Strangely Like War
STRANGELY LIKE WAR?The Global Assault on Forests
Derrick Jensen and George Draffan
Chelsea Green Publishing.
Picture this.
An "unbroken forest" of oaks and conifers blanketing the highlands of Iraq and Iran. The hills of Palestine and Lebanon, crowned with cedars and pines. "Dense forest growth" in arid North Africa. Juniper, fir, and sycamore woodlands blanketing Syria, and oak groves dotting the Arabian peninsula.
Sound fantastic? It shouldn't.
Ancient Greece was a fertile and wooded land where even lions roamed. Germany's Black Forest consists of trees imported from North America, the natives felled to house Europe's masses. San Francisco's peninsula provided the redwood trees that built the great city, leaving it barren and ripe for sprawl. Today less than 5 percent of native forests remain in the continental United States, and even that is under attack. Plans are in the works to "manage" the majestic trees of Sequoia National Monument.
Derrick Jensen and George Draffan's Strangely Like War is rife with depressing facts and figures, and predictions even more terrifying than those threatened by ecological doomsayers like Marc Reisner, Mike Davis, and John McPhee. Our natural forests are disappearing at such a rate—two football fields every second worldwide—that we'll no doubt see the end of them in our lifetimes. Every day 130 species of animals go extinct and countless indigenous peoples are displaced. Meanwhile the taxpayer-subsidized timber industry buys 400 year-old trees for "less than the price of a cheeseburger" and sells the lumber for immense profits, replacing them with profitable managed plantations.
Surprisingly engrossing for a terminal diagnosis, Strangely Like War offers few answers but presents many intriguing questions. Some obvious. Why are we so reliant on paper products made out of trees? Others more complex. Why do we continue to permit our environmental policies to be manipulated by corporations?
Although the future looks grim, Jensen still manages to leave us with a crumb of pessimistic hope. "Most of us environmentalists are holding on by our fingernails, trying to save whatever scraps of forests we can," he admits, "And we are praying, every moment of every day, for civilization to end. For this culture to run out of oil, to collapse in on itself. For this long and awful nightmare of deforestation and dispossession to end."
This review originally appeared in the LA Weekly.