It Feels Like It’s One-Sided…

We still talk as if there are endless forests. Endless big trees. As if time itself is on our side. As if what we see out of a windshield is proof enough that everything is fine.

I hear it often: “Just look around.”
As if looking is the same as seeing.

Driving down the highway, the forest appears continuous. A green blur at sixty, eighty, a hundred kilometers an hour. A ribbon of trees flanking the road, stitched neatly together for our comfort. Even when we turn off onto a logging road—dust rising, alder brushing mirrors, the hum of tires on gravel—it still feels like wilderness. Still feels big. Still feels intact.

But that picture is carefully framed.

It is not the forest.
It is the edge of it.

We have become very good at living on edges. Roads, clearings, corridors. We rarely step beyond them. And because of that, we believe what we want to believe: that the forests are still vast, still resilient, still waiting for us whenever we need them.

I keep referencing Google Earth—not because it is perfect, but because it removes our excuses. From above, the illusion collapses. What feels endless on the ground becomes fragmented. What feels wild becomes patterned. Blocks. Grids. Switchbacks. A patchwork quilt of extraction stitched into the land.

From above, the forest is not a continuous body.
It is a series of wounds in different stages of healing—or not healing at all.

And once you see it that way, you cannot unsee it.