Original subtitles

[♪♪]

Narrator: The sun.

The life force of our solar system.

Its photons of energy can remain trapped in the sun's sphere

for 100,000 years.

And when finally they are released, it will take

the photons 8 minutes to travel from the surface of the sun

to the surface of a leaf on planet earth.

[birdsong]

A leaf is a marvel of evolution.

It transforms the photons into food for planet earth,

creating a foundation for all life.

And it begins with a tree.

[birdsong]

It's time to look again at that tree outside your door...

[ambient street noise]

...and to the forest beyond.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Narrator: What do you know about trees and forests?

[birdsong]

When you come into the forest like this,

the first thing that hits you is the smell of the earth,

the smell of the humus in the earth,

the smell of the decaying twigs, the smell,

that wonderful smell that rises up to you and meets you.

[birdsong]

Narrator: We all feel better when we're around trees,

and when we walk in a forest, but why?

For over 1,000 years, the Japanese have been coming to

their forests to do what they call 'forest bathing'.

From school children to businessmen,

they all come here to forest bathe.

Diana: Forest bathing is really about immersing yourself in the

bath of medicinal aerosols that make up the forest atmosphere,

and the benefits are many!

I'm on the top, no, halfway up Mt. Kurama.

[birdsong]

I'm joining, it seems to me,

to be the rest of the Japanese population today on this

wonderful day in fall - forest bathing.

Narrator: If you feel refreshed and invigorated after a walk

in the forest, there is a chemical explanation.

Diana: A tree is not just a tree.

Some of the most complex chemistry that is found on

the planet is produced in the furnace of a tree.

[drumming]

One of the most important trees at the Shinto Shrine

is the sacred sugi tree.

[drum]

[♪♪]

And for those who speak Latin, it's Cryptomeria Japonica,

the sacred tree of the Shinto shrines.

The sugi and many of these trees around me are indeed very

powerful in the work that they do with this molecular screening

of chemical aerosols into the atmosphere.

[♪♪]

These aerosols directly benefit your immune system.

[♪♪]

Trees create many of the chemicals used in the

manufacture of approximately 60% of our medicines,

from aspirin and caffeine to paclitaxel in the treatment

of breast cancers.

And trees continue to be rich banks of

biochemical possibilities.

These trees also have life living within the tree itself.

It's a fungal life form and they are called 'endogenous fungi'.

These endogenous fungi are very clever.

They produce extraordinary compounds,

and the compounds they produce are very unique.

Narrator: These previously unknown compounds are the source

of many new exciting medicines.

But you're coming in here today to get it for free,

and that's part of forest bathing.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Diana: Everyone benefits.

[♪♪]

Narrator: Trees are the secret to our existence,

because they rule this planet on every physical plane, the land,

the sea and the air.

So much of our world is invisible to us,

such as all of the chemicals that are the building blocks

of a healthy balanced and breathing world.

Diana: And of course the trees are a key player in this

manufacturing and distribution of these chemicals.

[bird squawking]

This spruce tree, it's an Engelmann spruce,

it's an ancient, ancient tree, and it has a fiery canopy of all

kinds of chemicals in it.

This tree produces a whole treasury of aerosols.

The aerosols are Alpha Pinene and Beta Pinene.

Then in the air there is borneol acetate,

in the air there's a form of camphor compound.

Liberated with that is a limonene compound,

which aerates itself, firing up into the atmosphere,

like the parasols of a dandelion.

Narrator: It is an applicator chemical, an aerosol.

So all of those chemicals, those pinenes,

are now in my lungs.

[♪♪]

The limonene produced by these trees

is used in chemotherapy.

Limonene is anti-cancer compound,

the pinenes are antibiotic compounds,

and what they are doing to me now is they're giving me a

slightly narcotic reaction, they have an anaesthetic reaction

on my brain, and in my myelin sheath,

in all the message areas of my body,

just messages just like a computer system.

And what that is telling me is to relax,

as my immune system is being boosted.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Diana: Cities everywhere need trees...

...to bring in birds, to clean the air of airborne pollution,

and to soften the concrete experience.

[♪♪]

Narrator: One man who has given this much thought and is getting

his hands in the dirt is Professor Akira Miyawaki.

He has spent 50 years traveling the globe,

planting and restoring native specie forest systems.

