Motivations

Reprinted from Society & Environment,
Zayed International Prize for Environment, January 2009.

With "Southcrop Forest" I wanted to write an exciting fantasy story but one in which all the creatures and places are real. I drew upon works from both fiction and non-fiction—from animal fantasies to popular science and even sociology.

As "Southcrop Forest" is about trees, the Ents in J. Tolkien's "Two Towers", with their own intelligences and ancient culture, certainly influenced me. They are the most memorable tree creatures I've yet encountered.  But other animal stories also made their impressions. With meticulous yet seamless descriptions of the English countryside in R. Adams' "Watership Down" and the southern seas in Y. Martel's "Life of Pi" I learned that it was possible to write about nature and still spin a good fantasy. In "Life of Pi" and R. O'Brien's "Rats of NIMH" I saw how the most absurd and impossible things could be made believable.

"Southcrop Forest" is full of the real as well as the make believe. For much of its science I drew upon my years as an ecologist, and chose one of the main characters from a particular part of the animal kingdom I am most familiar with—the insects. But I went beyond my former area of study and borrowed ideas from the field of Complexity Theory discussed in popular science works such as S. Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe" and J. Gleik's "Chaos". And so it is no coincidence that the character named Fur is a single, self-organized creature that mysteriously emerges from a collective of organisms, or that the picture on the book cover that looks like a forest is actually a fractal image from the Mandelbrot set (computer generated using a mathematical formula).

"Southcrop Forest" is set in current times, and in a real place in the province of Ontario, Canada not so far from the city of Toronto where I live. To make the story come alive it was important to learn everything I could about this setting, from the plants and animals that dwell there to the history of its settlement and the aboriginal communities like the Wendat (Hurons) and Anishinabek (Ojibway) that arrived before the Europeans. What seems like so long ago to us humans, would of course be recent history to the much longer lived trees of Southcrop.

Like the main characters in the story, I went on my own voyage of discovery passing my free time in the early mornings, evenings and holidays pouring over field guides, technical papers and distribution maps of  mushrooms, wildflowers, trees, birds, mammals and the like, as well as literature on the impacts of humans on the earth’s climate. For information about aboriginal settlements I relied on books such as A. Hunter’s “A History of Simcoe County” and the many websites that discuss Canadian history. For example, the Canadian government provides an online Atlas of Canada that includes some fascinating maps and descriptions of aboriginal populations beginning in the early 1600s.

But why did I choose to write such a book? Nearly five years ago, I was reading an interesting but dry piece of popular non-fiction when my attention began to lapse and I found myself skimming more and more pages. The book was fine but it needed a story—something to tie all the pieces together and make all the facts easier to digest. So I put that book down and started my own. I would write a fiction non-fiction.

But on another level I wanted to write something about human societies and “Southcrop Forest” is full of anthropomorphisms. How could it not? Buried in its pages there are many parallels between human and tree civilization. In the story, trees have their arts and sciences and folklore, and even something akin to the worldwide web. And the trees also have a darker, more dangerous and controlling nature, not unlike our own.

But tree civilization is much older than ours, spanning hundreds of millions of years on earth. I tried to convey to the reader what the loss of such an ancient culture might feel like. I used ideas presented by J. Jacobs in her final book “Dark Age Ahead”. Civilizations decay and fall into dark ages through a process of forgetting. We first forget what is vital to our culture, and then eventually forget that we ever lost anything at all. And so in the story, the preservation of tree culture (or the ‘tree way’) is even more important to Southcrop Forest than the preservation of the trees themselves.

And therein lies a key message and warning. If we continue to destroy our natural environment, it may not be long before our own children forget there were ever such things as songbirds or large mammals or forests.

What puzzles me about so much science fiction and fantasy is the need to create other-worldly creatures. What about our world? There is no shortage of strange inhabitants. Are they not interesting enough? Perhaps we have already begun to forget what fantastic creatures dwell beyond our front doors. I wished to write something that might pull kids away from their computer screens and help them to see the nature that is all around us before it disappears and then we forget there ever was a time when we were not so alone—that we once shared our planet with others. And so I wrote “Southcrop Forest”—a story about a little piece of the natural world beyond my own front door.

All text and art work are Copyright © Lorne Rothman, unless otherwise stated.