Woodman, Spare that Tree
25th November 2011Flourishing Trees, Flourishing Minds: Nearby trees may improve mental wellbeing.
2nd December 2011What is a forest?
When most people think of a forest, they think of a big area of trees. Yet definitions of a forest vary (for example, as arboricultural consultants we focus on the ‘urban forest‘) and a historical overview of the definition of ‘forest’ suggests it is not as clear cut as it seems.
In ‘Forests, The Shadow of Civilization’ (1993), Robert Harrison notes how medieval chivalric romances tend to represent forests as lying beyond the confines of the civic world and its institutions of law. But early on in the Middle Ages many forests had already come under the jurisdiction of law. The word ‘forest’ in fact originates as a juridical term. Along with its various cognates in European languages (foresta, foret, forst, etc.), it derives from the Latin foresta. The Latin work does not come into existence until the Merovingian period. The word foresta appears for the first time in the laws of the Longobards and the capitularies of Charlemagne, referring not to woodlands in general but only to the royal game preserves. The word has an uncertain provenance. The most likely origin is the Latin foris, meaning ‘outside.’ The obscure Latin verb forestare meant ‘to keep out, to place off limits, to exclude.’ In effect, during the Merovingian period in which the word foresta entered the lexicon, kings had taken it upon themselves to place public bans on vast tracts of woodlands in order to insure the survival of their wildlife, which in turn would insure the survival of a fundamental royal ritual–the hunt.
The king hunting in the forests
“A ‘forest,’ then, was originally a juridical term referring to land that had been placed off limits by a royal decree. Once a region had been ‘afforested,’ or declared a forest, it could not be cultivated, exploited, or encroached upon. It lay outside the public domain, reserved for the king’s pleasure and recreation. In England it also lay outside the common juridical sphere. Offenders were not punishable by the common law but rather by a set of very specific ‘forest laws.’ The royal forests lay ‘outside’ in another sense as well, for the space enclosed by the walls of a royal garden was sometimes called silva, or wood. Forestis silva meant the unenclosed woods ‘outside’ the walls.”
(N.B The English word savage comes from Latin silvaticus (wild), itself from silva (wood, forest)).
Oliver Rackham, backs these ideas up in ‘The History of the Countryside’ (1986). He notes that although the mysterious word forest may, in its Germanic origin, have meant a tract of trees. In Western Europe it came to mean land on which deer were protected by special byelaws. The laws and the word were introduced to England from the Continent by William the Conqueror. For many centuries Forest meant a place of deer. The Authorized Version of the Bible, published in 1611, doubtless encouraged Englishmen to connect forest with trees, but the word could still mean ‘heath’ more than a century later.
Interesting historical stuff, but the debate as to what is a forest still rages today, with ‘The Great Lie: Monoculture Trees as Forests’, (2011), authors Winnie Overbeek, and Raquel Núñez Mutter suggest that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) continues to define a forest as an area of land with ‘tree crown cover’, without specifying that the tree species be diverse or that the embedded flora and fauna constitute an integral part. National and international institutions, including the tree plantation companies who are the owners of “planted forests”, invoke this definition, which provides a convenient “green” profile to expand industrial plantations to satisfy market demand.
According to the FAO, both an industrial eucalyptus tree monoculture plantation and a rainforest with its hundreds of different tree species are classed as forest. But neighbours of such vegetation types would only recognize the rainforest as a forest, while a tree monoculture plantation would often be referred to as a “green desert”. The only similarity a neighbour may indeed observe is that both types of vegetation contain trees. Moving the approach from a top-down, market-oriented one to a more multisectoral and participatory one reveals a radically different definition of “forest”.
Interestingly, when looking at the historical definition of the word ‘forest’ – a juridical term referring to land that had been placed off limits that could not be encroached upon- this seems to define quite well what the authors have in mind when they describe a forest as a ‘green desert’. They suggest that the definition of a “forest” needs to be reviewed, and needs to bring back the social dimension.
Forest
Adam
I'm a Chartered Arboriculturist at AWA Tree Consultants Ltd. As well as detailing our recent tree survey and arboricultural consultant work, this blog includes wide ranging arboricultural musings, including tree facts, opinion and anecdotes on trees in human culture.