He's turned his attention to Tokyo, the city he calls home.

Professor Miyawaki searches for every nook and cranny in Tokyo

to fill with native trees, the big, small and tiny.

Creating what he calls the world's smallest forests.

This is a perfect example of a city forest.

Yes, yes, very important.

City forest.Yeah, yeah.

And it's the smallest forest in Tokyo.

[bird cawing]

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

When you're in the garden and you're looking at a cherry tree,

and you see a Baltimore oriole coming into the cherry tree,

or even a cardinal, or even a scarlet tanager,

you have the garden not because of you,

and you know you've built the garden for the bird,

and it gives you a feeling of completeness that in the whole

world there is gratitude to you that you have a garden and

that you're honoured that these birds will come and visit you,

and that you've built a habitat for the birds and you have

maintained and protected the habitats for those birds

and the animals and the snakes and the creatures around you,

and, by gosh, it gives you a really good feeling

of well-being and joy.

So, what you are doing with a bio plan is you're working with

nature, and then when you have a good healthy nature around you,

you actually have your health.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Narrator: In the countryside around her farm in

Ontario, Canada, Diana Beresford-Kroeger noticed

many tree species disappearing.

She made the decision to preserve and protect them.

For over 40 years now, she has devoted her life to collecting,

trialing, breeding and studying rare North American tree species

to survive climate change.

Building a living library to ensure biodiversity,

food and medicines.

As she did, she realized this has to happen all over

the globe, wherever the native forests are falling before

human need and greed.

Diana: This led me to the outlandish notion

that we might, we must replant the global forest.

Our cheapest and best defence against climate change.

In my own way, I began replanting the global

forests long ago.

I planted this black walnut as a seedling here on my farm

almost 30 years ago now.

'Tis a tree that really grows in all of eastern Canada

and down into the States along the Mississippi.

It's really an extraordinary state of affairs,

where everything around this tree benefits from it.

It is really a medicinal tree, and it produces a fruit,

the fruit is a nut, and the nut is here.

The nut is like a globe really, isn't it.

The protein of these nutmeats is as good as any beef

on the market.

Then these nuts have got minerals,

all kinds of unusual minerals, but they have got

something else, three items that are very, very scarce

in our food nowadays.

The flesh of this nut has oleic, linoleic

and linolenic acid in them.

These are the three essential fatty acids for the development

and repair of the brain, the functioning of transportation

all through the body for neural messages because these acids,

these fatty acids, protect the myelin sheath of the human body

and of the animals, and what you should have is maybe two

or three or four of them a day.

And also once upon a time, these were part of the great savannah

of North America.

[♪♪]

Diana: A long time ago in the Middle Ages and way stretching

before that in thousands of years,

this heart of America could do something remarkable

with the forests.

Out of this soil, the plasticity of green grew to produce forests

beyond your thinking, beyond the dimensions of your home,

enormous canopies of forest that carried butternuts, walnuts,

hickory nuts, chestnuts, and marvellous oak trees in great

canopy systems, which were called savannahs,

and they stretched hundreds of miles,

sucking up the Mississippi River,

with this marvellous green highway that the squirrels could

walk hundreds of miles without touching the ground,

and that green highway was there stretching the continent.

Narrator: From the Gulf of Mexico to north of

the Ottawa River, and from the Atlantic coast

to west of the Mississippi,

today the remnants of these virgin hardwood

forests are miniscule.

[♪♪]

And there are no wild stands of black walnut remaining

on record in the United States.

[♪♪]

This North American sister of the Japanese Sugi,

the American Redwood, is one of the world's most loved trees,

and for good reason,

its sheer size makes it so memorable and inspiring.

It's the largest carbon bearing living organism on earth.

[♪♪]

For an Irish woman, this place is haunted.

It's haunted by silence, and a certain quality of mercy.

The trees are enormous.

They are called sequoias, evergreen sequoias,

sequoia sempervirens, which is the redwood.

The redwood is the tallest tree,

the tallest conifer on the planet.

It will go up to maybe 40 stories.

It will soar right up into the sky.

Chief Sequoia called them the kings of the forest and they are

indeed the kings of the conifer forest, but this is a very,

very unusual place in all of the planet.

