The narrative of civilization’s rise and fall is often illustrated with grand achievements and epic downfalls, but one of the most understated forces behind humanity’s progress—and its moments of regression—is the forest.

John Perlin’s seminal work, A Forest Journey, reveals how forests have been central to human history, shaping the fate of societies from antiquity to the modern day. Perlin’s book, now in its third edition with over 150 pages of new material, has long been a cornerstone of environmental literature, earning its place as a Harvard Classic in Science and World History.

Originally published in 1986, A Forest Journey explores how wood, once essential to nearly all human activities, fueled the development of civilizations across millennia. From constructing homes and ships to smelting metal and producing energy, wood was indispensable. Forests supplied more than just materials—they were a source of power, enabling empires to expand and leaving ecological scars as resources dwindled. Perlin deftly chronicles how the exploitation of forests for timber, fuel, and other needs contributed to the rise of some of history’s greatest empires, only to sow the seeds of their collapse when the forests were depleted.

Perlin’s journey through time is expansive, spanning continents and epochs. He begins with early human use of wood for tools and fuel, then moves to the great civilizations of antiquity, such as the Roman Empire and Han China, whose dependence on timber led to severe deforestation. The link between wood and empire is starkly clear: nations that understood and managed their forests thrived, while those that over-exploited them faced decay and decline.

In the interview that follows, Perlin offers an enlightening perspective on how modern society’s relationship with forests parallels that of past civilizations. Though modern industry no longer depends on wood, the underlying dynamic remains the same. As he notes, “Seven thousand years of repetition. Does anyone ever learn, I wonder?” For Perlin, the central message is that human history is inextricably linked to the health of forests. Civilizations that failed to manage their resources properly—be it Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome—collapsed as their timber resources vanished, leading to economic decline and societal collapse.

One of the more disturbing parallels Perlin draws between past and present is the ever-growing intrusion of human activity into wilderness areas. Globalization, colonialism, and the relentless march of industrialization have exacerbated deforestation across the globe. Despite technological advances that could, in theory, reduce humanity’s footprint, the spread of infrastructure continues to destroy the very ecosystems that sustain us.

“More stands of timber became accessible,” he remarks, and with that, the consequences of deforestation ripple across the world.

Perlin’s research uncovers a near-universal truth: throughout history, whether in ancient Greece or pre-Columbian America, societies have systematically destroyed forests as they sought to expand their reach. The Greek historian Herodotus described the clearing of forests for agriculture, and the Mahabharata tells of the Pandavas’ conquest of Indraprastha, which required the decimation of the Khandava forest. In both instances, human triumph was intertwined with ecological loss.

The updated edition of A Forest Journey expands the narrative further, touching on regions that were underexplored in the book’s earlier editions. Perlin delves into the histories of Africa, China, and India, demonstrating how societies across these regions also followed the familiar pattern of forest exploitation. These additions highlight a critical truth: deforestation is not merely a Western problem but a global one. In ancient China, as in the West, deforestation was celebrated as a sign of progress. Similarly, Perlin reveals that the iron production techniques in Africa, long hailed as an Indigenous achievement, depended on the destruction of vast swathes of forest for charcoal.

Perlin is quick to dismiss the idea that Indigenous cultures lived in perfect harmony with nature, a misconception often romanticized by modern environmentalists, he argues.

“Humans everywhere will take what they need to survive,” Perlin notes.

Even the so-called indigenous ecocide—such as the destruction of forests for agriculture in pre-Columbian America or the mass killing of megafauna in early human history—demonstrates that environmental degradation is a fundamental part of the human condition, rather than necessarily a byproduct of industrial society.

Yet, A Forest Journey is not simply a tale of destruction. The book, and Perlin’s insights, also offer hope. If humanity can learn from its past, there is still time to reverse the course. One of the most effective strategies, he suggests, is to protect old-growth forests. As he puts it in the interview, “Protecting old-growth forests throughout the world appears to be the most immediate and cost-effective solution to fighting climate change and drought.” By recognizing the importance of these ancient ecosystems, Perlin believes, we can address some of the most pressing environmental challenges we face today.

This sense of urgency underpins the entire book. As the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, remarked when he decided to republish A Forest Journey for a new generation, the book holds vital lessons for a world on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Time is running out, but as Perlin emphasizes, there are still steps we can take to preserve what remains of our forests and mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

The interview with John Perlin sheds light on these themes, offering readers a deeper understanding of humanity’s historical relationship with forests and the path forward. As deforestation continues to play a role in the collapse of ecosystems worldwide, Perlin’s work remains as relevant as ever—a stark reminder that the fate of civilizations, past and present, is intertwined with the health of the world’s forests.

An interview with author John Perlin

Mongabay: What inspired you to write A Forest Journey?

John Perlin: Ever since I was a child, I have always had the ambition to do something huge. At eleven years old I won a major national scientific contest, asking the award-winning question, “If a seed is so small, how does it make a tree so tall?” My award: The First Book of Trees. I got my first chance by writing the breakthrough solar-history book, A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, which would later be enlarged as Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy. While researching the use of solar energy throughout history, I discovered that people throughout the world turned to sun for house heating as they began to run short of wood fuel. Wood, I then surmised, must have been over a long period of history as important to societies as fossil fuels are today. Therefore, wood’s abundance or scarcity, I hypothesized, must have shaped, just as fossil fuels do today, the culture, demographics, domestic and international politics, and technology of times past. Here was my chance to introduce a whole new view of world history: A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization.

Mongabay: A Forest Journey traces the rise and fall of civilizations through their relationship with forests. How do you think modern society’s interaction with forests compares to those of past civilizations? Are there any new parallels or differences you see today?

John Perlin: Before the industrial revolution, floating logs down major rivers was the only way people could transport timber. This seriously hindered access as it became uneconomical to fell trees too distant from waterways. By the end of the nineteenth century with the advent of narrow-gauge railroads many of the larger stands hitherto inaccessible were now in jeopardy. As timbering machinery has advanced over the last century, more stands of timber became accessible. Nor can we forget globalization and colonialism. Roads and vehicles also exacerbate humanity’s inroads into the forest.

The Human/Wilderness interface seems growing globally yet historically the same happened historically and finds a place throughout the book. What I find so disturbing is that the story of deforestation over time and geographically eerily mirrors the seven-thousand-year story of Gilgamesh’s venture into the cedar forest, stripping it of its trees and floating down the logs to the urban center of Uruk for lumber to build a great empire. And yet in the end proving fatal to that civilization. Seven thousand years of repetition. Does anyone ever learn, I wonder. I hope my book starts to wake the world to the need for trees.

Mongabay: In the latest edition of your book, you’ve expanded the scope to include examples from regions like India, China, Africa, and South America. What motivated these additions, and what do they reveal about global patterns of deforestation and civilization?

John Perlin: I asked myself was deforestation particular to western societies while others better husband their trees or did the destruction of forests hold a universal truth for all human societies? To find the answer I decided to look at India, China and Africa. I found that both the Chinese and Indians celebrated destroying their forests in their founding legends. The Book of Odes, written thousands of years ago, celebrated China’s war against nature, stating, “T’ae, who then was chief, tamed wild nature, as before there only existed impervious forests. He felled the wooded clumps and rows. God then looked upon the hills where T’ae had tamed the thorny shrubs and had broken paths through the forest for human feet to pass.”

India has a similar founding legend as did China. More than five thousand years ago, the Mahabharata—referred to by its editors as “one of the two great gems in Indian literature”—described the conquest of the city of Indraprastha by the Pandava family favored by the god Shri Krishna, who oversees human affairs. For the newly conquered Indraprastha to flourish the Pandavas felt it necessary to clear the adjacent massive Khandava forest to make the land ready for farming.

While Africa had no founding myths, archaeologists found that iron workers in various centers relied on trees to fuel their metallurgy centers, leading to centuries where they had to shut down due to overcutting. It revealed a common societal trait: rapacious cutting down of trees until there are no more.

Here I will add that the so-called Indigenous, better referred as the first people, were also guilty of ecocide: It has been confirmed that the first people killed off most of the megafauna long before any civilizations took root. As Morten Allentoft, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen, commented on the extinction by the Polynesians of the Moa, a large flightless bird formerly of New Zealand.”

We like to think of Indigenous people as living in harmony with nature. But this is rarely the case. Humans everywhere will take what they need to survive. That’s how it works.”

Mongabay: You mention that many societies, including Western Europeans, had ancestral ties to forests, which they later destroyed. How do you think a reconnection with these ancestral roots could shape our current environmental consciousness and policies?

John Perlin: A Forest Journey introduces readers to the first true tree, Archaeopteris, which 385 million years ago spread throughout the world. Its ubiquitous florescence began a global trend toward greater carbon dioxide take down and toward the addition of more oxygen to the planet’s atmosphere, making for a landscape amenable to large animals which eventually has included us. Then the story skips to the time millions of years later when the catastrophic loss of the woodlands nearly brought about the end of life on Earth.

Chapter-to-chapter readers learn the universal truth that over the millennia the fate of the world’s civilizations, including ours, has rested on an abundance of wood, introducing a whole new way of looking at how we as a species have evolved physically, culturally, and materially. We all have descended from the woods whether African, Asian, European or First people of North and South America. Environmental consciousness and policies? By reading A Forest Journey people will realize their connection to the forests, not only in times past but right now, as our existential survival rests with our forests’ health.

Mongabay: The Chouinards from Patagonia viewed A Forest Journey as a foundational environmental text. What was it like to see the book rediscovered and championed by such influential figures after decades of struggling to keep it alive?

John Perlin: Before May of 2018 I had no idea of the Chouinards’ interest in A Forest Journey. The local Santa Barbara weekly, the Independent, ran an article on a symposium that I would keynote, introducing to the world Eunice Foote, an early American Woman’s Rights advocate who in 1856 discovered that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and more of it in the atmosphere would result in a hotter Earth. Two days later the Independent’s editor sent me an email he received from Patagonia, stating that A Forest Journey was by far their favorite book and they had wanted for a decade to republish the book. This was music to my ears as I had spent decades on researching and writing the book and it had been let out to languish for over a decade even though I continued collecting more and more stories I wanted to add. I immediately went to work and you have the result in your copy of the book. Patagonia had also improved the layout and allowed me to co-design this new edition, resulting in what many say is the most beautiful book they have ever seen and its relevancy has grown over its published lifetime.

The critics seem to agree. PubWest, a consortium of independent publishers throughout North America, named A Forest Journey as the best designed Adult Trade Book for 2023. The judges said, “Love the cover. Very intriguing and pulls you in. Entire Package is top notch.”

The Independent Publishers Association chose A Forest Journey as its 2024 Gold Winner for the Environment.

Time Magazine wrote, [If the book] “finds its deserved place in the conservation canon alongside such works as Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, it will be because its readers would not let it die.”

As another reviewer wrote, “So, what can I tell you about the 3^rd edition of John Perlin’s A forest journey? In short, it’s a brilliant plants-and-people book(!). At somewhat greater length and in more depth”

And as Yale Climate Connections stated, “The next six titles recount the history of humanity’s long and fraught relationship with trees… Included in this group is the rereleased and reimagined classic “A Forest Journey.” With Patagonia’s trademark care, this account of the role of trees in the fate of civilization has been enriched with new illustrations and artful production.

Thank you, Malinda and Yves Chouinard and all my readers, old and new, for resurrecting A Forest Journey and allowing it to flourish as never before.

Mongabay: The book emphasizes how deforestation contributed to the collapse of ancient civilizations. How do you see this historical lesson applying to our current global environmental challenges, especially regarding climate change and biodiversity loss?

John Perlin: About three thousand years ago events on the island of Cyprus provide a view of what happens when the consequences are brought on by unchecked deforestation and industrialization. Cyprus’ rich veins of copper and abundant forests made the island the industrial center of the Mediterranean Bronze Age. The island’s multiple furnaces extracted copper from ore, producing the metal which the entire Eastern Mediterranean civilization depended upon for its tools and weapons. The lively trade in the metal was based entirely by a reckless attack on the island’s forests for fuel, which after several hundred proved unsustainable. Without much forest cover left, wild pigs gave way to domesticated goats and sheep and the rain-saturated topsoil ran down the mountain sides to silt up the major harbors and flood the populated urban areas.

Carbon dioxide bellowing out of the copper furnaces and a surfeit of trees to ameliorate these emissions adversely changed the climate throughout the civilized world, resulting in devastating droughts, causing catastrophic crop failures and widespread famine, precipitating social, economic and political crises in the Eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia that brought an end to the Bronze Age.

Mongabay: In your research, you explored various ancient languages to uncover references to forests and trees. Can you share an example of how one of these linguistic discoveries deepened your understanding of humanity’s historical relationship with forests?

John Perlin: I wish to share the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was written on clay tablets in cuneiform, the world’s first method of writing. Most consider the Epic the earliest piece of great literature that has survived the millennia. Many portions of the Old Testament such as Noah and the Flood have their origins from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Tablet V, known by many as “The Forest Journey,” serves as the template for humanity’s eternal war against the forest over the millennia as discussed in the pages of my book. Gilgamesh, the hero of the Epic, dares to despoil the forest which the gods consider heaven on earth to build a giant city and leave a name for himself throughout the ages. Enkidu, his partner in the ecocide belatedly repents. As they float down the river on their raft of logs, Enkidu turns to Gilgamesh and exclaims, “We have turned the forest into a wasteland. How shall we answer to the gods?”

Mongabay: A Forest Journey highlights the shift from wood to other resources, such as solar energy or fossil fuels. Given your research into solar technology in A Golden Thread, how do you see the potential for humanity to transition from exploitative resource use to sustainable energy sources today?

John Perlin: In 1980 there was less than one million watts of solar photovoltaics installed in the world. Today the amount has risen to two trillion watts. Electricity produced by the sun in many cases has become the cheapest form of electricity today. As Science magazine wrote decades ago, “If there is a dream solar technology, it is photovoltaics…a space-age electronic marvel at once the most sophisticated solar technology and the simplest, most environmentally benign source of electricity yet conceived.” What is holding the solarization of the world up is not technological or economic but the power of special interest groups that would lose their entrenched position in such a transition.

An added advantage of photovoltaics is that the technology requires no source of water as do coal, gas and nuclear and of course, hydro, to produce electricity. In a water constrained world due to climate change this factor alone gives solar photovoltaics a distinct advantage over all these other forms of electrical generation.

Mongabay: The book’s message about the existential value of forests is more urgent than ever. How do you remain hopeful that humanity can break the cycle of deforestation and ecological degradation that has persisted for millennia?

John Perlin: I think it must begin with education. That is why I wrote A Forest Journey. When I went to school history was about generals, wars and politicians. Here is the story of our species presented with a new lens: the preeminent role trees have played in the fate of humanity from earliest times to the present. To describe the world more fully, as A Forest Journey does, is to help change it, as the lessons learned in A Forest Journey encourage people to turn away from the past to better our tomorrows.

Mongabay: Given the importance of oral histories and millennia-old literature in your work, what role do you believe indigenous knowledge systems play in contemporary environmental solutions, particularly in forest conservation?

John Perlin: If we speak of indigenous urban cultures, their systems worked no better than other civilizations. They followed the same trajectory as did other urban civilizations discussed in A Forest Journey. If there is any question regarding the impact on the forests by the New World’s first people, look no further than the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan located in what is now Mexico. By the seventh century C.E., Teotihuacan’s population had grown five times larger than Rome! Although a significant amount of wood fuel was required to transform limestone into mortar to build Teotihuacan’s spectacular Pyramid of the Sun, as well as adjacent buildings, the everyday needs of the city’s growing population for fuel with which to cook meals and heat homes far outstripped the lime kilns in devouring trees. Fuel used to convert limestone into lime took out about 415 square miles of pine over a 650-year time at Teotihuacan while demand by households for firewood stripped nearly 8000 square miles of forest land during the same period.

