I found myself in the mood for a quiet book. A book to read and keep me company in the solitude of the late night hours when everyone else was asleep. Something that would also invite moments of reflection and wonder.

Glenn Diaz’s When the World Ended I Was Thinking About the Forest was the perfect book for the reading mood I was in.  In a series of essays, Diaz wrote about forests as they show up in fiction, history, and his personal life, and how forests (and their absence) can reshape the world and our understanding of it. 

I grew up and lived in cities my whole life, and I have no deep connection to the forest. But trees, when I do see them in my city-bound life, have always fascinated me. Reading about forests in this book, and how they show up in various works of fiction means that the wonder surrounding trees and forests is one that has been around for a long time and shared by many people across time and space. Reading about the role of forests in Philippine history–how it was seen as a mystical and sacred place, then became a refuge for guerillas during the fight for independence, and finally commodified into products that signal capitalist progress for a young country that has endured so many colonial masters–made me wonder how the state of forests can change where the country might be today.

  

The area where I live has many trees, not quite a forest, but at least it’s something. However, there are no trees on my street, and each time I go out I feel their absence like the space in your gums where a tooth used to be. Something should be there, but it’s not. 

When the World Ended I Was Thinking About the Forest changed the way I look at the world. Isn’t it amazing when books do that? I find myself thinking about this book months after I’ve finished reading it. It has changed the way I think about the forest, trees, nature, and often unseen relationships between human society and the natural world. It is a change I welcome, because, to borrow Diaz’s words, unfortunately "I have not been to a forest. This appears to be at the heart of this inquiry. I have not been to a forest."