Written in the glare of the United States’ war on Indochina, and first published as a separate book in that war’s dire aftermath, The Word for World is Forest is a reflection on invasion, exploitation and oppression, and on the necessity and cost of resistance.
Though short, the novel is far from slight. It brings into sharp focus several of its author’s enduring concerns, and draws on the same intellectual resources that illuminate her wider work: notably anthropology, anarchism, feminism and Taoism.
Characteristically of all Le Guin’s writing, it embodies the stubborn virtue of seeing with both eyes, in depth and in colour, without looking away from or ignoring uncomfortable truths.
At the time of the novel’s setting, some centuries in the future, Vietnam is history - a history well remembered by one of the characters, Colonel Dongh. The prevailing social system on Earth and its colonies is still some sort of state capitalism, by now the driver of an interstellar imperialism. Racism has mutated and evolved to the point where having recent African ancestry - rather than having no trace of it - is to the racist eye what makes one fully human. That venomous notion has been given its own cosmic inflation by the discovery that there are in reality more races than even the Victorians suspected: Homo sapiens has a common ancestry’ with a forerunner species, the still extant and annoyingly wise Hainish, who in the distant past settled many worlds, including Earth.
Also of Hainish (and of terrestrial) descent are the natives of Athshe, the world for which the word is forest. Gentle, tribal, matriarchal, and small, they are easy prey.
Just strong enough to be slaves, too weak to be a threat, their likely fate is extinction. The forests in which they live are being felled around them to clear ground for future settlement and to satisfy an insatiable yearning for wood, a luxury almost beyond price back on the deforested home planet.
If we read the tale at too literal a level, as some critics have done, this makes no economic sense. It is almost inconceivable that interstellar extractive exploitation across all those decades of light- years could be profitable. Such nit-picking can sensibly and safely be ignored. In the first place, we have no textual evidence that it’s even meant to make economic sense. Perhaps it’s a mere whim of businessmen- bureaucrats who have no need to profit on their very long-term investment.
Furthermore, in a world where the kauri trees of New Zealand were felled and sawn up to make (among other such vital necessities) decking for yachts, and where the elephant is being driven close to extinction for ivory trinkets, and the rhinoceros for the entirely bogus medical virtues of powder made from its horn, and so on (and on) and where Vietnam is still suffering grievously from the effects of the chemical defoliants dumped on it at the very time this book was being written… in such a world, one would think, a writer crafting a protest is surely permitted some small poetic license.
In the other great SF work to come out of what in Vietnam is known as the American War, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, the conflict is between equally powerful empires and is in the end revealed to be the result of mutual misunderstanding. No such reassurance rounds off The Word for World is Forest. The author’s sympathy is entirely with the enemy. The invaders from Earth are indisputably the bad guys and the rebellious natives are entirely in the right. But the novel’s revolutionary defeatism doesn’t fall into the trap of romanticising the revolt of the oppressed. The Athsheans are changed by the very act of fighting, new and strange to them; the world they win back is not the same as the world that was taken from them; and their fight is not fair, or discriminating, or by the rules. It is dirty and brutal and shocking.
That oppression corrupts the oppressors is well enough known. That resistance to oppression can profoundly change those resisting, and for the worse, is less widely recognised - particularly among those who give that resistance their sympathy and solidarity. The ennobling aspect of resistance - of standing up, of fighting back, of driving the invader from the homeland - is seen and celebrated. The corrupting aspect - the hardening of the heart, the acceptance of casualty and atrocity’, the replacement of the moral calculus with a cold-eyed calculation of advantage, of revenge and reprisal - is put out of mind, and sometimes for what seem the best of reasons. That too is part of the damage done.
Le Guin’s subtle Taoist dialectic of darkness and light does not stop there. The Athsheans’ world, we see and are told early on, is itself a failed and lost Hainish colony. Not only the hominids, but most or all of the planet’s species of plants and animals are descended from a biota transplanted from Earth a million years ago. In showing us as an alien jungle and as a benign environment what is after all a forest such as might have covered Europe and North America in the Pleistocene, the novel gives its readers from those continents some further cause for reflection. And in implying that the now wise and compassionate Hainish were themselves invaders and colonisers in the distant past, this tale of damage and destruction carries a small, secret seed of hope for a better future than it depicts.
Ursula Le Guin may be the SF writer most respected by the literary mainstream, the most studied academically, her work set texts in countless courses. She remains subversive, and her work dangerous reading, because it changes the reader and makes them look at the real world in a different light. This novel’s continuing relevance is a rebuke to our complacency’.
- Ken MacLeod
The story focuses on a military logging colony set up on the fictional planet of Athshe by people from Earth (referred to as "Terra"). The colonists have enslaved the completely non-aggressive native Athsheans, and treat them very harshly. Eventually, one of the natives, whose wife was raped and killed by a Terran military captain, leads a revolt against the Terrans, and succeeds in getting them to leave the planet. However, in the process their own peaceful culture is introduced to mass violence for the first time.
The novel carries strongly anti-colonial and anti-militaristic overtones, driven partly by Le Guin's negative reaction to the
Vietnam War. It also explores themes of sensitivity to the environment, and of connections between language and culture. It shares the theme of dreaming with Le Guin's novel
The Lathe of Heaven, and the metaphor of the forest as a consciousness with the story "
Vaster than Empires and More Slow".
The novella won the
Hugo Award in 1973, and was nominated for several other awards. It received generally positive reviews from reviewers and scholars, and was variously described as moving and hard-hitting. Several critics, however, stated that it compared unfavorably with Le Guin's other works such as
The Left Hand of Darkness, due to its sometimes polemic tone and lack of complex characters.
I HAVE BOTH THE EDITION FROM 1976 AND THE ORIGINAL IN AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS (EDITED BY HARLAN ELLISON)
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS STILL FOREST
Contents
The Word for World is Forest 1
Excerpts from Ursula K. Le Guin
Mimetic Traps: Forest, Images, Worlds by Pedro Neves Marques
It Goes on Like a Forest by Dan Handel
The Mother Tree
by Suzanne Simard
with visualizations by Kevin Beiler
Life and Death of Data by Yanni Alexander Loukissas
Shannon Castleman: Tree Wounds
The Ancestral Tree of Plenty 96
by Abel RodrÃguez
with Carlos A. RodrÃguez
& Catalina Vargas Tovar
The Political Nature of the Forest: 125
A Botanic Archaeology of Genocide
by Paulo Tavares
Leaving the Forest
Eduardo Kohn in conversation
with Anna-Sophie Springer
& Etienne Turpin
Wildwuchs, or the Worth of the Urban Wild
Report by Silvan Linden
Sandra Bartoli: The Old Trees of Berlin’s Forests
Katie Holten: Tree Alphabet
Dear Reader-as-Exhibition-Viewer,
Borrowing its title from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 science fiction
novella, The Word for World is Still Forest is composed in these
pages as an homage to the forest as a turbulent and generative
multinature. Throughout this book, we invite you to join us in
traversing the mighty forests of Amazonia, Southeast Asia, and
the Pacific Northwest, arriving in the old urban woods of Berlin,
where this book was published. Moving from concepts of the
forest as a thinking superorganism to the linear monocultural
plantations and “concrete jungles” that threaten the life of global
forests, you will encounter trees as companions, communities,
entities, and providers; in other moments, they will appear as
expert witnesses, data stories, or resourceful ancestors. Whether
they occur as images, subjects, or architectures, the forests
of this world will beckon you to remember that their destiny
is entangled with yours. As in Le Guin’s original story, this book
contends that Forest and World are “two meanings and one.”
Le Guin originally wrote The Word for World is Forest in 1968
as a direct response to the geopolitical climate and environmental
violence of the American war in Vietnam. “1968 was a bitter year
for those who opposed the war,” she writes in the Introduction
to the 1980 re-edition of the book, adding, “The lies and hypocrisies redoubled; so did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming
clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and
grainlands and the murder of non-combatants in the name of
‘peace’ was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and
the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of ‘man.’
The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed
as inevitable as it was disastrous.”
The story itself is a tale of planetary colonization, resource
depletion, and enslavement, wherein a chauvinist, racist population of one planet—a deforested, naked Earth—conquers another planet rich in sylvan biodiversity and inhabited by a non-violent
forest people capable of lucid dreaming. Their decolonization
struggle is successful, but the cost of repossession is nothing less
than the cognitive seed of power, bloodshed, and murder.
The Word for World is Forest thus poses vexing yet necessary ethical questions about resistance, justice, and the fight for freedom.
