Sean Barrs 's Reviews > The Word for World Is Forest

I’ve been looking for a book like this for a very long time, a book that – at its very core – tackles the environmental destruction associated with systematic imperialism.

Now let me try to unpack that a little. I write these words as my own home (my planet) is being destroyed by mass scale consumerism, as our ever-growing appetites and population continues to decimate our own forests and natural land. This is not a new phenomenon, but as we advance technologically, we have become more adept at destroying ourselves. We continue to expand without any thought of the consequences. Time is ticking and Earth is in a sorry state.

The humans in The Word for World for Forrest have already destroyed their planet’s natural world, so they look outward and attempt to colonise other worlds to harvest their natural resources (namely wood.) Again, these humans have not a thought of consequences and by extension care little for the indigenous populations of their colonies.

And this is where the novel gets real interesting because one thing that really stood out to me – perhaps because of my own reading and background as an animal rights activist – is the association of animals with the “primitive” population. For the invading humans to morally justify enslaving them and to destroy their world (or habitat), they are considered less than human. They are associated with cows and rats and monkeys to make it easier for the colonisers to brutalise their planet. Their forests are cut down and harvested without a second thought, like we destroy the amazon rainforest because it only affects animal life and not us directly (in the present.)

For me, there is much to discuss here. Without going into too much depth about this distorted and destructive viewpoint, the novel brings out strikingly important themes about the nature of imperialism, colony, and slavery. Arguments for environmental justice are irrevocably linked with how we treat other humans and their cultures, and how we view the notion of what is "animal" and how it should be treated.

And because of this, I argue that it is an extremely important work of science-fiction because we could learn from it as a society. And this is why art is so radically essential. We have a distant future, and a distant alien world, we are dealing with intergalactic politics and racism across humanoid species, but the allegory is not too far from today.

And that's truly terrifying.

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