Forests. Big deal right? Yea, they actually are a big deal.
Nowadays, one only hears of forests when the topic of global warming or climate change is brought up. “We must save the forests. Saving the forests=saving the environment=saving the planet=saving our world=saving our children’s world”…and so on and so forth.
However, forests actually do a lot more than produce oxygen and glucose, and have been influencing human civilization for centuries. Forests have not only played an important role in the development of human society but have influenced our way of life as well. The book “Forests: The Shadow of Civilization” by Robert Harrison begins with the following quote, “This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.” Obviously, when humans began to walk the face of the Earth, the only resources present were natural resources. Forget tents or huts, the first humans had nothing except the environment.
The forest is the rudimentary source of human development. Therefore, we should know how the forest influenced the development of human culture. For example, what on earth does marriage have to do with forests? For starters, you’re going to have to change your current perspective of forests. Think of yourself in a dark room. Except its really dark, I mean-pitch black. You can’t see anything-not even your hands or feet. You hear noises all around you. You are terrified. You look up and hear the swishing of branches and trees brushing against each other.
When humans inhabited forests, they were unaware that there was a sky. In the daytime all they could see when they glanced upwards were branches. Therefore, when it rained and thundered, they had no idea what was going on.
Therefore during copulation, if it happened to thunder, humans had no idea what was occurring. In their terror they decided to establish matrimony, or at least become monogamous, which means being married to one person at a time. They took the thunder as a sign that copulating with more than one partner was a sin. Obviously, not all the inhabitants of the forest developed this mindset. In fact, polygamy was common. However, ideas never begin with unanimity.
Matrimony was only one of the many basic, everyday concepts of human civilization that emerged from the human’s forest culture. However, the point of this post is not to list those different concepts. Rather, the focus is of the innocence of mankind. Whenever we study the past, the innocence of mankind must be recognized. For example, in my history course, we are studying the colonization of the New World. Why were the Native Indians so easy to conquer despite their massive advantages in numbers? Primarily due to their innocence. (See previous blogpost for more detail about Native Indians vis-à-vis innocence). How did early human society develop the ideas of Zeus and Jupiter and their supremacy as gods? Clearly because the closed canopy characteristics of the forests restricted the human inhabitants from seeing the sky, therefore they began to picture images in their heads and relate those images with their daily experiences. “Ignorance is bliss”-but so is innocence.
gautamkapur 