The columns of Greek temples were imitation trees; so were the branched ribs of Norman cathedrals. And most mythologies include a World Tree or a Tree of Life, which upholds all life on Earth. In the Christian religion, the Tree of Life grows in the Garden of Eden—it’s the one with the apples Adam didn’t eat, having munched on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge instead—which is why we’re smart but not immortal, in case you were wondering.

  But for every positive symbol, there’s a negative counterpart. There’s a Tree of Death as well as a Tree of Life. Poetic versions of the wasteland usually have dead trees in them, or no trees at all; or the trees have been destroyed and replaced by stone or metal pillars. In the Christian religion, the Tree of Death is represented by the cross, a dead tree upon which death is inflicted. The tree-herding Ents in The Lord of the Rings are on the good side of things, and punish the tree-cutting wizard, Saruman; but in Tolkien’s invented world there are wild trees and bad trees, as well as good trees—the bad ones have bad hearts; and there are also entire forests that have gone bad: their trees will grab hold of you or imprison you within themselves. Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz encounters this bad kind of tree—there’s a forest of fighting trees on the road to Oz that won’t let her pass, and the problem is solved only by the decisive Tin Woodsman, who takes his axe to the brutes and clears a path. The powerful and destructive Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter series has a very respectable line of ancestors.

  Dante’s Divine Comedy begins with a labyrinth metaphor:

  In the middle of the journey of our life

  I came to my senses in a dark forest,

  for I had lost the straight path.

  Oh, how hard it is to tell

  what a dense, wild, and tangled wood this was,

  the thought of which renews my fear!

  We are led to infer that this forest represents error and sin—a departure from the true path. It’s a place where you stray, where you get lost. In olden days, being lost in the forest usually meant death by starvation, exposure, or wild beast, as indeed it still does. If you go down to the woods today, you might want to see the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, but you’d surely prefer not to be the Teddy Bears’ Picnic; as you may well be, if you overstay your visit.

  Shakespeare’s forests are less fearsome than Dante’s, but they aren’t exactly light and cheerful. Sometimes they’re places of enchantment and illusion, inhabited by creatures not entirely human, like the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and sometimes they’re places of enhanced freedom. The Forest of Arden in As You Like It shelters exiles in flight from a tyrannical king—just as Sherwood Forest shelters Robin Hood. To that extent, the forest represents communion with nature, and freedom from the injustices of civilization—as it does, much later, in Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales. But outlaws can just as easily be robbers and murderers, and many of these are met with in literature, and especially in folk tales. For the forest is the realm of predators—we can’t seem entirely to forget that. It’s when Red Riding Hood goes off the path into the dark forest that she encounters the wolf.

  The quintessential dark-forest experience is graphically described in that classic children’s tale, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. The Wild Wood is a dangerous place, and little Mole ought to have heeded the warnings he was given about it.

  Everything was very still now. The dusk advanced on him steadily, rapidly, gathering in behind and before; and the light seemed to be draining away like flood-water….[Eventually, as Mole] lay there panting and trembling, and listened to the whistlings and the patterings outside, he knew it at last, in all its fullness, that dread thing which other little dwellers in field and hedgerow had encountered here, and known as their darkest moment—that thing which the Rat had vainly tried to shield him from—the Terror of the Wild Wood!

  Those who live in the open—on plains, or far north, above the treeline—are gazers rather than listeners because anything that’s going to get you will be seen before it’s heard. But those who dwell in forests are listeners, because anything that’s going to get you will be heard before it’s seen. That’s why the whistlings and the patterings are so very frightening to Mole.

  The fact is that—no matter how many ecological reports we read about the importance of maintaining forests—we’re secretly afraid of them. And we’re also in awe of them, a fact of our nature that keeps throwing up fictional versions like the wood where all names are lost, in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, and the elf-ruled golden forest of Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings, where you may become “entangled,” and the wood where Merlin lies in an enchanted sleep, in Arthurian lore. Stay in such forests too long and you’ll forget who you are. The forest may be alluring, but you enter it at your peril.

  E.O. Wilson, in his disconcerting book The Future of Life, sets out our relationship to forests in an interesting way. What kind of location do human beings prefer? He suggests we look at what rich people do: those who can afford anything choose to build on a height of land overlooking an open landscape in which there’s a river or a lake, with some trees in the distance but not too close and thick. This would be in fact an ideal spot for hunter-gatherers: water to drink and to attract game, forest to shelter animals but not too close, a good view all around. This may account for the huge amount of forest burning done by the Australian Aboriginals before contact: they liked a clear understory and a wide view. This same kind of view—or even a picture of it on the wall—has been found to reduce by a factor of six the time it takes people to heal in the recovery rooms of hospitals. It seems we find this prospect soothing. Do we therefore have an innate bias in favour of cutting down trees? Wilson thinks we may have.

  If we give in to it completely, it will be the worse for us because if we cut down all the trees in the world, we’ll be doomed. An old proverb from India says, “Forests precede civilization; deserts follow.” This formula has played itself out many times over our history already: the story of Easter Island, where the destruction of all the trees led to soil erosion and famine and cannibalism, is only one of many. We’ve been told many times about the importance of the Amazon forests—the lungs of the planet, they’ve been called—to the maintenance of Earth’s climate, yet those forests continue to be felled. The forests of Borneo are going fast. The axe of Gilgamesh is busily at work, and some of the gods are pleased—the gods of money, for instance, and those who promote the idea of something for nothing, and the delusion that you can take from nature endlessly without giving back. But the mistress of the animals is getting very annoyed with us; and one of her maxims may well be “There is no free lunch.”

  Canada contains the largest boreal forest in the world. It has a long association with trees and tree-cutting: the early settlers cut down everything they could, for fear of forest fires and to clear pasture, and to make charcoal, and to export to Europe. We’re still cutting away, often quite stupidly and indiscriminately. We’re still indulging ourselves in fantasies of endlessness. We’re still telling ourselves that anything produced by nature is ours by right, and also free. Why are we still saying that clear-cutting is a natural thing to do because forest fires are natural too, and they burn large areas, so isn’t it the same thing? Why are we turning priceless old-growth forest into toilet paper? Part of this is just laziness and greed, but part of it comes from our ancient ambivalence toward forests—our fear of them. How long do we go on this way before we destroy our enormous natural carbon sink, reduce the fragile North with its thin soil covers to a rocky wasteland, and in the process wipe out a large number of species, before we scorch ourselves to death? How soon before we start paying people not to cut down trees, just as farmers have been paid for not planting potatoes?

  Because I’m a cheerful person, I like to introduce a ray of hope. There are many counter-movements already set in motion. World Wildlife has long known the importance of habitat to species protection, and has bought up large tracts of forest all over the world. Nature Conservancy is very active in Canada and in the United States, and has been successful in acquiring smaller but very significant pieces. The old form of logging is coming back—selective logging, with minimal damage to the forest. It may interest you to know for instance that a group of Buddhists is carrying on single-tree logging, with horses, in Nova Scotia right now.

  One of the reasons people are afraid of forests is that—especially if they’ve grown up in cities—they aren’t familiar with them. The value of early education is being increasingly recognized, as witness the growth of “outdoor classrooms” in Britain, where it’s been found that children actually learn better when they’re not in a closed-classroom environment. Young children have a natural interest in nature, if they aren’t discouraged by adults. (How many outdoor classrooms do we have in Canada? None, at the moment. Though we do have summer camps.)

  The Japanese have an expression: forest bathing—to immerse yourself in the forest for purposes of cleansing and relaxation. For a person who feels comfortable in the forest—and not afraid of it, like Mole—this does actually work. C.W. Nicol—the only Japanese ex-Canadian ex-Welsh karate seventh-degree black belt in the world, and an ardent environmentalist—has a small forest trust in Japan called the Afan Woodland Trust. This is a managed forest that produces some woods for local traditional crafts, and various precious medicinal fungi, and what the Japanese call “mountain vegetables.” The vision is similar to managed rainforest and shade coffee plantations—serving human needs in concert with restoration and maintenance.

  At the Afan Woodland Trust, they’ve also been doing several kinds of studies concerning people-forest interactions. One measures the ability of a stay in a forest to normalize blood pressure: low pressure increases, high pressure decreases. Another has involved work with abused and damaged children, which has proven amazingly successful: the forest can contribute to a healing of the psyche, as well as to a healing of the body.

  The name “Woodland Trust” is suggestive. That’s what we need: woodland trust. We need to trust the woodland, instead of feeling alienated from it and afraid of it. If we can do that, we may cease our indiscriminate destruction, and recognize our forests for what they are: ancient homelands, purifiers of air, shelters of species, protectors from sun, coolers of climate, healers of hearts, soothers of souls, unfolders of the world.

  I’ll end by quoting again from Treebeard the Ent—a few words we might well take as a motto. “There are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves,” he says. “I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!”

  Ryszard Kapuściński

  (2007)

  When I heard that Ryszard Kapuściński had died, I felt I’d lost a friend. No, more than that: an essential person in my life. A person—one of the few, surely—who could be trusted to tell the truth about complex and difficult events, not in abstract terms but in their concrete details—their colour, smell, feel, touch; their weather. Yet I didn’t know Ryszard Kapuściński very well at all. It was a rare quality of his, this befriending of people at a distance.

  I first met Kapuściński in 1984. I was living with my family—Graeme Gibson, our seven-year-old daughter—in West Berlin, which was at that time still surrounded by the famous Berlin Wall. It was there that I began The Handmaid’s Tale. The tone for a novel about a modern totalitarianism was readily available: East German fighter planes broke the sound barrier every Sunday, reminding us by their sonic booms that they could swoop down at any moment. The Soviet bloc stretched out to the east, and seemed as solid as a rock. We travelled to East Germany, with its surly border guards and its nail-polish ice cream and its Smiley’s People–era chocolate, and to Czechoslovakia, where to say anything real we had to go out into the middles of parks, so afraid were our Czech friends of being bugged.

