Eternal Forest

“Learning to live like a forest, to operate like a forest, running on reciprocity, on mutuality, could perhaps be a proposition for a healthier society, one that considers the well-being of other species well as important as its own. I am asking myself can we really learn this? Forest is telling me that she can teach us: she is a great book we can read if we can connect the patterns in our minds.” Evgenia Emets.

By Evgenia Emets, artist and founder of Eternal Forest

What if we lived in Forest Time?

What if our society was organised like a forest?

What if our relationship with forests was based on reciprocity, respect and long-term vision?

What if forests became sacred places for us, once again?

These are the questions I have been asking myself since I was called to manifest the project I call ‘Eternal Forest’.

In 2018, when I moved from London to Portugal, I became interested in the relationship humans have with forests and started to explore it through art, poetry and film. Now, after four years of learning and listening deeply to forests and people, I am convinced that the forest is calling us to review our relationship. We need to revise our values, rethink our priorities, revitalise our creativity, intuition and spirit. We need to reconnect to the sacred cycles of nature, build a relationship with nature as equals.

Today, as I tune into deep interconnectedness, I see the hope of a society operating like a forest: together, in a mutually beneficial and collaborative way. The transition to such a society requires a shift on personal, community and societal levels. What is needed is not only a rethinking of our modes of seeing and our behaviours but also a re-imagining of the actual core of our being in relation to the whole ecosystem, the other-than-human. This also demands a shift in our understanding of time, our highly controlled, linear, short-term vision of time, towards an expanded perspective, one that embraces a non-linear, multiplicity-of-cycles, long-term view of a more natural time, Forest Time.

There is not a single day that passes without news of the destruction of another bit of old-growth forest. For paper, for wood, for soya and corn production, for mining, for real-estate development - the list of reasons for this erasure is never-ending. To me, it is like destroying an incredibly intricate complex masterpiece, an artwork of Time. Rivers are disappearing, soils are being washed away by torrential rains and are being dispersed by the ever-increasing violence of winds. The forest can be restored, but an old-growth forest is an artwork that needs its artist - The Long Time - in order for it to re-emerge.

Everything is interconnected; we just need to tune our senses to see that. Forests are us. We are forests. Everything in our culture is because of the forest, every object, every piece of clothing, every vehicle, every building is somehow indebted to the forest. Denying or ignoring this reflects our disconnection, ignorance, numbness and loss of gratitude.

What are we missing?

When I moved to Portugal, I experienced the most shocking environmental disaster I have witnessed in my life - the aftermath of the devastating forest fires of 2017, with kilometre after kilometre of charred remains of trees marking the ravages endured by the earth. An otherworldly landscape of devastation created by fires sweeping through the endless eucalyptus plantations that have taken over the Portuguese countryside. Burned forests, farms, gardens and villages. Human, plant and animal lives lost. Seeing this devastation pushed me to connect with communities able to share their feelings and observations of the forest. I was hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the situation and uncover the root of the crisis. But I also desperately wanted to hear that people still remembered and loved their forests, despite the wide-scale replacement of natural forests with monoculture tree factories.

After making my first art-film Eternal Forest (2018), composed of interviews with people from the communities in the area of Góis, Coimbra, an area greatly affected by those tragic fires, I organised film screenings and discussions all around Portugal. While meeting people, I kept hearing similar questions and observations. Everywhere the conversations focused on the economic benefits of a profit-driven, extractive relationship with nature, and concerns, framed by a scarcity mindset, about the viability of living with naturally biodiverse forests.

Forest is a place where we plant and harvest - forest gradually becomes a farm. If a certain element of the ecosystem has no commercial value, we simply take it out of the equation. The end result is monoculture - endless rows of eucalyptus, cork oaks, olive, almond and pine trees, with little in-between. This inevitably leads to a loss of health and vitality of the ecosystem, a loss of biodiversity and water, and the degradation of the soil. The land stops giving.

I want to contemplate a thought for a moment. Scarcity does not exist in a healthy, biodiverse, fully functional ecosystem. Scarcity has been instilled into us based on a story of losing our place in the garden of Eden. Working hard, extracting what we can, and when we cannot take more, moving on - this has been our path. Today there are simply no places left without the scars of industrial-scale extraction, and all too often the idea of an abundant garden seems unbelievable when we hold in our hands the soil that has no life and is just dust.

What if we gave space and time?

I sensed there was something fundamental missing from the conversations I was having. It felt like trying to listen to the faint pulse of someone who had lost consciousness, to see if they were coming back. That piece of the puzzle came to me as a counterpoint to the mainstream economic narrative of always needing to profit from the forest.

After many remarkable encounters with the public, climate change specialists, soil and forest scientists, ecologists, permaculturists, philosophers and anthropologists, I kept questioning the idea that we can only ‘afford’ forests when they are economically viable. Once I formulated the new thought, it was clear that it was fresh but not new - it was an old message from the forest that has been dreaming for a long time (not so long, though, in Forest Time) and returned because we need it now so badly and are ready to hear it.

This is when the vision of an Eternal Forest as a sanctuary came to me. It was to be a protected forest space, created through art, with a focus on biodiversity and supported by a local community for 1,000 years. I could finally verbalise it, describe it and even design it. During an art residency in 2019 I proposed to establish with a community an Eternal Forest Sanctuary, as a place, process and practice, whereby the community became the long-term guardian of the forest sanctuary, created a cycle of events and experiences, and welcomed artists interested in co-creating with the evolving forest ecosystem.

During this period I listened to the land as she revealed her scars and wounds, the stories and traces of human activity, and possible paths towards healing together. Today, almost three years after this first intentional deep listening exercise, and having walked and sat with many forests - both visible and invisible, present and absent, young and old - I know how to talk about it. And having spoken with many established and emerging communities, I can confirm that people do resonate with Forest Time. A truly deeply regenerative process takes several generations, and it never finishes - or, at least, it should not stop (just as the life of the forest never ceases, even when the forest has been replaced by desert).

An ecologist told me one day: ‘It is impossible to plant a forest!’ Indeed, we need not only to plant trees but also to support a re-emerging forest ecosystem to do its own work. We are dealing with change, which is constant, inevitable and seems to be simply embedded in nature. Nature’s cycles appear to be embedded in the rolling ‘wheels’ of time. In fact, if we zoom in, there are smaller cycles and, influenced by many factors, they are slightly but constantly shifting. It all depends on how we look and how much we zoom in or zoom out. As humans, we need a certain level of predictability in our lives, something that we can hold on to, a place we know, a cycle that repeats. The forest exists on another spectrum and also on another level of complexity. This is why it is so hard for us not to impose our vision of how a forest should be.

The forest also includes all the spectrums. It accommodates a dragonfly that lives just a few months, a human who lives for a few decades, a tree a few hundred years, lichen a few thousand years, and rocks a few million years. We as humans are embedded into the spectrum of Forest Time, into the Continuum of the Forest; we do not exist separately from it but within it. Becoming sensitive to the expanded spectrum of time, I believe, is one of the key aspects of tuning more deeply to the pulse of the Earth.

How can we relate to Forest Time in our daily lives?

Imagine reconnecting to forest cycles through bringing nature’s cycles into community celebrations, such as solstices, equinoxes and annual cross points (special times between the four cardinal points of the year). These celebrations have existed all around the world and are still alive, even in monotheistic cultures. We can also connect to the cycles of place through remarkable natural events such as the time when almond trees bloom, when spiders make webs or when acorns are ripen and are ready to drop.

Forest Time can be experienced through the ceremonial planting involving the whole community. Natural time accepts birthing and dying; all such processes follow on from each other and are equally important for us to acknowledge and experience. When I sat in the heart of Bialowieza Forest in Poland with the ancient burial mounds called kurgans, the forest whispered a meditation to me and asked me to share this with people. You can listen to it through clicking on the link below. It is an invitation to step 1,000 years forward into the future, and connect with the old-growth forest which we might be planting now. Thinking like Eternal Forest is thinking in 1,000 or 10,000 periods, tapping into deeper time.

Forest Time Meditation

One can enter the forest in 1,000 ways. What is the way of ‘Eternal Forest’?

‘Eternal Forest’ takes many human generations to grow. We shall witness only a fraction of its evolution in our lifetimes but we can participate actively in the process. The dream of ‘Eternal Forest’ is that every rural community will have the desire and resources to support an Eternal Forest sanctuary and every urban community can be connected to several forests, which they can visit and help take care of.

Through personal deep experiences in nature, through ecological art that grows within the forest, through practices of nature immersion and community events, we develop a relationship with a forest. We get to know it intimately, and the forest gets to know us. It is a two-way relationship.

As the ‘Eternal Forest’ project spreads internationally, our community is joined by practitioners who make it their lifework to focus on spiritual and ethically-based relationships with plants, animals, soil, water and the whole forest ecosystem. ‘Eternal Forest’ is setting up partnerships and collaborations with art organisations, nature restoration teams, conservation and rewilding NGOs, forest schools, intentional communities, regenerative projects, retreat centres - each supporting, hosting and contributing to the network of Eternal Forests around the world.

The vision is to create spaces for artists and scientists to spend quality time working together in the forest, immersed in the ecosystem. Hosted in the communities, they will share the art and knowledge that can help reconnect people with their forests.

Eternal Forest sanctuaries are for contemplative, artistic, cultural and spiritual work with forests, and are not oriented towards production. In exceptional cases, working with indigenous people, who have been co-creating with the forest and stewarding the land successfully for a long time, the projects may be focused simply on protection and raising awareness through art and community collaborations. Many people ask me why it is so. Why can’t Eternal Forests be also gardens, productive spaces, agroecological projects? I pondered for a long time. And then I asked Eternal Forest this question. The answer was clear. There are many places in nature where humans practice different kinds of activities; some of these places we have created with intention, some came into being through co-evolution. Each place has its own purpose. Owing to an agreement between humans and forests, a certain practice will be successful in a particular place and will support connection, exchange and interbeing. Gardens, parks and farms, for example, are different types of places with different characters, each calling for different modes of being. The purpose of Eternal Forests is to support humans in opening up towards their spiritual home in nature through nurturing creativity, intuition, deep listening and multi-species communication. Using examples from history, I can perhaps compare Eternal Forests to ‘sacred groves’, ‘sacred forests’ or ‘nature temples’.

What does it take? Art as unusual?

It takes a multidisciplinary team to create an Eternal Forest sanctuary. It requires a Circle of Guardians to support its creation and many generations of a community to protect it for many hundreds of years. There needs to be a continuity of culture, of storytelling, to weave the thread of human-forest mythology that embeds both into each other’s boundary without harming each other.

I feel artists will play a key role in weaving these stories. Art can take up the forest as a medium, though this medium is not inanimate, like paint or canvas. It is a living system and its assent to the creations of artists will be required. I believe that Forest Art is a distillation of land art, forms of ecological art and socially engaged art - art in service of life, regenerative processes, future generations and whole earth ecosystems (in this case, forest ecosystems).

I envision artists collaborating in a multidisciplinary manner with soil specialists, climate scientists, ecologists, landscape designers, plant specialists, philosophers, anthropologists and the communities themselves. Their aim will be to help regenerate degraded land, to highlight the value of the forest beyond its materials and to help protect these places in perpetuity. I think there is a lot we can learn from each other’s skills and experiences: a truly multidisciplinary approach can enrich each of the disciplines involved, including pushing the boundaries of innovation when it comes to working with nature.

What do we still need to learn?

Trying to regenerate and protect forests is tricky because of our perception of time scales. If we are not coming from the perspective of a forest, from the complexity of a forest, with respect for its agency, and Forest Time, we might do more harm than good. There is a lot to learn. Seeing examples of old-growth forests and getting to know them intimately is essential. Forest is not a setting for our comforts, though it is a home for us and for all other forms of life. Forest is itself a complex being, which we are part of, even though we are currently not being good members of the forest society. Forest is also a complex process or system, characterised by intelligent co-organising, co-creating, collaborating and collective co-dependent co-being.

Learning to live like a forest, to operate like a forest, running on reciprocity, on mutuality, could perhaps be a proposition for a healthier society, one that considers the well-being of other species well as important as its own. I am asking myself can we really learn this? Forest is telling me that she can teach us: she is a great book we can read if we can connect the patterns in our minds.

Any ‘business’ with the forest must be done taking into account forest perspective, forest dream, forest timescale. So instead of doing business as if the forest were something inanimate, it is in our long-term interest, the interest of present and even more so future generations, to conduct our ‘business’ with the forest as an assembly of all beings that the forest is.

As in much earlier times, we connected with the spirit of the plant to heal us and the spirit of the animal to hunt, now we are invoking these essential beings to inhabit the land once again. To return to the land, to be medicine and heal the land and us.

Forest is countless relationships, a perfectly organised society, with no waste, no empty spaces, no unwanted or undesired ones, no centre, no periphery. A place of harmonious flow, a balanced whole. How would our lives change if we could learn this way of being from the forest?

Watch Eternal Forest Manifesto:

in English

in Portuguese

in French

Read more about the ‘Eternal Forest’ project and sign up to become part of the growing network of Eternal Forest sanctuaries.

Evgenia Emets

January 2022