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 if we tell a different history
Telling a different story about forests could have a much broader impact than we might think at first sight when we think about forests. As the word forest stems from the Latin term foris, meaning "outside" or "out of doors" which gave its name also to another term, a figure that is politically highly polemized: the foreigner. The foreigner became an instrumental figure of politics to fuel anxiety and to redirect all attention from social injustices to the outside, erect fences or walls and legalising ever stringent security and surveillance measures. So telling another story about the forests could impact our vision of the role of the outside in general and redirect our attention away from fear towards addressing social injustices. For this to happen it would be important to establish another relationship to the outside, one that is not marked by fear but that recognizes the "outside", forest, trees and other humans are a vital part of our world.
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