Since we began to work on this volume in 2014, the relevance
of Le Guin’s description of militarized, ecocidal violence has only
continued to intensify. As we write, the world appears fundamentally if disproportionately split between those who believe
solely in hording the profits that they have amassed through
destruction, and those who insist that the decency and dignity
of living things cannot be so callously reduced to abstract transactions and shameless accumulation. In this perilous situation,
Le Guin’s “writerly resistance” reminds readers that science fiction
is a formidable intellectual resource for political imaginaries.
As editors, we see this paginated exhibition series as our own contribution to an insurgent social and environmental science fiction
that responds to the physical, climatic, and conceptual foreclosures of the Anthropocene. To relay the potency of Le Guin’s
words and amplify their relevance for contemporary struggles,
we invited the landscape architect and designer Elise Hunchuck
and intercalations designer Katharina Tauer to reimagine some
of the most compelling passages from The Word for World is
Forest in the pages that follow.
This homage to words and forests is followed by an essay
from Pedro Neves Marques about the particularities of Amerindian
multinaturalism that sharpens our sense of the forest as an
ontological multiplicity teeming with relations, perspectives, and
temporalities. That such forests and worlds are largely incommensurable with Eurocentric image-making technologies poses a
serious challenge to understanding and solidarity by demanding
that we learn “how to inhabit the space of the in-between, the
interval between ‘worlds’ in order to contribute to a decolonization
of the many worlds from the imposition of the ‘one world.’” This
book is an attempt to open up a space for these transformations.
Curator Dan Handel presents a paginated version of his
research on wood as a vital aspect of forest mythologies and a
driver of industrial resource management. By translating elements
from his previous exhibitions into this volume, Handel contributes
to a renegotiation of the metaphors and mechanisms that render the forest present in human habits of consumption, creativity,
and ideation. Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard
examines how underground networks of fungi uptake nutrients
of salmon brought from sea to river to land by grizzlies and
wolves. Simard’s text summarizes her ongoing collaboration with researchers from various First Nations communities in British
Columbia to offer a defense of nature as a tangled web rather than
a taxonomical order. Accompanied by visualizations from
forestry researcher Kevin Beiler, this contribution makes a plea
for a more holistic approach to forestry science and urges us
to “fundamentally transform the modern scientific image of nature
as a resource.”
A reflexive essay on living collections by designer and ethnographer Yanni A. Loukissas unfolds alongside a remarkable series
of data visualizations. As an inquiry into the botanical data of
Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, his project Life and Death
of Data shows that in addition to the actual plant specimens of
this collection, their metadata are valuable indices of historical
events and local knowledge. As natural history institutions attempt
to redefine their role to more thoroughly address contemporary
ecological crises, Loukissas’s work is a poignant reminder for
curators to pay careful attention to the institutional and structural
parameters of their collections; as his project demonstrates,
there is a compelling narrative arc that connects historical practices
of collecting and contemporary issues of storage and preservation among digital systems and data sets.
Shannon Castleman’s photographs offer a closer look at
trees caught somewhere between life and death. By recording
the traces of incremental logging practices literally hacked into
the bark of teak forests in Indonesia, her series asks the viewer
to consider the consequences of subsistence livelihoods being
outlawed in favor of more profitable, large-scale agroforestry.
Remaining with the motif of the axe implicit in Castleman’s work,
we follow Nonuya knowledge-elder Abel RodrÃguez (also known
as Mogaje Guihu) to the Middle Caquetá River region in the
Colombian Amazon. He shares an oral narrative conveying the
discovery and eventual felling of the Tree of Abundance,
which relays the origin of social, territorial, and ecological interdependency in the Amazon; at the same time, this mythological
narrative alludes to the beginning of labor, violence, and disease.
RodrÃguez’s storytelling was transcribed and edited in collaboration with Carlos RodrÃguez from the Tropenbos International
Colombia forest conservation group and the philosopher and
editor Catalina Vargas Tovar. It is intercalated with a selection of
RodrÃguez’s drawings, including some which depict the annual
cycles of rainforest and river ecologies. By sharing this remarkable world as forest—normally conveyed by speech and
constrained by context—RodrÃguez invites us to revel in the
deep history of the forest and its mythic architecture.
An understanding of the Amazon as an anthropogenically
cultivated multinature is further elaborated in the contribution
by Brazilian architect, urbanist, and activist Paulo Tavares.
His essay and richly annotated selection of archival photographs
and contemporary cartographies expose the “politics of erasure”
deployed by the Brazilian state against Indigenous peoples
and their lands in the twentieth century. Highlighting the hybrid
literacies required by resistance movements fighting illegal
logging, plantations, evictions, and development, Tavares shows
that genocide and ecocide are often two sides of the same coin
in struggles for land sovereignty. He also underscores the politically significant thesis that many forests of the Amazon region
are the result of Pre-Columbian domestication and cultivation
practices. By rendering Amazonia palpable as the living ruin
of an “‘expanded polis,’ within which humans and nonhumans
co-inhabit a common political space,” he infinitely complicates
any comfortable dichotomies of city, civilization, and culture
versus forest, wilderness, and nature. An interview with anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, based on his book How Forests Think
and observations from his fieldwork in Ecuador, explores the
philosophical implications of nonhuman thought. After a discussion about “thinking-with” multispecies semiotics, we conclude
our conversation with questions about how to cultivate a forestlike mindfulness even in non-forest ecologies—a provocation
that we hope resonates through many other contributions in this
book as well.
Calling attention to the precarious nature of urban trees,
we learn just how difficult these co-inhabitations are to maintain
through architect Silvan Linden’s report on the controversial
felling of “city trees” by the Parks Department of Berlin-Mitte
district. Here we discover that the Wildwuchs, or wild trees, were
accused by officials of threatening the safety of pedestrians
because they were not “proper” street trees. Landscape architect
Sandra Bartoli’s photo series “The Old Trees of Berlin’s Forest”
offers a lesser-known history of the ancient trees of the urban
forest known as Berlin Tiergarten; these photographs remind us of the quotidian ancestors in our midst and their histories, which
can no longer be taken for granted. To conclude, a stunning,
original typography of tree forms from artist Katie Holten’s About
Trees connects the paper of these book pages to their origins
by way of a semiotics of forests as words. Bringing together
poetry and prose, photography, storytelling, drawing, and exhibition making, as well as data visualization and remote sensing,
The Word for World is Still Forest attempts to relay something
of the confounding efflorescence of the worlds of forests through
words and images. If you get lost in the forest, authorities advise
that you stop moving and stay in one place to avoid confusion and
increase the chances of being rescued. We see things differently:
we suggest you stray far from paths cut by familiar habits and
explore some of the innumerable perspectives on and of the
forests that sustain this world.
We hope you will enjoy these words and forests and find among
them a renewed conviction that the loss of these worlds is nothing
less than the loss of the world.
Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin
Berlin & Jakarta, February 2017
2018 08 24
The World as Forest: bilingual exhibition guide
— digital version of our newsprint publication
Get here the exhibition guide for Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest that we’ve published at K. Verlag. It includes texts about the artists and works in the exhibition as well as statements from all three venue directors hosting the project. It also includes German translations of ANNA TSING‘s 2015 lecture “Earth Stalked by Man: A Feminist Approach to the Anthropocene” as well as an essay on Wallace by evolutionary biologist ANDREW BERRY. It also includes, in English, interviews with YAKA SHAWADAWA, a woman of the Arara people in the Indigenous territories of the Brazilian province of Acre, and a teacher and activist in this region, as well as with ZENZI SUHADI, Head of the Department of the Research, Advocacy, and Environmental Law of the ngo Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (WALHI) in Jakarta.
German & English
72 pages
73 full-color images
Duo-tone on newsprint
Folded
ISBN 978-3-947858-02-6
[ PDF ] For info on how to get an (almost) free paper copy in the mail please go here
2018 08 25
Thinking Like a Mountain (2018) by Alexander Hick
—double feature during our finnissage of The World as Forest
We are excited to screen Alexander Hick’s documentary essay film Thinking Like a Mountain about the extraordinary resistance of the Arhuaco Indigenous people of the high Sierra Nevada in Colombia tonight during the finnissage of the exhibition at Tieranatomisches Theater. The screening is the team premiere in Berlin after the film has only be screened once so far at Visions du reel in Nyon in the spring.
Screenings are at 21h00 and 23h00—first come first get a place, but please note that you need a ticket for the Long Night of the Museums that is also happening tonight throughout the city.
Trailer of Thinking Like a Mountain and more info here
TWO GUYS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY WROTE THIS:
May 11, 2016 - PDF | In LeGuin's novel The Word for World is Forest 1. she presents a fictional forest that serves as a collective mind for its inhabitants living.
Associate Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University
DECRA Research Fellow, University of Sydney
Associate professor/ARC DECRA fellow, Charles Sturt University
Alfred Deakin Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Deakin University
Deakin University
