The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.
— Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”1
Deforestation is one of the most pressing environmental issues, not only directly implicating forest ecosystems but also impairing the planet’s larger ability to handle climate change2. Despite general awareness of deforestation, public attention and mitigation efforts are broadly restricted to decrying the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and/or planting more trees3. Yet the reliance upon such tropes oversimplifies a problem requiring a far more nuanced and involved understanding to properly address.
For example, regarding the Amazon rainforest, one must account for the fact that agriculture is currently the only successful economic sector in Brazil4. Simply decrying farmers’ claiming of rainforest land is a naive and futile approach, particularly considering the multifactorial pressures affecting these farmers’ actions. It is furthermore essential to realize that deforestation is a much broader issue than is typically given credit, both temporally and geographically5. And by simply “planting more trees,” places such as Japan and China now face the issue of monoculture forests6. Clearly, the current narrative surrounding deforestation is failing and should be revisited.
In this collection of poems, I aim to revise the way in which we view deforestation to achieve both greater scope and complexity of understanding. Putting into discussion perspectives of distance and closeness, I compare and contrast the experiences of observing deforestation from afar and experiencing it closely. Along the way, I grapple with the attitudes of human exceptionalism and the guilt associated with belonging to the species that is actively destroying one of the planet’s most important resources. At times satirizing the tendency to romanticize nature’s “gifts” (while ignoring their blatant exploitation), I hope these poems can serve as a much-needed wake-up call to address deforestation with the attention it deserves.
- Mosaic7
Light-green pinwheels bloom on dark-green fields
carved into geometrical computer chips and
logs laid parallel in perfect spaces like a
census for the casualties:
One tally mark for each hectare erased in a second8,
Ten for each degree this wasteland warms, and9
1.6 billion for each person who depended on these trees which now are neatly lined up like
graves10
Listen, someday they’ll marvel at this
“Grand Mosaic”— legacy
of a species who pounded nature into something
tame.
- Why Do You Run As If You Can Escape This, Too
At which point in the tetric silence that followed
I was swarmed by those bees and lost consciousness.
At which point there was no way out for me either.
— Forrest Gander, “Beckoned”11
Just take one second of your precious, hurried time and see
the light bursting through the branches like the whites
of half-dead eyes and poke
a shaking finger through the cage because you
don’t know
what’s on the other side
and what made your whole world cave in a growling
instant.
But you know exactly
what follows this
moment if
you don’t escape
it first.
So don’t tell me it’s a tragedy when you read that the forests
are falling
and then you strap into your huffing car and
scramble down the mountain while
the flames are greedily
feasting on your house like it’s kindling,
and your great-grandmother’s photo album, too, because
meanwhile
the orangutan is nowhere to be seen
against the sticky amber sky12 as it
holds
utterly still
until
the crashing
End.
- Bird’s Eye View
As if
they could escape
rise with the embers and
perch amongst the stars
to watch the eruption until it
sputters out like curdled blood.
I dare you to come back and bathe in
the leaves last night’s light bleached
no powdered
to death
and a feather, forced to ombré
falling
Thirteen inches over, you might spot
the body, slumped against
the charred barrel— that creature you dreamed was
a phoenix but now know to be utterly
Dead. This
is the bird’s eye view.
- Man’s Triumph
If I have seen further than others
it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants13
/or/
slashing their knees so they buckle
and tumble
so that I can see
forever
- A Case for You, Doctor14:
Patient presentation:
Sickly green skin rashed and laced with
Dirt-brown scabs and pock-marks,
Flaky terrain and bushy blackheads,
Rocky rifts spilling blood into rivers stained red,
And patches dyed that detested shade of beige
— like cardboard boxes—
(better pack ‘em up quick, this place is getting stale)…
Prognosis:
Destruction doesn’t last and
wounds will heal with time but
/ALERT/
the patient: scars are bald
and forever
numb.
- Into nowhere
The sky peels
inside out
like inverting a contact lens—
once resting in a bowl of branches, now
it swallows the horizon whole
in one mindless, silent gulp— But
We’ll keep clearing and cutting
into searing
space until one day a
mile will look just like a
thousand and who
knows which way is home because it’s all the same, anyhow.
- Restoration
Patch it up, quick— make it neat and
pretty15—
scribble in the skyline
as your mother does her eyebrows but
this time you’ll have to lay low
and squint
to see it
for where the green and red giants once stood, now
wispy stalks shake at the mere thought of
a human walking by and
bend at the touch of a fallen feather.
- Pushing
In the Great Crusade for Space, who
is on the other side? (Hint: look in the mirror of your noble sword)
Idea no. 158326:
To forge a synthetic land— like that drifting plastic patch—
is that the plan?
I heard it was as large as France16.
Well, if anyone can make it,
you know it’s Man.
- The Giving Trees
They said this land would save us with its infinite
gifts— remember the boy
who befriended a
tree?17 He received all
of his needs— so
please let me know: where
are all the Giving Trees?
What does it mean
when taking is losing and
the rainbows floating across the silky black
pond outside my window make me want to
inhale-that-poison-and-let-the-tainted-liquid-drip-from-my-teeth-like-guilt?
Drilling into the forest, we slash away
its tendons, tear apart
its veins and
wonder
why then the Giving Trees present
us with Pandora’s box of pandemics18—
I think we’ve spoiled our stay.
Notes:
- This excerpt encapsulates (perhaps unintentionally) the guilt of watching the forests disappear at the hands of the human race. See “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray” for the poem in its entirety.
- See World Wildlife Fund, Mazhukhina, Collins, and PBS NewsHour for statistics and a more detailed discussion of the broad effects of deforestation on global climate change.
- See PBS NewsHour, “China’s Afforestation Efforts,” and Life Where I’m From for examples of such trends.
- See PBS NewsHour.
- Collins offers a detailed account of the history of deforestation, which dates back to the Greeks and Romans and spans the globe.
- See “China’s Afforestation Efforts” and Life Where I’m From for the limitations of some well-intentioned afforestation programs.
- The imagery for this poem (particularly in the first stanza) was inspired by the video provided by BBC’s Satellite Shows Extent of Terrible Destruction to the Planet.
- See IUCN.
- See PBS NewsHour.
- See IUCN.
- This stanza of Gander’s work inspired this poem which examines how humans easily forget that by destroying the forests, we trap ourselves, too. See “Beckoned by Forrest Gander” for the entire poem.
- This description was inspired by an image of an orangutan stranded in a burning forest, featured in the article by Gokkon.
- See BBC World Service for the origin of this quote by Isaac Newton.
- The imagery featured in this poem, particularly in the first stanza, is inspired by the footage of PBS NewsHour and BBC.
- In reference to the monoculture forests resulting from China and Japan’s afforestation programs, which is discussed in more detail in “China’s Afforestation Efforts” and Life Where I’m From.
- See “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
- The title of this poem and the opening sentence refer to Silverstein’s popular children’s book, The Giving Tree.
- See Watts for more on the rise of viral outbreaks due to deforestation.
Bibliography:
BBC. Satellite Shows Extent of Terrible Destruction to the Planet – BBC. 2019. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9zWDtDKDS8.
BBC World Service | Learning English | Moving Words. https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/movingwords/shortlist/newton.shtml. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.
“China’s Afforestation Efforts: Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees?” Institute for Security and Development Policy, 13 Aug. 2020, https://isdp.eu/china-afforestation-efforts/.
Collins, Karina. “Origins & History of Deforestation.” NoMorePlanet.Com, 5 Mar. 2020, https://nomoreplanet.com/history-of-deforestation/.
“Deforestation and Forest Degradation.” IUCN, 10 Nov. 2017, https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/deforestation-and-forest-degradation.
“Deforestation and Forest Degradation | Threats | WWF.” World Wildlife Fund, https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation-and-forest-degradation. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.
Foundation, Poetry. “Beckoned by Forrest Gander.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 22 Apr. 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/154755/beckoned. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.
Foundation, Poetry. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 22 Apr. 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.
Gokkon, Basten. “A Roar for Nature in Indonesia: Q&A with the Poet behind ‘Indigenous Species.’” Mongabay Environmental News, 30 Oct. 2017, https://news.mongabay.com/2017/10/a-roar-for-nature-in-indonesia-qa-with-the-poet-behind-indigenous-species/.
Life Where I’m From. Why Japan Isn’t Cutting Down Enough of Its Trees. 2019. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4gRGPbTqE.
Mazhukhina, Karina. “Why Deforestation Affects Everyone, Not Just Neighboring Communities.” In Our Nature, 30 June 2016, https://green.uw.edu/blog/2020-03/why-deforestation-affects-everyone-not-just-neighboring-communities.
PBS NewsHour. How Amazon Deforestation Could Push the Climate to a “Tipping Point.” 2019. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yMnMJWyY7k.
Silverstein, Shel. The Giving Tree. Harper Collins, 1964, http://www.shelsilverstein.com/books/book-title-giving-tree/.
“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The Ocean Cleanup, https://theoceancleanup.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch/. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.
Watts, Jonathan. “Disease Outbreaks More Likely in Deforestation Areas, Study Finds.” The Guardian, 24 Mar. 2021, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/disease-outbreaks-more-likely-in-deforestation-areas-study-finds.
