Creating a vast new forest inn Central England will help offset climate change, but it also appeals to the imagination. And that’s essential if we are to turn our environmental aspirations into reality
Felix Dennis embodied the contradictions of the counterculture. As the young editor of Oz, he was prosecuted for obscenity when he published a cartoon showing Rupert Bear having sex. He built a publishing empire and reportedly spent millions on drugs; but this week, following his death and the sale of his company, we heard that he’s leaving £150 million to establish a broad-leafed forest in Warwickshire comprising 10 million trees.
Something stirred in me when I heard this story, which came amid news of the global heatwave that makes climate change seem closer and more real than ever. The forest his foundation will plant will sequester carbon and restore wildlife by creating a green corridor through central England. But Dennis’ legacy also touched something in me that’s only indirectly concerned with these pragmatic benefits – the imaginative resonance of restoring ancient forests.
There’s the echo of Shakespeare, whose plays are filled with memories of the woods around Stratford, especially As You Like It, where the courtiers flee to a forest named after Warwickshire’s Forest of Arden and find ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.’
Even in the play that’s a romanticised version of nature; but the yearning for contact with the natural world, and the alienation we feel when we’re deprived of it, go very deep. For Buddhism, they reflect an understanding of human flourishing that’s expressed in the image of the Buddha at the point of Enlightenment, seated beneath a spreading fig tree in the heart of the forest.
He has abandoned the illusory belief that we can bend life to our desires, opened himself to the impermanent, interconnected nature of existence and felt in the core of his being the relationship between actions and consequences. Through our choices, he understands, we create the world for good and for ill.
Most of us value nature and fear climate change, but often that’s one concern among many, and collectively we’ve been slow to act. For that to change I think we need to know the natural world more fully and love it more deeply. We need to let the call of the forest, which the poets have so often expressed, stir our imaginations with a longing for freedom and simplicity.
The impulse to restore the forests is a response to the needs of the planet, but it also engages our own spiritual need for wholeness and renewal.
