John W. Reid > Quotes

“The adjective “intact” is earned by encompassing at least 500 square kilometers—which is roughly 125,000 acres—free of roads, power lines, mines, cities, and industrial farms. That’s the size of about 60,000 soccer fields, 146 Central Parks, or a single square of land 14 miles on a side. “Landscapes” is added to the term because natural forests have vital treeless places, such as rivers, lakes, wetlands, and mountaintops mixed in. In 2008, the group helped map all such forests globally. Worldwide, there are currently around 2,000 intact forest landscapes, or IFLs, comprising nearly a quarter of all the planet’s wooded lands. They are heavily concentrated in the five megaforests.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“Megaforests hold staggering human diversity. Over a quarter of Earth’s languages are spoken in the world’s largest woodlands. The mere tally of languages, however, is less arresting than their particulars. Thousands of lexicons are deployed according to grammars that seem to test every possibility of human perception and cognition. They throw open the conceptual boxes within which each of us thinks and, in doing so, reveal the full spectacle of human inventiveness.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“The Amazon forest exhales a Lake Tahoe every five days. Many mornings you can see mist columns twisting up from the canopy as if from fairy campfires. This vapor coalesces into “flying rivers” that ride equatorial winds to the west, while at ground level the rivers flow down an extremely subtle slope eastward toward the Atlantic.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“average, 95 percent of boreal plant carbon is underground, compared with 50 percent for tropical forests.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“The Taiga and North American boreal forest have similar fauna and trees because they were recently one circumpolar super-megaforest interrupted only by the North Atlantic. Before melting ice filled the Bering Sea, about 11,000 years ago, you could walk from Norway to Newfoundland. Moose and people walked to the Americas, while horses and bison went from Alaska to Russia. Mammoths are buried in permafrost on both sides of the strait.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“The diversity of people is similarly spectacular in the megaforests. Around a quarter of the planet’s roughly 7,000 living languages are spoken in the five great wooded regions. For modern humanity to keep the megaforests, and with them the one planet we know of that has any forests, we need to care for the world as if it is family. We need to attempt a grammar in which subject and object, people and everything else, are the same. In a material and evolutionary sense, of course, we absolutely are.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“For modern humanity to keep the megaforests, and with them the one planet we know of that has any forests, we need to care for the world as if it is family. We need to attempt a grammar in which subject and object, people and everything else, are the same. In a material and evolutionary sense, of course, we absolutely are.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“We invite reporters to ask, in every story they cover, whether the news is good for nature. Media outlets might include climate costs and benefits in all business reporting. Data are available to gauge the atmospheric consequences of construction, oil drilling, consumer spending, air travel, and shipping. Why not show it? Another positive step would be a quarterly forest report on losses and gains, fragmentation, carbon uptake and emissions, and changes in protected status. Global Forest Watch already has most of the information online.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“Go outside. Frequently. Step outside anywhere and find a leaf and permit it to blow your mind. Check out its delta of veins. Run your finger on its underside. Taste it. Check if it has hair. Crumple it and smell it.

Go further, to a forest of any size, a forest clearing, a clump of trees, or even a spot under a single specimen—someplace where, even though you may hear cars and dogs in the distance, you can sit on soft, uneven ground, unseen. Consider the unspooling ribbon of human affairs that the surrounding trees have witnessed and with what interest or indifference they may have watched.

Inspect the ground and picture the interlaced fingers of mycelium and roots that swap sugar and water and carbon and data, a mushroom-assisted conversation that betrays care among trees. Notice the mosaic of leaves catching light or the weave of needles on the ground.

Be still and birds will invade your copse. Trees, even in small groups, exhale monoterpenes that reduce stress, lower blood pressure and heart rate, and perhaps even trigger dopamine. So stay long enough to feel your mood change, watch shadows shorten or stretch. Get caught by rain or snow or nightfall. Get a little lost.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet