Did your elders tell you that the forest protects you? Did they tell you that you’ll receive everything you need there? That a forest is created by stories, spirits, and ancestors, but also by questions? Did they tell you that asking nurtures relations and questions create wonders? Did they tell you that when you ask a question, you commit yourself to listening to the answer? Did they tell you that a forest is a question we answer?

A forest asks:

Who breathes surprise, knowing we inhale the offerings of others? If every breath is a gift, if every tree is a regeneration of life, if every fruit is a book, who are we? Who is the forest and who is the tree? Who can step softly on the earth’s back, leaving only a weight that lightens?

Who knows the languages? Who talks to the trees? Who passes on the knowledge to the ones who come after us? Who hears when Grandmother trees tell their great-grandchildren stories about ancient giant forests in the beginning of forest time? Who remembers the stories and the trees that carry those stories? Who shares those stories by the fire for everyone who wants to listen? Who remembers ahead and who imagines back? Who leans their ear into the branches to hear the rivers they carry? Who allows themselves to be held by the thick arms of a ceiba?

Who knows the tracks and who finds the paths? Who draws the maps as shifting worlds of layers on top of each other? Who remembers the names of the places and who remembers the stories behind those names? Who follows the sun and the moon, and who reads the stars?

Who builds the shelter and makes space for those who don’t have one? Who finds the water? Who hunts the birds, catches the salmon, slaughters the reindeer, and harvests the berries and plants? Who prepares the forest’s medicines? Who cooks by the fire and who feeds the fire? Who can speak with flames, and read their burning?

Who learns from the forest's parliament of permissions? Who pauses before the palaces of their past? Who presents offerings to the forest-dwelling council of beings? Who acknowledges that trees have their own laws, lives, wills, spirits, calendars, holidays, deities, and burials? Who attends their celebrations and who sings their songs? Who only takes and who also gives back? Who uses everything they get and who shares everything with everyone? Who expresses gratitude and who gives thanks? Who does magic with forest flowers and miracles with birch seeds?

Who can tell the difference between an ancient forest and a plantation? Who sees logging as the mere cutting of trees, and who sees it as the cutting of cultures, the rupture of families, the entire uprooting of forest thinking? Who sees biodiversity as a list of species, and who understands it as sacred tapestries of relations? Who promotes monoculture and who views their own body, their community, their ecosystem as polycultures? Who sees emissions as gasses, and who as responsibilities? Who sinks the carbon dioxide and who raises the global temperatures?

Who can differentiate between relations and transactions? Who remembers the dismemberment? Who does the world see as disposable? Who do we dispose of? Who recognises the grief that flows through a tree’s resin? Who mourns the death of tree families in the hands of colonial projects? Who prepares funerals for them?

Who sees the crisis, the catastrophes, and the disasters? Who opens and closes their eyes? As the climate and its weather patterns are forced towards new extremes, so are their questions: who is resilient, who is adaptive and who survives? Who helps when the wildfires and floods arrive and who runs away? Who can travel, who has a boat and who has the strength? Who eats and who starves? Who has a community of love and care and who will be abandoned? Who is most vulnerable in the forest and who is the forest most vulnerable to? Who has already lost their forest and is homeless? Who died, who disappeared and who is gone forever?

Who remembers that our sickness is a mirror of a sickness in the forest? Who practices medicine, the healing of all to be whole again? Who nurtures the queer life-giving ecosystems? Who knows that family is a lineage that is both horizontal and vertical, linear and circular? Who draws humility from their limitations, and who remedies their misdoings? Who prolongs destruction through false solutions, and who asks the forest for its vision?

Who seeks justice? Who fights for it to death because they know their life isn’t only theirs? Who sees temples in seeds, prayers in paths and who is amazed by the blueberry leaves? Who gets up in the morning to save the trees?

Co-written by Jenni Laiti & Maria Faciolince Martina & Daniel Voskoboynik With forests in Sápmi, Udmurt Elkun, Collserola, Antioquia and the missing forest of Kòrsou