Every year I get the privilege of co-leading a spiritual retreat weekend with the wonderful Greg Kennedy at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre. This year we revamped the “Trees” retreat from a couple of years ago and I switched it up, including a talk on Friday night on “What is a Forest : Of exclusion and of Community”.

This wasn’t a talk about a particular ecosystem necessarily. Instead it was an exploration of the shady history of the word and concept of “forest”, The first English use of the word forest doesn’t describe a specific ecozone; instead it was the place where royalty and gentry removed the people to keep exclusive regal hunting grounds for them and their noble guests. It meant the expulsion of peoples, and the emergence of the enclosure movement (so incitefully taught to me by Rain Crowe and Sylvia Federici many years ago), and plausible contribution to the witch hunts across Europe. “The forest” is not neutral territory. It is a contested zone.

This topic is significant to me, as in, it’s important to remember the contexts of where these exclusionary ways of interacting with the land have come from and how the plans and technologies of power were then exported, and are used with colonial intent on different lands and different people. It is important to remember how those who came before resisted this theft of the commons, and it is important to remember that we are as connected to those ancestor as we are to the trees, screes and seas.

To learn more :
Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici. Autonomedia, 2004. (pdf link)
The Once and Future Great Lakes Country : An Ecological History by John L. Riley. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.
The World Turned Upside Down by Leon Rosselson, performed by Billy Bragg