Nature’s Cathedral

Ideally a book will start with a hook that catches readers’ attention. Two of the most arresting opening pages in literature are Karen Blixen’s description of the view looking toward Mount Kilimanjaro from her farm in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi in Out of Africa and Aldo Leopold’s tale of the environmental history of Wisconsin set against the background of two sawyers slowly working their way through a large oak tree in A Sand County Almanac. The beginning of Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s book is not quite in the same league, but she is an evocative writer and captured my attention by her opening sentences: “The landscape of my youth was an Irish one. The fields were filled with the brilliant chrome yellow of furze.” My youth was also Irish, and as I write in my cottage in western Connemara, I can look down over swathes of furze (which we call gorse) to the sea. A profusion of wildflowers testifies to the absence of pesticides and the clear air, scrubbed by the strong westerly winds, underlining one of the messages of The Global Forest, the impact of the misguided use of pesticides on biodiversity: “By ignorance and greed, the trees of the global forest are being genetically modified … pesticides used in forests will kill much more than their target organisms.”

Beresford-Kroeger, who lives in Merrickville, Ontario, has studied botany and medical biochemistry and done postgraduate research at the University of Ottawa. But apparently she likes to call herself a “renegade scientist” because she brings together western medicine, botany and aboriginal knowledge in order to argue for a special and healing role for trees in our ecosystem. In this book she adopts the style of a traditional Irish storyteller or seanchaí to advance the concept of a multifaceted interaction with forest ecosystems through a collection of 40 short essays. All of them deal in some way with the intricate web of plant life, from the individual blossom or nut up to the great boreal forest, large remnants of which even now stretch east from Alaska to Siberia. They touch on many aspects of botany, ethnobotany, biochemistry, physiology and the use of forests by both “developed” and “undeveloped” societies. Many of the essays deal with aboriginal uses of forests and their sanctity and importance in aboriginal spirituality: “They are places of quiet refuge. Out of every quiet thought is a rebirth of the mind in its own humanity … A forest in the global garden is a living cathedral of nature”; “Sacred trees hold a message in silence … It is not unlike the quietness of the painter and the stillness inside the notes of the composer.” Only the very rash would deny the spiritual power of some trees. Anyone who has walked in the towering groves of the giant redwoods of California, Sequoiadendron giganteum, and lowered their voice to an awed whisper would recognize something approaching the holiness of the great cathedrals, although they might not agree that “sacred trees and sacred things do not have a place in a consumer society.”

The author’s overall vision is one of ecologically sustainable, forest-centred societies, and all the essays are interwoven to support this concept. However, they dart about all over the place, both topically and geographically, sometimes recapturing the awed curiosity of a small child and sometimes offering the sophisticated analysis of a trained scientist. Some of the essays touch on issues that are familiar to many from the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and debates surrounding the Kyoto Protocol and the 2009 Copenhagen conference. Others are treasure troves of arcane, fascinating information about some of the extraordinary adaptations of organisms to meet their local environmental conditions, or the ingenious uses humankind has found for products of the forest. One piece of arcana that particularly appealed, perhaps because of my years spent on research in East Africa, is the response of hippopotami to the intense equatorial sunlight. I knew that hippotami have thin skins that are extremely sensitive to sunburn, but I had no idea that their skins are adapted to secrete a red antibiotic sunscreen.

Many species of plants, insects, birds and mammals are woven into the essays, but the stars of the show are the trees and the biological, physiological and biochemical processes that control the complex ways they interact in forest ecosystems. Some of the essays deal with the multiple products of forests and recount numerous anecdotes about the ingenious uses for food and medicine developed by aboriginal peoples. Most are drawn from the First Nations of North America but the Beresford-Kroeger’s views could be supported by innumerable examples from around the globe. When Mungo Park was searching for the origins of the River Niger, the shea butter tree was a dominant feature of the Sahelian savannah and played a central role in rural life, just like the oaks, butternuts, walnuts and hickories of the North American savannah. In these dry, harsh environments, sparse individual trees were highly valued and became the objects of jealously guarded rights that persist to the present day. As in North America and many parts of Europe, exceptional individual trees in Africa often assumed important cultural, spiritual and, sometimes, religious roles; in the dry plains of the northern Rift Valley in Kenya, the shade of certain large trees is still reserved for important traditional village meetings. In rural Ireland the millennium-old yews of Clonfert Abbey are recognized as sacred trees and are hung with ribbons, tokens and prayers.