Well, I was working with redwoods as a research species.

I have to tell you it's a pretty easy tree to fall in love with.

We haven't really started to figure out yet what's going on

in trees, and particularly what's going on underground.

I mean we stand here and look at these things,

and above ground is awesome,

we still don't know how water gets to the top.No.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table and

I was thinking about the volume of a 2,000-year-old redwood.

I decided that I would, in my mind, create a scale,

and I would put a 2,000-year-old redwood on one side

of the scale, and what would balance out that scale

and it would be a whole town, and the town would be,

I figured out the volume of about 13,000 people,

and that boggled my mind, and then I got the idea

of the volume of these trees.

It's just immense!

If you look at the rings, the rings on this tree are very

small, because there's so much diameter and there's so much

height, that the years growth is being put on a whole lot

of very small places.

But when you add it up, a big tree like this is growing faster

now than it has every time in its life, they don't slow down.

Diana: We're standing on soil containing insects,

bacteria fascias, fungal hyphae, viruses, bacteria,

and even algae, and there is so much more.

And we don't even fully understand living soil,

let alone the roots, let alone the interconnections.

It's like a huge metro system underneath our feet.

These redwoods that remain with us are really the runts.

[♪♪]

The straightest, biggest, oldest trees are always

the first to be logged.

By the 1870s, most of the remarkably big redwoods were

already taken for lumber.

[♪♪]

These were the mother trees, 2,000 to 4,000-year-old trees.

We now know that these really big trees, the mother trees,

in any forest system essentially nurse all of the forest

around them, by way of carbon and nutrient transfers through

the underground network of root and soil.

[♪♪]

And when these dominant trees are removed from a forest,

the integrity, health and the quality of a forest

is significantly diminished.

[♪♪]

They really are a coastal species, aren't they?

Well, the coast redwoods is coastal species,

but when you talk about all those species of the redwoods,

we have giant sequoia, which is a mountain species,

grows at elevations between about,

oh, 1500 and 3,000 metres.

Narrator: Before the last Ice Age,

the various redwood species grew across the entire northern

landscape of planet earth.

After the last Ice Age, we were down to some 2 million acres of

redwoods, mostly in California, and now with the present and

ongoing chainsaw cycle, we are down to about 133,000 acres.

Diana: The redwood forests of North America stretch from

the Chetco River up in Oregon, down to the Monterey peninsula,

and a little bit closer maybe to San Francisco.

Think of these redwoods as a whole series of tall green

curtains stretching up and down the coast;

a green wall on the lower area and a green wall on

the mountainous area.

That green wall is connected to the atmosphere,

and in turn is connected to the great ocean of the Pacific

in a rather extraordinary way.

In the morning here in California,

the mist rises in from the sea, and it is actually drawn in from

the sea by the heat of the land.

But these green curtains trap that mist.

These trees are acting as condenser units or green

machines for the collection and preservation of water.

They're pulling the moisture up from the aquifer,

but they're replenishing the aquifer again and again

by condensation of fresh potable water from the ocean mist.

In the past, the redwoods provided this service here

for the west coast.

California is very dry and it is getting drier,

and as these trees come down,

it's getting drier and drier again.

These redwood forests need to come back.

[water splashing]

Narrator: Along the coast, the trees are part of a chain

or a cycle, a feeding cycle, which feeds everything.

All the way to the underwater forests.

Diana: These underwater forests of kelp oxygenate the oceans,

as the trees do the atmosphere.

What we do see of this invisible forest is the upper canopy

of its reproduction, floating with balloons called vesicles

that are filled with mucilage and air.

Below the surface, this kelp forest is held in place by a

root system called 'a holdfast', anchoring it to the ocean floor.

Amazingly, the kelp grows as much as a foot and a half a day.

But those kelp depend on the trees here.

And when the trees are growing and producing leachate,

the leachate comes right down into the water here,

and the leachate carries iron in the water,

then they can grow and get big and get huge and then divide.

So, it's without those trees, there would be no leachate,

without the leachate there would be no kelp,

and without the kelp there would be no otters...

...no coastal marine life.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Not even the whales.

Narrator: It's another of the chain of relationships found

throughout nature that can be so invisible to us...

...until that chain is broken.

[♪♪]

A strange desert was created in Japan more than a century ago.

