CLBAForest1

“Where are the Forests of Today?”
CLBA Journal 2005
Judith Hoch, Ph.D.
When Ernesto Pichardo, my godfather and friend, asked me to write an essay about the ‘sacred forest’ for the CLBA website, I agreed because one of my greatest passions is the forest and trees near my home in New Zealand. The ancient West African rainforest, with its primeval trees and complex plant environments, was the antecedent and inspiration for many Lucumi/Yoruba beliefs and practices. Unfortunately, the sacred forest that once existed throughout the Yoruba nation lives today only in legends and tales. Lucumi depends for its medicines and spiritual insights on wild, untamed nature. Yet, it is difficult for an olorisha to find a wild, untamed ‘sacred forest’ because mass consumerism and expanding populations have ravaged our natural forest heritage, not only in Nigeria, but also in every corner of the globe.
In my mind’s eye, I see the great Orisha weeping for what this beautiful planet has lost, and for the continual desecration of its remaining wilderness areas. It is important that every olorisha become involved in environmental activism, saving rainforests, planting trees, boycotting rogue timber, joining forest organizations, writing letters to politicians, and perhaps most importantly, educating her/himself about what is happening to our ‘sacred forests.’ I will give you a little background on the condition of Earth’s forests today, and the relationship to Lucumi beliefs, but there is much more you will learn by becoming involved in forest stewardship. The second half of this essay is from a chapter of a book I’ve written about Lucumi philosophy called, Victory Over Strong Enemies, and it talks more about Lucumi and the master teachings that have come to us from trees.
The Lucumi idea that trees have spirits, who can share love and important intuitive wisdoms with us, is, according to the extreme American pro-development and family values perspective, an hysterical, even dangerous mistake. The logical, pro-business, pro-life viewpoint might concede that trees in a landscape or garden are ‘beautiful.’ However, to suggest that trees are ‘sacred’ beings, with as many rights to habitat and life as humans, courts being called a ‘tree hugger,’ or even ‘eco-terrorist.’ This point of view derives from centuries of natural resource exploitation by the West, driven by the disastrous Christian belief that man has a divine right to control and dominate the natural environment.
By contrast, Lucumi belief contains the opposite sentiment. In Lucumi thought, every tree has an eleda, a spiritual counterpart with destiny and purpose. For Lucumi practitioners, the forest is the backdrop to healing and ceremony, a sacred landscape of spirit, filled with plant and animal knowledge, and medicine needed for healing and initiation. Perhaps most importantly, ancient trees in Lucumi tradition are great master teachers. For instance, in the story that I will relate in the second part of this essay, an ancient Nigerian iroko tree sheltered and protected the Orisha, Orunmila, and taught him Ifa divination. According to this pataki, the greatest wisdom of Lucumi is contained in ancient trees. Many indigenous peoples believe that trees are our oldest ancestors who gave birth to the human race. In many ways, this belief is true scientifically.
The forest that coheres with Lucumi is the old growth forest, full of ancient groves, myriad plants, vines, flowers, fruits, nuts, animals, birds, clear flowing creeks and rivers, and scintillating nature magic. A commercially planted forest is of little significance to Lucumi. Such a forest is almost devoid of the herbs, leaves, roots, and most importantly, the spiritual experience of a natural old forest. The iroko, a type of mahogany, is mentioned in many Yoruba stories, and, in the past, iroko trees were often found in sacred groves where ritual took place. Now, the giant iroko is scarce in Nigeria where there is less than one percent of the original native forest left standing. It is hard to contemplate the fact that the country, which gave birth to the profound Lucumi spiritual path, is itself, now almost devoid of the habitat that the Orisha created on earth. It is ironic that in the Nigerian and Cuban homelands of Lucumi, the forest and its animals and birds are as threatened with extinction as they are everywhere else.