Many of the essays deal in some way with the impacts of humans on forests. Inevitably, through greed, stupidity or ignorance, most of these impacts have been extremely negative, resulting in shrinkage or degradation of forest ecosystems to a fraction of their former extent. The decline of forests has usually been for survival, to clear land for agriculture, to eliminate the hiding places of those perceived to be hostile, as in 17th-century New England or 20th- century Vietnam, or for commercial profit. However, religious zeal has also played its part, particularly amongst European colonists in North America, who were imbued with a Judeo-Christian directive to “subdue the earth.” It is reassuring that in some of the essays the ledger is partially balanced by the effects of plants on humans and their unpredictable consequences. I was particularly taken with the effects of several fungi, which thrive in persistently cold, wet weather and whichproduced a toxic sclerotium, ergotamine, in rye that, when milled, baked and eaten, produced the disease known as St. Vitus’s dance. Inevitably the most serious sufferers set off on pilgrimages to seek divine relief for their ailment, which miraculously disappeared when they reached the abode of a certain French monk. As it happened this was in a drier location where the offending fungi did not thrive and the rye was uncontaminated. This climatic happenstance did nothing to diminish the reputation of the monk (who became St. Anthony) and the credit that accrued to his cure.

The cultures of Australian aborigines or the bushmen of the Kalahari provide convincing evidence that modern societies have an immense amount to learn from aboriginal wisdom and knowledge of the environment, and I agree strongly with the author’s desire to effectively integrate such knowledge with modern science. However, wise management of nature is not always an innate characteristic of aboriginal societies, a classic example being the ecological destruction of Easter Island caused by a competitive urge to raise massive stone monuments. In some cases, apparent environmental wisdom may merely ref­lect the lack of means to cause serious degradation, as on the island of Guam in the South Pacific. It is not surprising that a traumatic event such as the Second World War dramatically affected the ecosystems of the island, but the effect on public health decades later was less predictable. Apparently one of the prized foods of the Chamarro islanders is a large f­leshy bat that used to feed on the fruit of cycad trees. These bats, being difficult to hunt, were eaten only once a year at a major festival. The arrival of guns during the war disrupted this pattern and enhanced hunting efficiency so that bats could be eaten every day. Soon serious neurogenerative disorders started to appear amongst the population. Apparently the cycads kept predation of their fruit by bats under control by secreting a neurotoxin that accumulates in the body.

Taken as a whole, the book is an exhortation to respect, protect, manage and utilize forests sustainably, but the closest the author comes to giving practical guidance about how this might be achieved is in her chapter entitled Bioplan for Biodiversity: “Epicenter trees are chosen … from the highest and best genetic origin … the oldest and healthiest specimens around.” This approach dovetails with a recurrent question in conservation: how to design effective policies and practices when so little is known of the component species and processes. For example, how can we seriously aspire to protect biodiversity in forests where it is estimated that some three quarters of the insect species have yet to be identified? The ideal but unfortunately unrealistic solution is to preserve massive forest areas from any form of disturbance. The practical approach adopted in most conservation plans is to try to recognize the most critical “capstone” species in a forest ecosystem, in whose shadow all other species and processes prosper. If these capstone species are preserved, then one can have modest confidence that most dependent species will also survive. For all the myriad species that live in forests, trees are the capstone species whose survival is essential to sustainable functioning of the ecosystem. This concept can, of course, be refined to recognize a hierarchy amongst trees, in which the well-being of certain species and individuals are particularly pivotal. The practical implementation of this concept is the foresters’ recognition of seed trees, protected in sufficient number and appropriate spacing to ensure healthy seedling regeneration, accomplished by the highly skilled practice of “tree marking”—the identification of individual trees for special protection.

Beresford-Kroeger’s choice of the voice of the Irish seanchaí to tell the story of the global forest is an interesting and perhaps appropriate one, particularly in view of the amount of traditional aboriginal knowledge involved. Many of the stories are fascinating and many contain important insights on the limitations of current practices, for example, “a modern monocropped plantation of trees is not a forest” and the “removal of hedgerows has given greater efficiency to the use of pesticides on crops.” The seanchaí’s voice certainly effectively transmits the author’s passion for forests. However, the style adopted also presents some problems and, in my opinion, undermines the value of the book. In places, the emotive and assertive style of expression distorts the author’s message. It is simply untrue that “not since the Middle Ages has the Western forest been used intelligently,” as anyone familiar with the Menominee forest in the United States, or the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve in Ontario, managed by Peter Schleifenbaum, would recognize. Inevitably, statements like this raise questions about other parts of the book. Unfortunately, the style of writing does not lend itself easily to inclusion of the normal identification of sources, or recognition of previous contributions by specific references. For me, this diminishes what is in many ways an admirable and enjoyable book. Some references are included, but in most cases it is not possible to link these to specific items in the text. The author does not specifically identify the audience for which the book is intended, but if this is a general audience, then a glossary of technical terms should have been included. Finally, as a reviewer, I would have also welcomed an index.