  Finally we went to Poland, which was another story altogether. Poland had always been viewed by its neighbours as recklessly brave, or as bravely reckless. The well-known anecdote about the Polish cavalry charging the German tanks on horseback may or may not have been true, but it was emblematic; and that recklessness or defiance was still there in Warsaw in 1984. Taxi drivers wouldn’t drive you anywhere unless you had hard currency; writers offered you armfuls of samizdat—unofficial publications—which they kept stored right on the premises of the supposedly Communist writers’ organization. While we were there a priest had been found murdered, presumably by the secret police. There was a Catholic parade, and as we watched the flinty-eyed nuns and the angry, determined priests and their crowds of followers, we thought: This regime is in trouble.

  And then we met the man who helped to bring it down.

  Kapuściński wrote The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat in 1978. On the surface it’s about Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the collapse of his corrupt and absolutist regime, and, read simply as that, it’s a terrific book. Kapuściński, the journalist with the Polish recklessness that took him through twenty-seven coups and revolutions—streams of refugees heading one way, away from trouble; Kapuściński heading the other way, into the middle of it—gets himself to Addis Ababa and sneaks around at night, interviewing former courtiers who are now in hiding, and setting down anecdotes about the emperor that range from the unintentionally comic—his cushion provider had to slide exactly the right size of cushion under his feet for every chair he sat on, at the risk of leaving his short legs dangling—to the horrifying: beggars gobble scraps from palace feasts, eyeballs squirt from sockets.

  But The Emperor had another level of meaning for the Poles, who, throughout the Nazi occupation and then under the Soviets, had become used to speaking in coded language. As Kapuściński himself says of those times in Travels with Herodotus, “Nothing was ever plain, literal, unambiguous—from behind every gesture and word peered some referential sign, gazed a meaningfully winking eye.” Thus, because one corrupt, autocratic regime is likely to have many things in common with another, The Emperor could be read as a critique of the moribund Polish Communist government. The book quickly made it on to the stage, in one dramatization after another, and contributed greatly to the popular unrest that finally toppled those in power. The brilliance of The Emperor as a tactic was that the Communists could hardly object to it, for wasn’t it about the badness of monarchy—a form of government to which they were devotedly opposed?

  The Emperor was translated into English in 1983, just in time for us to read it and then to meet Kapuściński in Warsaw in 1984, and to shake his hand. He was a member of the same extraordinary generation that included Tadeusz Kantor, the outstanding director and playwright, and the novelist Tadeusz Konwicki—men who had lived through the Second World War as children only to reach adulthood within a one-party Communist system, but had nevertheless managed to produce astonishing works of art. Although Kapuściński’s settings were many and his material varied, his underlying themes remained constant—fear and oppression and how people cope with or transcend it, meagre circumstances and how they can both warp and ennoble, the stifling drawn-out torture of political monocultures, and the abiding desire of human beings to possess their own souls. Such themes are entirely understandable in view of Kapuściński’s own constrained youth.

  Kapuściński seemed to me shy and charming and diffident; Graeme said that might be so, but underneath all of that he was hard as nails. I suppose he would have to have been both: the shyness and charm and diffidence kept him from being shot at roadblocks in the midst of chaotic civil wars, and the nail-like hardness propelled him toward those roadblocks in the first place.

  There was always something surreal about encounters with genuine writers inside the Soviet bloc in those days, and maybe Kapuściński’s diffidence was caused in part by that surrealism. At polite official occasions there was what was said, and then there was what was not said but was supposed to be understood. “Why do you have so many beautifully illustrated children’s picture books in Poland?” I asked another writer at a book fair. “Think about it,” she replied, by which she must have meant that there was no problematic political content in kids’ picture books.

  In January 1986, Kapuściński was in Toronto for the English publication of his 1982 book, Shah of Shahs, about the spectacular overthrow of the shah of Iran and his brutal regime, which featured Savak, his hideous, torturing secret police. This book bears rereading now, so prescient is it about the patterns that continue to unfold in the Muslim world. Kapuściński was going to appear at the Harbourfront international writers’ series, and he was nervous: he didn’t think his English was good enough for a public reading. Would I be his English voice, and do the readings from his books for him? I said I would be honoured, but at the same time I was thinking, Wait a minute! Ryszard Kapuściński is nervous? About reading in English? In safe, unthreatening Toronto, where everyone will love him even if he manages to blurt out only one word? What about the murderous turmoil in the Congo, the bombs falling in Honduras, and the life-risking riots in revolutionary Tehran?

  Kapuściński’s nervousness on that Toronto occasion was endearing. It was also sort of like Mary, Queen of Scots, worrying about whether her cap was on straight while on her way to the scaffold. But then, there is no predicting other people’s spheres of nervousness.

  Because he was a foreign correspondent—for many years, Poland’s only foreign correspondent—Kapuściński seemed ubiquitous, at least when it came to rotten political structures in their moments of crumbling or catastrophe or dire bloodshed. Where there was chaos, there he would be. In Imperium, which describes his journeys through the Soviet Union in 1989–1991, just as it was coming unglued, there is a characteristic passage: