I am ensconced in my new gable nook, my rincón, soaking in the light from an artificial sun, and looking at four framed little forest poems that were given me after my initiation. And I realized something I had known all along, but had never verbalized to myself.

The forest is feminine. Female. Dark and dangerous in so many cultures. Full of mystery, unknown paths, wild beings and creatures, and home to solitary witches and wise women of story.

So much of our culture sees the forest only as something to use. I bore the title of forester and fought against that view of the forest for 25 years. I saw myself not as a Steward of the forest, but rather as a Servant. And when necessary, a Scythe. 

And I saw up close the men (mostly, though not all) who see the forest as something to take from, rather than as a spirit to befriend. They all had powerful arguments for why their way was best for the forest.

“We must protect forests in exactly the degraded and unhealthy state the past has brought them to. It is hubris to think that mere humans could heal some of the injuries they inflicted in the past.” 

Or, “The climate emergency is the only thing we can afford to think of. Whatever other things we might have been doing with forests before must stop, so that we can use the forest to produce as much biomass from carbon as possible. Water quality, wildlife habitat, recreation, and even spiritual values must be sacrificed on the altar of carbon.”

Or, “Forests must serve humanity. We must reward forest owners who meet even their most basic needs, while allowing them to take what they want: timber, water, wildlife, fresh air. And the State must also own forests, managing them to serve the interests of the voting public so the everyday citizen can use forests for recreation too.”

All of these arguments treat a forest as a thing, or a place. As an other to be enslaved and used. And not as a being, not as a manifestation of spirit. Anyone who has worked with forests instead of simply working in forests knows that she is both. The forest is a woman. The trees are her bones, the leaves her hair. She gathers a skirt of soil around her roots, weathers rocks, and composts life to extract elements. She breathes in carbon for her bones, and drinks in the rains to soak her soil and water her trees. She was born when a change in micro-climate allowed the first trees to immigrate to the fields or marshes or tundra where she grew. And inevitably, she will die. Either destroyed and replaced with more humans and their structures, or becoming some new natural community not dominated by trees.

The forest is a woman. She has changed since her earliest days when the first trees started growing on the tundra and taiga of a receding glacier or the loess deposited on a still-cooling volcanic island or any of the other ways that trees took hold in a new place. Once enough trees had migrated to an area, they made it their own. They created new microclimates to support their favored microbes and insects and plants and animals. Individual trees became an ecosystem, and the forest awoke.

The forest is a woman. Our society thinks mostly about how they can use her. How she can serve them. What they can take from her. We know better. We know that enslaving a forest is no more ethical than enslaving another person. We know that the forest is spirit. The forest is a being. The forest is a woman. 

And so we learn to listen instead of speak. We learn that trying to make the forest live at the speed of human thought will kill her. Her thoughts move over centuries and millennia. We need to slow down in order to meet her midway. We need to buffer her the best we can from the catastrophically rapid changes we are making in the world. We need to treat her and her sisters as the most treasured beings in our region. We must learn to offer friendship instead of extracting resources, become neighbors and friends instead of colonizers and pillagers.

The forest is a woman. 

And I am too.

-Rowan Hawthorne (she/her)

Rowan Hawthorne shares her corner of the world with her wife, the wood between the brooks, songbirds, ravens, turkeys, bears, coyotes, bob cats, white-tailed deer, rabbits, foxes, a small spruce bog, and some lovely rock outcroppings.