It happened on the Erimo Peninsula on the northern

Island of Hokkaido.

Japanese settlers clear-cut the native forests

to create farmland.

But with the trees gone, the rich humus layer created by the

forest was gradually blown away by the constant high winds.

The land became a barren desert,

that desert extended itself into the sea.

Along thousands of kilometres of coastline,

the marine ecosystem collapsed entirely.

It was a mystery to everyone.

Diana: Professor Katsuhiko Matsunaga, solved this mystery.

It all begins with a molecule of iron.

Iron is the foundation of the marine food chain.

You found something that was so, so simple and yet so valid for

everything all over the world.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Narrator: Now we know the oceans feel the effect

of a forest clear-cut hundreds of miles away.

[♪♪]

Maybe this is why the Japanese have come to say

'seek a fish by climbing a tree'.

[♪♪]

This is rainforest that predates the last Ice Age.

Only 5% of this ancient coastal rainforest remains.

[♪♪]

Diana: Along the wild Pacific trail,

I came upon this great Western redcedar.

It measures over 54' in circumference,

and is over 1,000 years old.

But as with all trees, so much more is going on here.

The DNA is each cell of all trees codes the tree

to produce protein.

And it produces all of the manufacturing needed for

its health, just like you and me.

In this ancient redcedar and all other trees,

they are not far off you and me in their capacity to live,

but they have lived for a very, very long period of time.

This is a phenomenal species.

It is something worth studying, it is something definitely

worth knowing, and in my opinion as a botanist,

it is a miracle of this planet.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

In the 1960s, this whole watershed was logged.

In fact, 90% of the watershed was logged,

and at that time no protection was afforded to creeks

and rivers and streams.

So, they actually logged right up to the creek banks

and then threw the waste wood into the stream.

It was littered with logging debris,

small branches to large cedar logs,

and piled up so debris jams that were blocking fish access

upstream and were blocking water flow downstream.

By opening it up, but retaining lots of the wood in

the stream still, we're sort of restoring it back to

a functioning habitat.

Now can I make a comment about you?

You're just a little woman.

[laughs]

And how did you manage to get these huge logs around

here back up to, what did you do?

It's really hard work, but we used a sort of hand powered

mechanical winches and cables and pulley systems,

and we sort of just pull the logs back,

opening the stream up, and then sort of anchor them against

the bank of the creek.

To my eyes as a botanist, you've got the elders in excellent

condition, then you've got the lower shrubs that will feed the

butterflies and the birds and then going down into the gravel.

You've got, opened the whole area,

and you've got the stream running over gravel,

which means the water is being oxygenated.

And from your elders, then you have got lots and lots

of really good lichens.

And these are lichens on lichens producing ursolic acid,

which sweeps the water clean in front of the salmon

coming up here.

If they can do it, with a very small baby in arms,

if you can do it, I can do it, if she can do it,

we can do it and actually we can all do it,

'cause there's lots of us around.

[♪♪]

Diana: I was born next to the sea.

My heartbeat is part of the ancient conversation between

the forests and the oceans.

[waves crashing]

The tides are in the trees,

in the atmosphere and in the aquifers.

These are the bare bone skeletal elements of our lives.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Like so many people from around the globe,

the Irish were a woodland culture.

And now as with so many of those cultures,

their natives forests have come down.

Across Ireland, atop these hills, are where the Irish

oak forests once stood.

But no more.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

I look around me, there are no oak forests left.

There should be oak forests here.

[♪♪]

What happened to make all of these forests go?

It's a whole series of disasters that had happened

on this island.

Narrator: Many a result of the 500 years of invasion

and occupation by England.

The saying went at the time that the Irish will never be tamed

while there are leaves on the trees.

And so Ireland was left with less than 1% forest cover.

[♪♪]

Trees and forests are often the casualty of wars,

occupation and conquest.

[♪♪]

It's hard to believe that 2,000 years ago

this Ireland had a protection,

stronger protection for its trees than it has today.

The Irish, who are woodland people,

lost the context for their culture, which is these forests.

The section of Brehon law, known as the Brehar comikesa,

which is the laws of neighbourhood,

and the resources of the forest belonged to every person on the

condition that they took what they needed, no more, no less.

