In the twelfth century, long long before that, and all the way until the end of the nineteenth, people in the more settled lands around the world did not walk out of their houses and into a forbidding forest, but into woods that were worked and managed, places they knew as intimately as they knew one another. They were the source of fuel, food, building material, fertilizer, medicine, musical instruments. There, they formed an active, millennial relationship to nature that was not destructive but regenerative. It was good both for the people and the trees.
