Witnesses to a Diminished Forest
During the transitory space between winter and spring, we (two educators and myself), wandered toward the forest with a small group of seven children, only to realize that the forest had been disconcertingly diminished, seemingly overnight. Slowly the realization of the destruction of a patch of trees dawned on the children as they starred quizzically at the barren space of filled with only jagged stumps where the tall trees once stood. Many of the children moved around to examine the tree stumps seemingly awestruck by this radical transformation of a once familiar space. There were questions of where the trees went and what happened to them. It was quickly understood that the trees were cut down. Although most of the trees had been removed, a few of the children noticed the “remains” of formerly standing trees piled a little further off in the distance, seemingly awaiting retrieval and ultimate disposal. A few of the children resisted the collective movement to peruse the altered landscape. Instead, and instead observed impassively at the edge of the former treeline.
Noticing this silent but clearly affective response to the environment, I joined them and asked what they thought. One of them responded somewhat mournfully, “I don’t like what happened to the forest!”
The preschoolers, educators and I continue to venture deep into the forest. Because the weather is still too cold for the clamorous enterprise of home construction, the silencing of the machines does not drown out the first pecking sounds of woodpeckers from deeper inside the, as yet untouched, confines of the forest. These sounds break the seeming spell of the silent forest ruins. One child asks what the clackety sound he hears is. Another, perhaps remembering our springtime forest encounters from the previous year, declares it to be a woodpecker. One or two others asked what a woodpecker is. “See, the birds are further inside the forest,” the educator affirms. After exposure to such stark precarity, it is important for the children to see that the birds persist within the shrinking edges of the forest, but a new appreciation of the birds’ precarity is increasingly evident amidst the children’s queries and suppositions. As we venture further in, other birds become visible and audible and some of the children spot the first robins of the season. Overhead, we spot two birds’ nests that we hadn’t noticed before. A child says that the nests are the birds’ homes and where the mother and father birds protect their baby birds. It is not lost on me that the children are highlighting place and animals’ own forms of care.