With the abundance of forest that we had, you know,

for a long time, 65, 70, 75% forest cover,

there was enough for everybody.

The Brehon law was written before the Magna Carta,

before 1215 or 1216.

That Brehon law was written centuries beforehand

and practiced centuries even before that.

This law system came from the forest from the observation

of how the forest is a almost perfect society in how it

arranges itself from the very biggest to the smallest,

all have a place and all are working together in harmony.

It was about people living very close to nature,

almost in a dream-like state where they saw that the plants,

the trees, the stones, the water was all alive,

and they could communicate with all of these,

that there were spirits in all of these things.

[♪♪]

Diana: In Ireland, these forests of native species are so rare.

This is only one of a few, and it is a small forest,

barely 60 acres.

It seems really as though it has survived only by chance.

I know this forest, because close by there is a very

important tree, and it has a name.

The tree behind me is probably my most favourite tree

in the world.

It's the tree that sits in my landscape,

in the landscape of my mind when I'm living in Canada,

and it stays there in my mind because it has a conversation

with me all the time.

This tree has borne witness to the landscape of Ireland

for a thousand years and maybe even more.

It is the Quercus robur.

It is the darling of the Celtic world.

This woodland was a favourite of our last Ard-Ri,

and that was the High King of Ireland,

and that man's name was Brian Boru.

The druids that were at his side,

told him and advised him about these trees.

Narrator: The druids of ancient Ireland are often misunderstood.

They were the elite educated class of this woodland culture.

They served as spiritual leaders, lawyers, doctors,

poets, composers, musicians and astronomers.

They had an extraordinary ability to observe nature.

The oak on dair was sacred to the druids.

It remains a part of many Irish legends.

The oak could communicate with the heavens through lightning.

Three hundred years to be born, three hundred years to live,

and three hundred years to die, which is the history of an oak,

almost a thousand years.

When the tree gets to be that ancient,

it has a great weight on the canopy,

and when the wind comes on the canopy,

it has a torque value on the trunk itself,

and the torque value is like winding the top of a bottle

of a jam jar, it tightens down on the trunk itself.

And what that produces from the bark is something really

interesting, it's a gallotannin produced down at the end of

the tree and pours out like a form of molasses,

and it was called uisce dubh, uisce dubh by the druids,

the black water, the healing black water.

The tannic acid has also hypertensive action on the skin.

And if you've got bleeding on the skin, it seals it,

closes up the wound and it's like you just had surgery.

That's what the druids had in ancient Ireland.

Medicine came from here.

[♪♪]

Medicines still do come from nature, from trees.

We've just forgotten.

[♪♪]

Narrator: The Celts heard the song of nature.

The song of the power of nature.

And they heard it through the trees.

[thunder]

That forest song was transcribed into an alphabet

called the 'Ogham Script'.

I'm sitting in front of the newspaper of the druids,

the newspaper of about 2,000 years old,

possibly the largest newspaper in all of Ireland.

Narrator: Hundreds of these ancient stone newspapers

survive, most of them in southern Ireland.

This is one of the tallest.

I would come along here 2,000 years ago and I'd know the news

of the day, I'd know who had conquered whom,

how many cows did somebody have, who married who.

I'd find it on the stone.

Narrator: It is one of the oldest scripts of Europe.

It is an alphabet based on trees.

One tree is the Scots pine.

The Romans had a name for it, Pinus silvestris, of course.

But the Irish have their name for it, and the name is

'an Ailm', the sacred tree 'an bile', of the druids.

Their birch tree, birch is called beithe in this language,

and it goes on like that.

The oak tree, the sacred tree of the Celts, is the script

of D, dair, similar to Daru of Sanskrit.

So it goes right down the whole of the alphabet.

An bile in old Gaelic are sacred trees,

and sacred trees were the sacred trees of the Ogham script.

Each one of them was a sacred specie, but that's nothing new,

because sacred trees are found in North America.

They are the trees without chlorophyll in them.

They are the blond trees, the trees that are

called 'alba trees'.

Narrator: In the global garden,

some trees are treated as being special.

A deep reverence has emblazoned their image on the landscape

since the beginning of human history.

[♪♪]

And across the world, there were trees of water.

They were called the 'water fir' or 'dawn redwood'

in the sacred temples of China.

