John Keats - William Blake - Iain Stewart TV - The Wee Man 2013 - Susan George - Karl Marx - Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood - Mahatma Gandhi - David Attenborough - John Muir - Carl Sagan TV - Robert Louis Stevenson - Franklin D Roosevelt - Charles Darwin - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Ken Burns TV - Friedrich Nietzsche - Steve Coogan TV - Noam Chomsky - World’s Most Extraordinary Homes TV - Mexico: Earth’s Festival of Life TV - Dispatches TV - David Yamaguchi - Earth’s Natural Wonders TV - Earth’s Greatest Spectacles TV - Ancient Aliens TV - Destination Truth TV - Storyville: The Truffle Hunters TV - Secret Life of the Forest TV - A Year on Planet Earth TV -
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim. John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale stanza II
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? William Blake, The Tiger
This is the oldest forest in Africa. A relic really of a time when trees dominated the planet. So this really has a feeling descended into that lost world. Iain Stewart, How to Grow a Planet III: The Challenger, BBC 2012
The forests started breaking up. The grasses were on a land grab. Conquering the territory once held by the trees ... The world was ablaze ... Grasses were dominating the land. ibid.
Outside this house is a forest, a vast dark scary forest full of evil things lurking behind trees waiting to get ya. The Wee Man 2013 starring Patrick Bergin & Bhrina Bache & Hannah Blamires & Lewis Brand & Mark Burdis & Martin Compston & Chris Cowlin & Steve Daly & Simon DeSilva & Paul Donnelly & Gary Driscoll et al, director Ray Burdis, father's bedside story
The environment is probably the major victim next to human beings of the debt crisis, if only because countries are obliged to cash in their resources. They must cut down their forests. They must dig up their minerals and ruin their land, producing cash crops to earn enough currency to keep on paying the debt. There is an almost perfect correlation between the top debtors and the top deforesters. There is a striking correlation. Dr Susan George, author The Debt Boomerang
The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison. Karl Marx, Capital II
In the space of a few generations we have laid waste to paradise. The Tall-grass Prairie has been transformed into a corn factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Shortgrass Prairie is a grid of carefully fenced cow pastures and wheat-fields. The Passenger Pigeon is no more; the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The endless forests of the East are tame woodlots. With few exceptions, the only virgin deciduous forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than one thousand Grizzlies remain. The last three condors left in the wild were captured and imprisoned in the Los Angeles Zoo. (An expensive reintroduction effort has since been started.) Except in northern Minnesota and northwestern Montana, wolves are known as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian and Mexican borders. Four percent of the peerless Redwood Forest remains and the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland communities of the West, displacing Elk, Moose, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghorn and leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly Bear, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and other ‘varmints’. Dams choke most of the continent’s rivers and streams. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching
What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. Mahatma Gandhi
The winter forests can support very few plant-eaters. David Attenborough, The Living Planet: The Northern Forests III, BBC 1984
This forest covers only 3% of the planet’s surface but it contains more than 50% of all its plants and animals. The canopy is particularly rich. There are monkeys, birds and millions of species of insects. Exactly how many we have no idea. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s1e1: Pole to Pole, BBC 2007
Trees – surely among the most magnificent of all living things. Some are the largest organisms on earth dwarfing all others, and these are the tallest of them all. The deciduous and coniferous woodlands that grow in the seasonal parts of our planet are the most extensive forests on earth. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s1e10: Seasonal Forests
Giant Redwood ... These conifers grow at ten times the rate of those near the Arctic, and they live for thousands of years. ibid.
An unbroken belt of forest that stretches seven miles around our planet and contains one-third of all the trees on Earth. David Attenborough, Frozen Planet I, BBC 2011
Bromeliads and the frogs that live in them are only one example of the complex relationships that abound in the rain forests. David Attenborough’s Kingdom of Plants I, BBC 2012
This beautiful lemur has now become a symbol of the fight to save the forest. David Attenborough and the Giant Egg, BBC 2011
Forests cover one-third of the lands of the Earth. Hiding within them are half of all the animal species on the planet. But forests are complex places in which to hunt. There is never a clean line of sight. No room for the chase ... The forest hunter must master the art of ambush. David Attenborough, The Hunt III: Hide and Seek (Forests), BBC 2015
The American marten ... must continually search for food. ibid.
Chimpanzees hunt monkeys by using the most complex and intelligent ambush of all. ibid.
The ant raid is an unequalled phenomenon. Over a million hunters chasing hundreds of species of prey animals. ibid.
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. John Muir
This is the Boreal Forest: the largest forest on Earth. 750 billion trees. Smothered by snow throughout the winter. This is the northernmost boundary of an extraordinary world … A very different world dominated by relentless change. David Attenborough, The Green Planet III: Seasonal Worlds, BBC 2022
Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish. John Muir, The National Parks and Forest Reservations, Sierra Club Bulletin I:7
After we discovered fire we began to incinerate forests intentionally to clear the land for a process called Slash and Burn agriculture. And today forests and grasslands are being destroyed frivolously, carelessly, by humans who are heedless of the beauty of our cousins the trees. And ignorant of the possible climatic catastrophes that large-scale burning of forests may begin. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Heaven and Hell, 1979
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanates from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. Robert Louis Stevenson, Forest Notes
Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. Franklin D Roosevelt
Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
I do not count the hours I spend
In wandering by the sea;
The forest is my loyal friend,
A Delphic shrine to me. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Muir considered forests sacred; he wanted them treated as parks. Ken Burns, The National Parks: The Last Refuge 1890-1903, PBS 2009
I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
For some Thetford Forest means dogging or suicide. Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life, Alan walks, Sky Atlantic 2014
The same is true in Thailand, where the government announced a plan to expel six million people from forests where it wants to establish softwood plantations. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy