From the Sivens forest in France to the Hambach forest in Germany, from the Broadback forest in Canada to the rainforests of Borneo, something has shifted in these wild spaces over the last decade or two. People have begun to inhabit the forests, oppose the loggers and use their bodies as shields, motivated by the determination to resist the lethal ecosystem of commercial exploitation. Forests have become a battleground in the struggle between groups with fundamentally divergent aims and objectives.

Forests are made up of insurgents. Jean-Baptiste Vidalou went to see some of these forests and meet those who are defending them: he discovered a completely different way of understanding the world, sharply opposed to the mentality of planners who see forests as just one more territory to be managed. Here he recounts this encounter, relays what these forest peoples and struggles convey, not to offer any recipes or ready-made solutions to the crises of our times but to be the forest, like a force that grows, stem by stem, leaf by leaf, slowly becoming ungovernable.

Selected by Mongabay as one of 10 notable books on conservation and the environment published in 2023
 

“Jean-Baptiste Vidalou investigates the rise of people fighting for forests around the world… he bristles at the idea that something as wild and unruly as a forest needs to be measured to have value… He also reflects on what he sees as the limitations of the way we currently approach forests, and in doing so, finds a mirror for human society at large.”
—Mongabay

"We are Forests is the outstanding implementation of a lyrical counter-expertise. Jean-Baptiste Vidalou explains how a political struggle is required to truly understand all the components at stake in our relationship to the environment. If we don’t defend a territory, a forest or a lake, we simply see the proposed changes by engineers, administrations and experts as necessary 'progress', smart management, without being sensitive to the ecological devastation at play."
—Frédéric Neyrat, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"If you, like me, doubt the only way we can see nature is through the data we so obsessively collect and pore over – trying to detect all that which we cannot see – and wonder if ours is just a newer form of an older, discredited interventionism; or, if, in fact you have pondered about why we still stumble for some kind of 'complete picture' of nature, then this book is for you."
—Ecos

Jean-Baptiste Vidalou is a dry stone wall builder and philosopher who lives in France.