The fear is related to the forest, not the plants. This feeling is very old, it goes back to Roman civilization. For the Romans, the forest was the place of the “stranger”: It was in the forest that the barbarians hid. Moreover, the French word “forêt” [forest] comes from the Latin foris, which means “outside”. In English, the word “foreign” refers to what you don’t know, that which is far away. It may be due to the ecological legacy of antiquity that the tree continues to be considered a material for trade, which is not very commendable. We have remained within this fear of the forest and the desire to sell wood.
Francis Halle, A Life drawing trees, Interview with Emmanuele Coccia # 6
Why do you fear the forest?
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- But who really owns land and nature? Humans have no more self-evident rights than grass, trees, and squirrels, not to speak of fungi and bacteria. Property, the conceit that state-backed human social relations give us absolute rights over things, does not go far in the realms of land and nature, wh …
What captured our attention
We find that it is a very original perspective to say that civilization in Europe began with fear.
What do fear and civilization have to do with one another?
Can we claim that the beginning of civilization lies in the fear of the forest, the fear of the outside, of the unknown? Wouldn’t that be quite a scandal—if an irrational feeling like fear were at the root of civilization? Civilization, which presents itself as the triumph of reason over chaos, would then originate from precisely that which it seeks to overcome.
Imagine what that would mean: the beginning of civilization would contradict what we usually believe—it would not be rational, but irrational. It would be as if the world were turned upside down, for many civilizing efforts are devoted to proving the irrationality of the non-civilized world.
The surprising semantic connections between the words for forest and foreigner in various languages suggest that everything—and everyone—that comes from “outside” is associated with untamed nature, wilderness, and danger. Yet this is merely a projection, one that generates fear and obscures the fact that we are all part of nature.
Meike Gleim and Loretta Mesitiof our Imagination
