Key takeaways
- Forests do measurable work: Quotes from Peter Wohlleben and António Guterres put numbers on what they do for temperature, carbon, and clean water, not just how they look.
- Before deforestation and climate change, nineteenth-century writers like Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson wrote toward the wonder of forests; the activists and Indigenous leaders also quoted here more often today write toward urgency.
- Indigenous leaders, from Nemonte Nenquimo to Txai Suruí to Marina Silva, are some of the most specific and forceful voices for both the beauty and value of nature.
"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,"
John Muir wrote in his journals more than a century ago. Forests cool the land around them by 10 to 15 degrees in summer and absorb roughly a third of the greenhouse gases people emit each year. They have also occupied some of the best writers, scientists, and activists working today, and plenty who came before them.
Poets and naturalists have spent careers paying close attention to trees. Foresters and ecologists have spent theirs explaining what forests do for the planet's climate, water, and air. Indigenous leaders and activists are working, often at real personal risk, to keep forests standing. Together, their words move from forests as wilderness admired at a distance to forests as infrastructure the world depends on to function.
