When We Miss Forests We’ve Never Known

Arash has never seen a real forest, yet he draws them constantly—dense canopies, hidden paths, creatures that exist only in his imagination. When I ask him where these images come from, he shrugs. “They feel right,” he says, as if rightness were explanation enough.

Maybe it is.

There’s something in us that remembers what we’ve never experienced, that aches for landscapes our bodies have never touched. We carry the blueprint of wildness in our cells—the genetic memory of ten thousand generations who lived in intimate relationship with untamed earth, who knew the smell of rain on leaves, the sound of wind through branches, the particular silence that comes only in places where humans are visitors, not rulers.

I feel this homesickness most acutely in crowds, surrounded by concrete and neon and the constant noise of a civilization that has forgotten how to be quiet. Some ancient part of me expects to see stars when I look up, expects to hear owls instead of sirens, expects my feet to feel earth instead of pavement. The disappointment is physical—a tightness in my chest, a restlessness that no amount of urban entertainment can satisfy.

This isn’t romanticism. This is biology. For 99% of human history, we lived embedded in wild systems, our survival dependent on reading weather patterns, understanding plant cycles, knowing the behavior of other animals. Our brains evolved to find peace in natural complexity—the fractal patterns of tree branches, the white noise of running water, the gentle chaos of ecosystems in balance.

Cities offer stimulation, but not the kind our nervous systems recognize as nourishing. We’re homesick for a relationship with place that most of us have never experienced—the deep familiarity that comes from knowing a particular patch of earth through all its seasons, from understanding which plants are medicine and which are food, from feeling ourselves part of a community that includes more-than-human beings.

Happy’s grandmother in Sylhet comes closest to this old way of knowing. She can predict rain by the behavior of ants, knows which trees will fruit before the trees seem to know it themselves. When she tends her garden, she’s not imposing order on chaos—she’s participating in an ancient conversation between human consciousness and the intelligence of growing things.

But even she carries the sadness of disconnection. The forests of her childhood have been cleared, the rivers polluted, the seasons themselves unreliable now. She’s homesick for a version of her own landscape that existed only in her grandmother’s time.

This is the deepest tragedy of our moment: we’re not just destroying wilderness, we’re destroying the possibility of home. Every extinct species takes with it some part of the conversation that made humans feel like we belonged on this planet. Every cleared forest eliminates another chance for our children to experience the particular peace that comes from being appropriately small in the presence of something vast and alive.

The homesickness we feel for wilderness we’ve never known isn’t nostalgia—it’s grief. We’re mourning the loss of our own nature, the severing of connections that took millions of years to establish. We ache for wild places because wild places are where we learned to be human, where we developed the capacities for wonder and humility and complex relationship that distinguish us from machines.

Without wilderness, we forget who we are. We become homesick for ourselves.

In dreams, I sometimes find myself in forests that never existed—trees taller than any I’ve seen, clearings filled with light that seems different from ordinary sunlight, paths that feel familiar though I’ve never walked them. I wake from these dreams with the strange sadness of remembering something I’ve lost, though I can’t say what or when.

Maybe these aren’t my dreams at all. Maybe they’re the dreams of my species, our collective memory of the world we evolved to inhabit, the world we’re still homesick for even as we finish destroying it.

The question that keeps me awake is whether we can find our way home to a place that no longer exists, whether it’s possible to heal a homesickness that gets deeper every day, as the last wild places disappear and our children inherit an earth that their bodies will remember but never recognize.