When I was a child, I wanted to live in a pine forest. Or, to be more accurate, a pine plantation. We have a lot of these in Britain, sown across the hills and mountains during the twentieth century for cheap paper and pulp. The tight ranks of conifer trees, planted so close together that most of their branches die for lack of light, and which acidify the soil for miles around, are hated by ecologists, landscape lovers and most of the local wildlife, which barely ventures into them. Perhaps that's what I liked about them. There seemed to be some kind of dark, mossy mystery in the maze of pillarlike trunks. Maybe I'd been reading too much Tolkien (this was a perennial problem), but I could imagine myself pitching camp in there, making a small tent of branches and leaves, wandering the soft forest floor, drinking from streams, becoming something other than myself.
-Paul Kingsnorth, from his Introduction to Against The Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
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