The Treeline Quotes

“Systems change when there is a culture that demands it”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

“The revolution begins with a walk in the woods. How did it ever come to pass that we would forget the names of the living things that manufactured oxygen, purified the air and water?”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

“This is how the world ends: in a myriad of tiny tragedies. Each extinction of species, language, custom is noted not with a howl of protest but with a quiet tear.”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

“Capitalism not only alienates and commodifies nature into products and transforms humans into consumers, it also alienates and commodifies us. Our very gaze has become a product. Our attention is directed away from the biosphere that sustains us, and this alienation makes us to varying degrees blind, deaf and dumb.”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

“Life is not the opposite of death, but a continuum. Evolutionary nature is an engine of mystery- of things we do not and cannot know. Every step is simultaneously an act of destruction and of creation, of life. There is consolation in the fact that we are always living in the ruins of what went before.”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

“The Romans, Danes and the nobles of England were in search of natural resources, principally timber. The colonization of Wales was the first expression of an economic system founded on overreach: having exceeded the limits of what their own environment could sustain, early mercantilists applied force to acquire tribute and resources elsewhere. Empire, whether British, Viking, Roman or otherwise, is by definition overreach. And colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy share a common, perverse philosophy: limits on some humans’ freedom of action are seen as an affront to the principle of freedom itself. The exact opposite of the coevolutionary dynamic of the forest.”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

“The leaf talks to the wind, the flower talks to the bee, the roots talk to the fungi- the world is a chaotic, noisy place! We are making the world with our bodies, with our feet, our eyes, our breath, our imaginations. Multiple randomized branching futures are possible...seas of possibility, an infinite experiment in coevolution.”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

“Stories and ideas of the frozen north, like so much else of human culture linked to stable climates, familiar species and regular seasons, will be like the light from stars shining for years after they are long dead.”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

“The unnatural has become natural, the apocalyptic has become prosaic, a perennial event merging into the background. This, perhaps, is one of the emerging realities of climate breakbown: that grief is a luxury. The urgent demands of daily life allow for no such respite or detatchment.”
― Ben Rawlence, The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth