There’s a major new excitement pulsing through the global mind, and it comes from Diana Beresford Kroeger, an Irish-Canadian botanist and biochemist who has just published her new book, The Global Forest.

Diana shakes up the normal thought that forests are a habitat for nature, a place of beauty, or a source of timber by seeing the forest’s trees as a living miracle, with a pattern of intelligence we have scarcely begun to understand.
She comes from a deep Irish background. After her parents died in a car crash when she was 11, she chose to live with her bachelor uncle, a chemist, natural philosopher and lover of Buddhism and Gaelic poetry, who took her to meet her elderly cousins. “They were Irish speakers, and they knew all the old stories and the old cures. They showed me everything. They taught me to meditate, to focus my mind. They talked to me about survival.”

Over in Canada, with a doctorate in biochemistry, she found herself a renegade scientist, appalled at the influence of the corporations and the threat posed by pesticides. By contrast, she was trying to bring together aboriginal healing, western medicine and botany as she researched the biochemical and medicinal properties of trees. At Carraigliath, her 160 acre estate near Merrickville, Ontario, she has transformed the Canadian bush into a leafy sanctuary for over 100 types of tree.

Her new book is opening people’s eyes to the miracle of trees, such as their ability to remove air pollution: children who live in tree-lined neighbourhoods have 25% less asthma than those in treeless neighbourhoods. In a walk through an old-growth forest, “there are thousands if not millions of chemicals and their synergistic effects with one another.”

Among other things, trees produce aerosols, including a compound called alphapinene that stabilizes a child’s breathing mechanisms and has a mild narcotic action on the brain, allowing the child to calm down and be smarter. The Japanese have a phrase for this - they call it shinrin yoku, or “wood-air bathing”.

Trees produce a spectrum of light we can’t see that monarch butterflies can, and infrasound we can’t hear but birds can. Half of the world’s oxygen comes from trees - and they have been producing it for 380 million years.

Diana’s new book is a call for us all to think far deeper about the trees that surround us. “There’s an enormous difference between old-growth forests and tree plantations,” she says. Much as Merv Wilkinson did for 60 years at his Wildwood Forest, near Ladysmith, she recommends using stock from old-growth forests to grow new forests, to benefit from the advantage of their genetics. Her book has been praised as much for its poetry and lyrical nature as for its scientific content.

Source: Earth Future

Diana Beresford-Kroeger, author of The Global Forest