Archaeological data from the Yucatan peninsula reveals severe reductions in rainfall coupled with a rapid rate of deforestation, as the Mayans burned and chopped down more and more forest to clear land for agriculture. They also required massive amounts of wood to fuel the fires that cooked the lime plaster for their elaborate constructions—experts estimate it would have taken 20 trees to produce a single square meter of cityscape. The central Yucatan lowland, site of most major Mayan cities, was abandoned due to the stresses of deforestation and drought. The rapid deforestation exacerbated an already severe drought and was responsible for 60 percent of the total drying that occurred over the course of a century as the Mayan civilization collapsed.

Today’s Amazon soil profile called Amazon Dark Earth serves as evidence for the Pre-Columbians setting afire the old-growth rainforest to allow trees bearing edible fruit to flourish, as well as providing open land for farming. Such activities opened land previously shaded by the giant trees. Consequently, according to researchers, the land below became “more susceptible to drought induced fire activity compared to old growth rainforests.”

In Africa in various areas and at different time periods the production of iron tore down the forests in multiple ways. To convert iron ore to useful implements required large amounts of wood for fueling the furnaces. The iron tools produced in the furnaces – hoes, sickles and axes – enabled farmers to clear even more land of trees and use the soil formerly underneath the forest to expand their croplands. Coring samples revealed striking changes of vegetation where iron was produced and made available, proving that fueling the iron industry and accelerated land clearing crops had denuded the nearby forests.

The best millennia-old piece of literature regarding contemporary environmental solutions, particularly in forest conservation, that I have found while researching material for A Forest Journey comes from an ancient Greek myth which tells of a king who greatly loved watching his wood cutters fell trees. One day they came upon a huge oak of great age. Because of its enormous size and antiquity, the lumberjacks realized that the tree must enjoy divine protection. They therefore would not cut it down, fearing the wrath of the gods. “Cowards!” the king shouted and began to hack away at the oak all by himself. Punishment came swiftly. Demeter, the protectress of Old Growth, decreed, “This miscreant’s stomach will ache with hunger, but no amount of food will satiate his endless appetite.” Sure enough, a ravenous appetite attacked the king. He demanded everything edible brought to his table. The more food he consumed, the king cried out for more. His appetite soon exhausted the stores of his palace, devastated the surrounding countryside and ravished the world. Yet he was still hungry. Left at last with only his body as food, the wretch tore at his very flesh with greedy teeth until he devoured himself.

Mongabay: With over 500,000 square miles of forest lost since the original publication of your book, do you believe we are at a tipping point, or is there still time to reverse course? What strategies give you the most hope?

John Perlin: Protecting old-growth forests throughout the world appears to be the most immediate and cost-effective solution to fighting climate change and drought. Paying a living wage for people to stay out of the forest and protect the old growth seems a worthwhile strategy to achieve this goal. Birth control is another important pillar in protecting the trees.

I have personally seen the consequence of population growth needing more food destroy huge swaths of woods replaced by crops in southern Mexico repeating what their Mayan predecessors had done a millennium earlier: burning and chopping away at an ever-decreasing forest clearing the land to feed an ever-growing population until there were no more trees and no more food.

I am happy to let you know that no trees were lost in producing A Forest Journey. Thank Patagonia for that!

Citations

• Tetius Chandler and Gerald Forx, 1974, 3000 Years of Urban Growth, p. 82.
• Luis Alberto Barba and Jose Luis Cordova, 2010, Materiales y Energia en la Arquitectura de Teotihuacan, pp.114-115
• S. Yoshi Maezumi, et al. (03 August 2018). New Insights from Pre-Columbian Land Use and Fire Management in Amazonian Dark Earth Forests. Frontiers in Ecological Evolution. 6