The True Magic of the Forest
Reflecting on the ethics of engaging with the natural world under colonialism
Hi everyone!
Welcome to this newsletter! I had planned on writing a first post with a story giving the background for what inspired me to start writing and sharing here, but that is still a work in progress, and I find myself eager to share this somewhat older work.
Lately, I have been craving opportunities to exercise creativity and curiosity. Times are pretty bleak in general, but this year I have become the most authentic version of myself that I've ever been anyway. With the pressure to stay productive and continue business as usual as the wheels fall off of a destructive machine, I find myself seeking out little opportunities to express my joy and let the wild animal of my brain off its leash. Chasing whims, seeking out knowledge, and diving into how I really feel. Making photographs and writing essays and telling stories and playing games. In the face of packaged "content" and sloppy work done by robots, I crave opportunities to exist in the messy and interesting parts of life. To ask questions and share observations, and have a point of view.
I set up this newsletter as a place for that curiosity to live, and hopefully as a structure to help me write with some regularity, and to put that writing out there, even if there aren't many people there to read it. I may write an essay, a description of something I liked seeing, a rumination, a book review, photographs, and some combination of all of these. I'll explain more at some point soon, but my main hope is simply to write, and to post.
This particular piece of writing was inspired by the vaguely colonial feeling of the San Diego Bird Festival, which I attended back in February. I had gone expecting to find kinship with other birders, excited about my first real bird event, and felt a vague, creeping sense that I didn't share quite as much as I thought I did with other attendees.
Tables and booths were filled with corporate exhibitions and ads for tourist trips, turning the sacred beauty of those feathered animals into profit. There were no opportunities to hear from the people who know this land and its birds best, the Kumeyaay people. It just felt off. As I poked at what felt wrong, I noticed the way that so many white people drip with an entitlement that is hard to pin down but feels palpable. How can you draw people to stomp around on stolen land, just to advertise visiting other stolen places? How can you advertise opportunities for people to cross imaginary, militarized borders in exactly the way they are designed and so violently enforced, allowing those of the imperial core access to the world while keeping everyone else out.
As a white settler myself, I started thinking about my own ethics in engaging with nature, and this was the result.
Gratefully,
Austen
The True Magic of the Forest
There is genuine magic in a redwood forest. I hear it in the sound of rain filtering through thousands of verdant needles, the songs of Pacific Wrens, and the croak of a raven on a high branch. It hangs like the fog, floating in the air surrounding trunks so high they fade into it. The rays of the sun passing through branches and shining on mist. It animates the scurrying squirrel as it twists between the ferns, rustling up leaf litter atop spongy soil. It fills my nose with the smell of rich earth in the slow decay that feeds it.
The magic soaks into the moss alongside water. It lives in the microscopic invertebrates, for whom the moss's stalks must themselves look like trees. I can almost see the glitter of it through the air, connecting each living thing to one another through deep and long lasting relationships. It flows alongside energy from sun to leaf to berry to bird to flight. Each thing moving through this ecosystem carries its own magic of life.
There is something truly miraculous in feeling the bark of a living thing that has lived 50 times longer than I ever will. A being that grows and feeds and builds relationships, and has become an ecosystem all its own, starting from a sapling that rooted itself a thousand years before the Roman Empire.
In visiting these creatures, with perspective, strength, and longevity I could scarcely imagine, I know I am in their home. On soil made up of the decay of their leaves, and the bodies of their neighbors. Breathing air made entirely by them – filled with oxygen from their leaves and with a temperature, humidity, and composition determined partially by the combined work of the forest. Standing above roots that connect them to one another, and to the bacteria, fungi, and all the other creatures around me. It is not just their home, but a home they have built over thousands of years.
They share this home with others. This place where I am a passing visitor is also the home of the wrens and ferns and squirrels and mosses and bugs and everyone who has built this thriving ecological community in partnership with the trees. This forest is the home of the Ohlone and Coast Miwok people, who have built it just as much as the trees have.
