Old Growth Forests

Today I was watching some videos about the tiny, tiny remaining old growth forests in the eastern part of the United States and I felt a deep sense of grief.

Knowing the joy of what it feels like to connect with healthy, pristine environments, it absolutely killed me to think how the vast forests of majestic, old trees were almost completely cut down by the “new” Americans, i.e. Europeans.

It makes me question and think deeply about spiritual connections and past and future lives.

To be honest, it really shook me. I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this on a computer and able to publish this page on the Internet if it weren’t for those people – the European peoples – and their inventions. But the devastation they caused to Earth on such a massive scale is a source of deep grief to me.

The whole concept of “forestry management” – a euphemism for controlled logging – usually involving clearcutting – is just sickening.

I was reading the about the Forest Landscape Integrity Index and it’s sad to think how Earth’s once majestic old growth forests are being destroyed. And the European ancestral lands are among the worst. Literally millennia of cutting down forests has completely changed the Old World from what it would have been like long before.

When old growth forests are destroyed it also destroys us. When the forests are gone part of our soul is gone.

Forests are sanity. They are wholesomeness. An Earth that is losing its forests is a sick Earth.

In the past, I sometimes romanticized about going to Europe, the place of my ancestors, but when I look at the Forest Landscape Integrity Index it makes we want to go somewhere else, somewhere away from it all.

I guess it is a sacrifice to be here. How nice it would be if we could all just go live in some idyllic place. Some super-wealthy people can do things like that, burning shitloads of fossil fuels in their lives as they “connect”.

But I accept the spiritual practice of living in a world that needs healing and abiding here in places that need to be healed.

I used to have a saying “Even Satan wants to live in paradise.” There’s nothing special nor particularly virtuous about wanting to live in some place like that.

But just like the bhiksu renounces material attachment by not wearing a garment that is not torn, I vow to renounce attachment and help heal the world wherever I am.

If humans out of grand ignorance have cut down the majestic, ancient old growth forests the forests will live on inside me no matter where I am.