Francis Young:

The older I get, the more intensely I feel about old trees. I don’t think it’s just a sentimental love of old things. Nor is it just a reactionary or activist desire to preserve old things from destruction – I feel that about old buildings, but what I feel for trees is different. It’s more personal, in more ways than one – as if at some deep level I carry a conviction that trees are persons. I’m not sure what to make of this conviction. The difference between old buildings and old trees is that trees are not our heritage. They don’t belong to us at all; they belong to themselves, because they’re alive. Their importance doesn’t lie in their cultural value, even if they do have that in abundance. They are surely valuable in and of themselves, and for their own sake. A long-lived tree represents the hard-won triumph of life over time and happenstance, a testament to a creation far older than us. The idea that human beings with their mayfly-lives could assume the right to end that long life, suddenly and artificially, is somehow repugnant; and the idea of re-shaping a landscape by wholesale deforestation is more monstrous by orders of magnitude. It happens, of course; and the serried forests we plant, like the forests I grew up close to in the Suffolk Breckland, feel like parodies of the lost greenwood. But it may be the forest – or, in a phrase I coined for a recent book, the ‘arboreal sacred’ – lies at the heart of the pre-Christian religious history of temperate northern Europe, for the forest was everywhere once. In losing it, I fear we have lost a major part of ourselves.