New ways of seeing – connecting with forests across the hemispheres

As the International Year of Forests draws to a close, Alison Pouliot reflects on the importance of connecting with forests across the globe.

European Jura Forest

It takes time to connect with place. It takes time until the longing for the ‘there’ becomes absorbed by the ‘here’. It takes time for place to get into your blood, your consciousness, your imagination, to truly seep in and become familiar.

When I first set foot in the local forest here in the European Jura a decade ago, I didn’t hear my footfall. There was no familiar crack of dried leaves and sticks of the Australian bush’s tangled understorey.  There was no warning call from pardalotes or tree creepers alerting all to my intrusion. And there was no shrill incessant ringing of cicadas above a chorus of buzzing insects.

After the rains, my nose strained for the scent of wet bush and damp earth. But I sniffed in vain and met with just a kind of sour musty dankness, like an unwelcoming cellar. How was I to reconcile the lack of sensuousness of this unfamiliar forest?

In the beginning, the silence, the apparent lifelessness and the uninviting darkness were disheartening. I longed for the dynamism of Australian forests that command one’s attention and alert every sense with their endless activity and myriad of forms to admire. Their hidden and impenetrable corners, chaotic and asymmetric vegetation, their wildness, at times seem to parody the Australian temperament.

In contrast, this European park-like forest was as if a troop of unseen faeries had preceded me, sweeping everything into order. The regularity and symmetry seemed to suggest adherence to some unspoken rule of conformity (an audacious reader may continue the anthropocentric connections here…)

No matter how far I wandered, I could rarely escape the distant hum of traffic or the thundering intrusion of fighter jets overhead. My foreigner’s eye inevitably viewed everything as weeds; a stark reminder that a weed is merely something growing where it’s not wanted. The interpretive sign that proudly announced the forest’s inhabitants as foxes, deer and rabbits, challenged me to re-align my thinking with place.

I soon opened my eyes, adjusted my focus. Alerted my senses. Tuned my ear to a different scale. I heard the tapping of woodpeckers, the furtive scampering of squirrels, marvelled at the exquisitely delicate lichens that clothed every limb. I watched the quivering lips of young deer slipping between the slanting rays of morning light. As the leaves turned and fluttered to the ground, fungi pushed through the soil in a stunning palette of colours and striking forms.

In time, this forest seeped into my blood and my sense of place. I made connections, found delight and curiosity and splendour. The names all this forest’s creatures still elude me, but it doesn’t matter. Every day begins with a wander through this forest and every wander promises some new and astonishing discovery. It never fails to intrigue and enchant. And it’s the constant connection with the foreign among the familiar, that fuels this captivation.

The local box and ironbark forest

There’s space enough for us to embrace every forest. Forests all over the world need us to make this connection – to preserve their biodiversity, splendour and significance. Their future existence and best possibilities for management rely on us forging connections between nature and culture. Without this connection they remain dangerously in peril of exploitation.

We all know governments are notoriously fickle. The new proposed changes to state environment laws that will allow logging exemptions undermine the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act and could set forest conservation back decades. The greater our connection to forests, the greater the possibility to resist these actions.

There’s wonderment in both the unknown and the familiar, discoveries to be made in every forest; they’re just waiting for those prepared to make the connection. I’ll sign off here to search for my passport and count down the days until I set foot once again in the Aussie bush.

Words & images:  www.alisonpouliot.com