It is not hard to figure out why the iroko is disappearing from the wild. I learned from a joinery website that the sacred iroko of Lucumi tradition is an excellent building material. The cholorophora excelsa and regia, the two main species of iroko found all over tropical Africa at one time, attain very large sizes, reaching 45m or more in height and up to 2.7m in diameter. According to the website, Iroko has excellent strength properties, comparing well with teak. It is valuable, they say, for ship and boat-building, light flooring, interior and exterior joinery, window frames, sills, stair treads, fire-proof doors, laboratory benches, furniture, carvings, marine uses such as piling, dock and harbor work, and produces a satisfactory sliced veneer. True to our exploitative, resource consuming, contemporary societies, there is no mention of the spiritual or ecological value of iroko at all.
We live in a time when the Republican Party and multinational corporations hope to convince us that to love trees as we love people is a ridiculous error. Trees from their so-called ‘rational’ point of view are useful to industry and commerce. The fact that timber companies are setting fire to the last stands of old growth forest are irrelevant to business, even when, like today, August 13,2005, the entire port of Singapore is closed because of polluting haze from forest fires in Indonesia. Timber from the last rainforests in Asia is for sale all over the world. Never mind, say the multinationals, we’ll plant more trees. The more trees planted for useful purposes, paper, building materials, furniture making, and the like, the better. These planted trees are ‘tree plantations,’ for example, in America, mono-crops of oak or pine planted for commercial use, and they appear as ‘forests’ in statistical summaries of ‘forested’ land in the USA and other countries.
To the pro-development mindset, a planted forest is equivalent to a natural one, yet nothing could be further from the truth. These sad tree plantations, sprayed and pruned for industrial need, are reminiscent of factory farms for animals. Trees, like animals, do have spirits, which love to live in concert with other wild things, to grow naturally, and to enjoy their lives. A planted forest is a lonely and barren place, but that is what will replace (if anything does) the forests that are now burning in Asia, Siberia, Africa and elsewhere.
Contemporary Forest Mystics
Most of us have not had time to find the last remaining old forests where trees have ancient spiritual knowledge gained over millions of years of evolution on Earth. It is only when we spend time in old forests that we learn the ignorance of the ‘pro-development, resource gobbling’ worldview. Much old forest is in remote, mountainous areas difficult and costly to reach. For that reason, many of us will never have the time and resources to visit old growth forests and learn their mysteries. Even so, we can at least read the comments made by forest mystics, those people who’ve spent time with old trees and learned that they are more than their wood reduced to dollars and cents. Here are a few thoughts from forest mystics from California, New England, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and Cuba.
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
~ John Muir

So to the Dagara, there is an understood hierarchy of consciousness. The elements of nature, especially the trees and plants, are the most intelligent beings because they do not need words to communicate. They live closer to the meaning behind language.
~Malidoma Patrice Some, The Healing Wisdom of Africa

A region without trees is poor. A city without trees is sickly; land without trees is parched and bears wretched fruit. And when good trees are to be had, we must not be crazed heirs of their great timber, because those who did not amass that wooded treasure do not know when it will run out, and they cast it into the river. All trees which are felled must be replaced, so the heritage may remain forever intact.
~Jose Marti

...I have been privileged to know the peace of the forest. The forest—any forest—is, for me, the most spiritual place...It is my long days, months, and years in the forests of Gombe that help me to keep calm in the midst of chaos, for I carry the peace within me.
~Jane Goodall, A Reason to Hope

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? ~Walt Whitman

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
~Henry David Thoreau

The people quoted above, two poets, a primatologist, a naturalist, an African shaman, and the liberator of Cuba, all took time to live in the forest, to initiate there, to study the animals, and to gain spiritual richness. Those of us affiliated with Lucumi, have probably visited remaining forest stands near our homes and communed for a short time with forest spirits, leaving our offering of appreciation. However, finding a truly wild forest that spans any distance is a difficult task for keen hikers, climbers, and campers because most remaining old growth forest stands are in rugged, steep, and mountainous country remote from cities.
What happened to the giant, primeval, and sacred forests that grew in the nations most associated with Lucumi? Primary stands of ancient trees, once covered Cuba, Nigeria, and the United States, but they disappeared during colonial settlement, especially after the start of the industrial revolution in Europe. The colonists desired timber for building houses, factories, sailing and steam ships, making furniture, building bridges, railroads, and stations, and many, many forests burned to make way for European livestock and cash crops. In Nigeria, Cuba, and the United States, countries where many Lucumi and Yoruba practitioners live, less than one percent of indigenous forest survives, and even that one percent is under threat. Although we often read that the percentage of forest cover is much greater than this, for example, we can see figures for these three countries, which vary between 22 and 26 percent in the World Resources Institute website, these figures disguise the fact that most forest stands are fragmented, young, and/or exotic species planted for industrial purposes.
We have lost and are losing what many indigenous peoples rightly called, our earliest ancestors, and with them, our ancestral direction and faith. The old forest was always a place of worship and initiation, as well as the supplier of many human needs, including medicine, food, shelter, and fuel. Most indigenous peoples had sacred forest traditions, whereby large areas of primeval forest were set aside for limited, prescribed use, which included spiritual practice. When population numbers were much smaller, pressure on natural resources was far less, making it easier to maintain sustainability and to practice good conservation of wild spaces. However, it was not simply small population numbers that preserved the ancient forest. It was native peoples’ spiritual values of respect and appreciation, which preserved the forest’s natural condition. Many indigenous peoples have legends of acquiring their spiritual knowledge, especially their divination systems, from trees. When trees teach humans how to live good lives, it is not likely that the humans will destroy them wantonly for sheer monetary gain.
By contrast, Christian colonial attitudes around the forest and all things wild were disrespectful and barbaric, even before the rush to turn all resources into commodities began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Colonial Christianity despised all religions not Christian, and hated and feared ‘pagans’ who worshipped in the wild. Because ancient groves of trees were temples to pagans around the world, Christians were especially brutal in cutting them, often building churches from the sawn timber. Whatever the reason, the great forests of the Caribbean, America, and Africa, as well as pagan Europe, were clear- felled progressively from the beginning of Christian conquest.
Pagan attitudes of worshipful nature reverence went underground in many countries where colonial repression demanded, as it did in Cuba, that everyone be baptized leaving ‘pagan’ ways behind. Today, in America, thanks in part to Ernesto Pichardo, Lucumi is free to express its beliefs and to practice them. There is no doubt in my mind, that a Lucumi olorisha must not only shop in botanicas for herbal and forest ingredients, but must support forest conservation wherever she or he may live. Lucumi is a pagan religion. When the wild and free disappear, Lucumi will be impoverished beyond reclamation. Lucumi olorisha should be at the head of environmental movements in their home states and countries. The forest spirits of trees, plants, animals and birds demand no less.
Ernesto Pichardo always reminds me that Lucumi sees everything in nature as sacred. Natural elements each have their own ashe, neutral creative powers, and their eleda, their spiritual counterparts in a parallel domain. This attitude toward nature, that everything is alive, charged with energy and spiritual purpose, is common among indigenous peoples everywhere.   For instance, spirit to native Hawaiians, as to Lucumi olorisha, is manifest in everything in nature: plants, water, rocks, and air. The whole landscape radiates ashe, which the Hawaiians call mana.   Both Lucumi olorisha and Hawaiian kahuna call upon this source of power to heal and to bless. Hawaiian medicine, like Lucumi medicine, was forced underground for centuries after contact with the West. Hawaiian practices, like those of Lucumi, became kapu for many generations. Like Lucumi olorisha in Cuba, Hawaiians only taught their religion to other Hawaiians in secret during the repression of western European conquest.
To both the ancient Hawaiians and to Lucumi and Yoruba olorisha, the forest is a key sacred structure in nature. It purifies and replenishes air, holds water in the ground, prevents erosion, nourishes and sustains all animal and plant life including humans, contains a multitude of healing remedies, and is an important ancestor of human beings. An olorisha’s training includes preparing, obtaining, and learning about herbs, trees, fruits and flowers, in order to make herbal baths and waters. In Lucumi practice, because they are sacred, that is, related to all that is divine and full of ashe, plants, trees, animals, and birds have properties that can cure body, mind and soul. To the Lucumi olorisha or the Hawaiian kahuna, human beings are simply one living species in a world of equally important others.
Ernesto Pichardo grows some of the plants he needs in his home garden, and knows over 150 praise songs, which he sings when he gathers and prepares them. Ernesto tells the plant what he is going to do before he cuts it, asks its permission, and does not take more than he needs. There is often an herbal preparation boiling, simmering, or cooling in Ernesto and his olorisha wife, Nydia’s, kitchen. Ernesto buys some of the fruits and other things he needs for Lucumi ceremony and ritual at the supermarket, or at botanicas in Miami, the shops that stock many things needed for Lucumi baths, altars, herbal charms, and initiations. However, Ernesto is also planting trees and plants that he needs in his home garden and tries to avoid commercially acquired plants.
Although there is no traditional, sacred forest in Miami, it is a city with a big canopy of mature trees and lush gardens. Many Yoruba herbs grow there, and Ernesto thinks that is another important reason why Lucumi thrives in Miami. The environment is similar to Nigeria and Cuba; all three places are hot and humid. Trees that abound like the almond and the royal palm are sacred to Lucumi Orisha, and even curbside wild herbs appear in healing rituals. Lucumi in Miami uses the wildness that grows through cracks in the city’s concrete, a memory of the lost and very wild old growth forests that once created and inspired Lucumi spiritual values.
Old Growth Forests
The term, old growth forest, refers to a forest that has been growing and evolving naturally for millions of years. There are very few areas where old growth forest exists today, among them the boreal (northern) forests of Canada and Siberia. However, these too are under threat, especially in Siberia, from rogue timber companies who set fires to the boreal forest even as I write this.
A contemporary definition of old growth forest says it is a forest where there are at least eight or more trees per acre over 150 years old on a site not less than five acres large. Forest fragments such as these are the most common examples of old growth forest today in America. There are few large contiguous stretches left, even though giant trees are keystone resources that protect a large piece of the environment around them. Their ecological services include maintenance of water cycles, climate regulation, soil production, fertility and protection from erosion, nutrient storage and cycling, pollutant breakdown and absorption, and a potential source of genetic material for new drugs and food crops.
The forests that remain still provide an amazing list of products, with some 15,000 species of wild plants and animals used for foods, medicines and other functions. Even in cities, trees perform important ecological services. Just three trees planted around the average size home can lower air conditioning bills by up to 50%, and trees that shield homes against the wind can lower heating bills by up to 30%. An average tree absorbs ten pounds of pollutants from the air each year, including four pounds of ozone and three pounds of particulates. Half of the oxygen on our planet was created by plants, trees, shrubs, grasses, and other plants, and the rest by phytoplankton photosynthesis.
The first life on our planet began around 3.5 billion years ago in the form of aquatic bacteria. Blue-green alga was the first earth plant. As recently as 470 million years ago, there were still no plants or trees on the earth’s surface. To move out of water, plants had to develop weight-supporting systems, a system to transport water and nutrients so they wouldn’t dry out, and an insulation system from sun and temperature changes. Obviously, these adaptations take a very long time. Trees first appeared and began to cover the earth some 370 million years ago. These trees helped break up the hard crust of the earth’s surface allowing the evolution of other plant species, more trees, and more diverse mammals. Although plants and trees are young in comparison to the age of the earth, they are very ancient compared to the age of human beings. Even the first rose, so closely connected to human imagination, evolved 66 million years ago. By contrast, homo sapiens’ earliest skeletons are dated from 200,000 years ago, although homo sapien’s ancestors are dated to over five million years ago in Africa.
