Have you seen Muir Woods? I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness. Likewise many of nature’s five hundred kinds of wild trees had to make way for orchards and cornfields. In the settlement and civilization of the country, bread more than timber or beauty was wanted; and in the blindness of hunger, the early settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide, regarded God’s trees as only a larger kind of pernicious weeds, extremely hard to get rid of. Accordingly, with no eye to the future, these pious destroyers waged interminable forest wars; chips flew thick and fast; trees in their beauty fell crashing by millions, smashed to confusion, and the smoke of their burning has been rising to heaven more than two hundred years. After the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia had been mostly cleared and scorched into melancholy ruins, the overflowing multitude of bread and money seekers poured over the Alleghanies into the fertile middle West, spreading ruthless devastation ever wider and farther over the rich valley of the Mississippi and the vast shadowy pine region about the Great Lakes. Thence still westward the invading horde of destroyers called settlers made its fiery way over the broad Rocky Mountains, felling and burning more fiercely than ever, until at last it has reached the wild side of the continent, and entered the last of the great aboriginal forests on the shores of the Pacific. ... There will be a period of indifference on the part of the rich, sleepy with wealth, and of the toiling millions, sleepy with poverty, most of whom never saw a forest; a period of screaming protest and objection from the plunderers, who are as unconscionable and enterprising as Satan. But light is surely coming, and the friends of destruction will preach and bewail in vain.
This essay appears in The American Idea. For further reading, consider Cimbing the Redwoods, by Richard Preston, from a February 2005 issue of The New Yorker: About ninety thousand acres of old-growth redwoods have remained intact, in patches of protected land. The remaining scraps of the primeval redwood-forest canopy are like three or four fragments of a rose window in a cathedral, and the rest of the window has been smashed and swept away. "Oh, man, the trees that were lost here," Sillett said to me one day as we were driving through the suburbs of Arcata. "This was the most beautiful forest on the planet, and it's almost totally gone. This is such a sore point."
You might also consider The Idols of Environmentalism: Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. ... it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world ... it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.
The American Forests | John Muir | August 1897 | The Atlantic |
