it was rolled and sifted in seas with infinite loving deliberation and forethought, lifted into the light, submerged and warmed over and over again, pressed and crumpled into folds and ridges, mountains and hills, subsoiled with heaving volcanic fires, ploughed and ground and sculptured into scenery and soil with glaciers and rivers, every feature growing and changing from beauty to beauty, higher and higher.  And in the fullness of time it was planted in groves, and belts, and broad, exuberant, mantling forests, with the largest, most varied, most fruitful, and most beautiful trees in the world ....

These forests were composed of about five hundred species of trees, all of them in some way useful to man ... For many a century after the ice-ploughs were melted, nature fed them and dressed them every day, working like a loving, devoted, painstaking gardener; fingering every leaf and flower and mossy furrowed bole; bending, trimming, modeling, balancing; painting them with the loveliest colours; bringing over them now clouds with cooling shadows and showers, now sunshine; fanning them with gentle winds and rustling their leaves; exercising them in every fibre with storms, and pruning them; loading them with flowers and fruit, loading them with snow, and ever making them more beautiful as the years rolled by ....

But when the steel axe of the white man rang out on the startled air their doom was sealed.  Every tree heard the bodeful sound, and pillars of smoke gave the sign in the sky ...

In the settlement and civilization of this continent, bread more than timber or beauty was wanted; and in the blindness of hunger, the early settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide, regarded God's trees as only a larger kind of pernicious weeds, extremely hard to get rid of.  Accordingly, with no eye to the future, these pious destroyers waged interminable forest wars; chips flew thick and fast; trees in their beauty fell crashing by the millions, smashed to confusion, and the smoke of their burning has been rising to heaven more than two hundred years ...

 
 

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