INTRODUCTION

Forests seldom fail to evoke strong feelings. Their imagery threads its way through literary and visual media across cultures and times. They may be places harboring great evil or good, may be symbols of strength and endurance or they may be fragile and rare. For me, those feelings have always been equally divided between positive associations of exploration and freedom, of wonder and appreciation at the ‘natural world’ and negative ones of fear—of dangers both known and unknown.

My childhood was filled with fairytale forests. In my books, they were places of extreme danger where the unwary would encounter witches, wild animals, cold, and hunger- but also opportunities (for the brave and good) to find magical gifts of power and riches. In my childish way, I absorbed those lessons, taking the forest as both a metaphor for life but also a real presence in my imagination.

As I grew older those feelings were sublimated to my lived experiences camping and hiking in wooded places. As a child, my family camped in the forests of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest-national forests with campgrounds and lakes, pit toilets and cleared trails. Here you could find the gift of independence from the adult eye instead of magical, fairytale opportunities. There was the quiet beauty of sunlight through the trees, the gentle sounds of the woods that were in such contrast to my city childhood. But we also faced the dangers of our poor woodcraft (poison ivy, getting lost, cuts, bruises, dislocated joints). As an adult, I hike and camp recreationally, carrying heavy packs, water purifiers, sleeping pads, walking miles to try to find human-less places to spread out and ‘get away.’ This new life experience retainS both measures of fear and freedom- the fear of witches is now replaced by my imaginary ‘radio killer’ who stalks campers while holding a transistor radio (the result of an auditory hallucination created by the sound of rushing water transformed into radio announcer babble) and freedom is from the all-seeing eye of the modern world, that release of tension when you truly can no longer hear the sound of the highway and you find that you have no cell phone signal. But know my childish forest still lives along side my adult experience, keeping me in terror and in hope of its magic power, a power greater than my mundane modern mind allows it. This issue of Prospect, exploring forests in their myriad real and imagined guises, the ways humans impact their management, understand and appreciate their role on the planet (and also in our story of ourselves), offers an opportunity to step back and look at what forests ‘mean’ through the lens of science, technology, economics, and cultural imagination.

—MEGHAN T. RAY

COLLABORATORS:

Victoria Bevington, Magali Duzant, Ethan Fenner, Nikki Lindt, Morgan Mangelsen, Greg Owens, Peggy Ray, Meghan T. Ray, Nancy Seaton, Robert Sullivan, and Eri Yamagata.