These ancient trees have burn scars from fires used by Coast Miwok and Ohlone ancestors to care for them, and for the forest. The trees knew the people they built the forest with as partners, and they know them still. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have poured their respect and love and hope and labor into these trees, and into this forest. Everything that is beautiful and full to the brim with life is a product of their love and care for one another.
Life in nature generously provides the things we need, including those things we need for our spirit and our heart. They provide these things best through equal partnership, through acknowledging a shared home. The magic is in this exchange, or as Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it, it is in reciprocity. The magic I feel in the forest is the love that my fellow humans have poured into it since time immemorial. I am able to touch a tree that has grown for 50 lifetimes because someone, 50 generations ago, cared for a sapling.
I am a guest in that someone's home. I am a guest on land unjustly stolen from that person's progeny, by my ancestors. That person's investment of love and labor and hope to build a future for their children was stolen from that child through war and genocide. The magic survives because of the strength and longevity of the processes that built it, which will always be more powerful than the forces of colonialism.
This earth is not something that can be owned. Of course it isn't – because we cannot live on certificates and documents alone (even if we could, these too are the generous gift of a tree). We share any land we are on with countless others, and without them, it has no worth.
But their ancestors’ love and labor is still the birthright of modern Coast Miwok and Ohlone people, as are the lands of Indigenous people around the globe. This love and hope is truly the only investment you can make in land, and it is a wealth that is passed on through soil and trees and culture and song and language. The ancient sapling’s needles are messages of love from the past, intercepted and stolen by European settlers. Even though land cannot be owned, only some have any rightful claim to have really invested in it.
That is why I must approach this place with respect and gratitude. When I walk through the forest, I am not there to consume and take and steal. I try to be there to love and appreciate that magic. I do not know how to do so nearly as well as those that have tended this forest, and I wrestle with how to hold love for this place in my heart alongside the knowledge that my presence here is the very result of its theft. But I know that I can spend my time listening to the true rules for this place. Not authoritarian mandates defined by cops and made real through punishment, but rules discovered and developed through centuries of partnership and collaboration between human and tree and fern and flower and water and flame and bee and buzzard and all the greater-than-human beings that share this place. To learn them, I must listen carefully to each party in this compact, and to the people who have always been part of it.
We cannot engage with this land as if it has not been stolen, nor as though any part of it is ours to take. I cannot engage with it as though it weren’t my ancestors doing the stealing. For me, birding is about love and respect. It is about letting birds tell me about themselves, and applying their many lessons to my life. It is about letting their song move me, and feeling the flow of love and hope and energy and labor and care from the past to the present.
Indigenous people everywhere have their equivalent of the redwoods. Bison and prairie and shellfish and reindeer and toyon and oak are all filled with the magic of past love and labor. Olive trees bear the fruit of generations spent tending them through a memory of and future hope for a Free Palestine. The gifts given by their ancestors continue to flow, and everywhere they can, modern Indigenous people continue to give them to the land and all its inhabitants.
They deserve the stewardship of their lands back, and justice demands it. I must at least remember that, and that I am a guest in somebody's home. I am still working on finding my own place in a community and web of reciprocity, but I know I'll never find it while holding onto the entitlement of whiteness. That is much easier said than done.
Resources and Inspiration:
My thoughts here have been inspired by reading incredible work on politics, nature, colonization, and the intersections between these. Here are a few of the books, authors, and events/experiences that have contributed to my understanding and thoughts on these issues:
Much of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing, including Braiding Sweetgrass, Gathering Moss, The Serviceberry, and the essay “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System”
Our History is the Future by Nick Estes
Fresh Banana Leaves by Jessica Hernandez
Border and Rule by Harsha Walia
Enero Zapatista, a series of political events held in San Diego each January to honor the Zapatista uprising of 1994
Native Land Digital, a resource for understanding the locations of Indigenous ancestral lands using treaties, linguistic groups, oral histories, and more.