Today there are over 100,000 known species of trees with perhaps 8,000 species threatened with extinction. Over the past 8,000 years nearly one half of the forests that once covered the Earth have been converted to farms, pastures, and other uses and much of the rest has been fragmented. Improvements in health and technology mean that human populations have grown at a rate unparalleled by any other major land animal species in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history. According to UN estimates, one billion people lived on the planet by 1800. Today over 6.3 billion people live on our planet and the relentless use of dwindling resources continues unabated. During the single decade from 1990 to 2000, 2 percent of the world’s forest cover, roughly 10 million hectares was lost, according to FAO, and that rate continues today. Most forests that are left are heavily altered by humans, who have rendered them into a patchwork of small areas. According to a 1997 World Resources Institute assessment, just one fifth of the Earth’s original forest remains in large, relatively natural ecosystems known as ‘frontier forests.’ However, since 1997, more of these forests, especially in Asia, South America, and Siberia have been removed or altered. The degradation of world forests has serious consequences for our planet.
Forests are home to between 50 and 90 percent of the world’s terrestrial species, both plants and animals. Only a tiny fraction of the remaining frontier forest is in temperate zones. Most is in boreal regions. A country-by-country breakdown shows that 76 countries have lost all of their frontier forest. Anther 11 nations are close to losing their last remaining frontier forests, having fewer than 5 percent of these forests left, all of which are threatened. More than three quarters of all frontier forests fall within three large tracts that cover part of seven countries: two blocks of boreal forest (Canada, Alaska, and Russia) and one large tropical forest covering South America’s northwestern Amazon Basin and Guyana Shield. Three countries, Brazil, Canada, and Russia contain nearly seventy percent of all frontier forest that remains on our planet.
Seventy-five percent of this remaining frontier forest is threatened by human activity especially logging for the wood chip industry. Even the great stands of forest in Siberia are under threat from fires. Fires there have increased ten fold in the last twenty years, set by rogue timber companies who gain cheap licenses to clear damaged land and sell the trees to China. In 2003, soot and smoke from these fires reached all the way to Seattle. Climate change and bigger draughts contribute to fire risk too. Wood chips supply the lucrative paper industry, which is growing daily. In America, we use almost 772 pounds of paper per person a year, while consumption worldwide is less than 110 pounds a year. The internet is a great paper alternative as long as we don’t print everything we read!
Ninety percent of Cuba’s forest was destroyed by colonial practices. Despite the socialist government’s tree planting programs involving millions of trees, harsh economic conditions force people to use their declining forest resources. Poor people need wood for fuel and building, and plants and animals for the dinner table. In Nigeria, the picture is similar. Nearly 15 percent of the land is forested, but 95 percent of the indigenous forests were destroyed for timber, and population expansion greatly diminishes the remaining stands. The enormous trade in ‘bush meat,’ in Nigeria and other African countries, is likely to kill the remaining forests because animals are responsible for seed spread and processing. In America, although 24.7 percent of the land is rated ‘forested,’ in fact, less than one percent is old growth forest, and all natural stands are fragmented.    Rainforests now cover less than six percent of Earth’s land surface, yet more than half of the world’s plant and animal species live in tropical rain forests. About a quarter of all medicines come from rainforest plants. More than 1400 varieties of tropical plants are thought to be potential cures for cancer. Despite these facts, every year at least sixteen million additional hectares of forest fall. The remaining forests need human assistance to survive. Only true frontier, undisturbed forests can continue without help.
All of North Africa, the Middle East and nearly all countries in Europe have lost their frontier forests. Only a few countries in the world have frontier forests large enough to sustain if they follow stewardship principles. Isolated protected forests are often too small to protect traditional populations especially of large mammal species over time. Logging is the most serious threat to all forests with agricultural land clearing next. Logging inevitably opens an area with roads and infrastructure making the forest even more vulnerable. In Asia especially, the forests are under widespread attack from multinational logging companies. A third of Africa’s forest frontier is threatened by the wild meat trade. Frontier forests are home to the world’s last indigenous cultures. These forests are refuges for global biodiversity and they store tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide (at least 433 billion metric tons), maintaining regional and global weather cycles, and soil integrity. These are the Earth’s true, and last remaining sacred forests.
Continue to: The Sacred Forest (Part Two)