The Cryptomeria Japonica, the great sugi trees of Japan...

...found around the Shinto shrines where the trees still

hold sacred significance.

[drumming]

Diana: These are ancient species,

but there's always medicine at the back of it.

There is always a reason why these trees were called sacred.

[♪♪]

Narrator: And in Ireland, it was certain ancient families

that kept this knowledge alive.

Diana: My family elders passed this knowledge

of the trees to me.

I grew up here.

I was brought in here when my family died.

According to Brehon thinking, an orphan is everybody's child.

So everybody who lived here, the high and the low,

felt they had a responsibility to tutor me.

They taught me all the old laws, the old cures, the pisogaries,

the thinking for remedies for medicines.

All of the laws of the druids, the laws of the trees,

an understanding of nature was passed to me, a sacred trust.

This was my apprenticeship in nature.

I worked as a scientist where I had developed a non typing blood

substitute, an artificial blood, and found that there was a

similarity in the chemistry of plants and the human being.

The haemoglobin of blood and the green chlorophyll of plants

are remarkably similar in form and function.

[bird squawking]

[splash]

[birds squawking]

The science has spoke to the sacred in me,

creating a synthesis for my philosophy of nature.

Narrator: E. O. Wilson, Harvard Entomologist and considered

the father of modern environmentalism,

calls Diana's ideas

'A rare, entirely new approach to natural history'.

That revolutionary approach led to her series of groundbreaking

books about trees and forest systems.

Arboretum America, A Philosophy of the Forest.

Arboretum Borealis, A Lifeline of the Planet.

Diana: And the little Global Forest, that's a prayer book,

you know, a prayer book of the forest.

[♪♪]

Christian is my editor and photographer.

[♪♪]

I thought it was just for a joke.

Yeah, yeah.

We've been working on the forest for a very long time now,

with the idea of peace in our heart, haven't we,

for an awfully long time?

Yes, we have.

Diana: An intact forest is a mighty act of peace.

Christian: And it's fundamental to who we are and to what we do.

[♪♪]

Diana: Christian's father has had a great influence

on our thinking.

His job was to oversee the safe return of the Apollo astronauts

from the moon.

So through their eyes, he saw the earth from a very

different vantage point.

News footage: Eagle, you're looking great.

Your father made an interesting comment to us once.

Do you remember that comment?

And it was about the astronauts when they came back from space.

Oh, he said that when the astronauts go into space

and then view the world when they have come back,

they fundamentally change the way they look at the world.

[♪♪]

Diana: We're carrying his message.

We're carrying the message of man being on the moon

and seeing how fragile and how small earth is.

It is a very fragile closed system.

Christian: And if we don't treat it right, it'll get rid of us.

Diana: It will get rid of us, yeah.

[♪♪]

Diana: I imagine you've never really thought about

the atmosphere as being clean, unless of course you live

downtown in a city, or you live in Beijing, China,

where the atmosphere is very, very bad with a lot of

particulate pollution.

[♪♪]

Trees themselves, they can clean the atmosphere.

This is what all of these trees do for us on a daily basis.

The forests function in absorbing carbon dioxide out

of the atmosphere.

They have been doing that for 400 million years.

Trees have been banking carbon dioxide.

The carbon is digested into the body of the tree from the leaf,

and the oxygen floats out into the atmosphere.

The real banking of nature is carbon banking.

It is the one element that is used and reused and vaulted

and banked and stock shared all over the planet.

Even in you.

There is carbon found in every part of every living system all

over the world, and the trees are the facilitators for this.

The forests are the great banks of nature,

a carbon flow that is extraordinary.

[birdsong]

Narrator: All over the world we've taken down

too much forest.

In some instances what's gone up are non-native trees

into native spaces, monoculture.

For example, here in Ireland, you'll see great plantations,

well let's call it plantations, because they're not really

forests, it's of Sitka spruce.

They are the green evergreens you see as you drive around

the coastlands and right through the country.

The problem is that Sitka spruce comes from the west coast

of Canada and the United States.

Narrator: They've brought here for cheap and easy lumber.

Like barley or corn, the tree plantation is a cash crop.

It's not the heart and bones of a rich ecosystem that turns

a group of trees into a forest.

For that, we must look to the remains of the ancient

native woodlands.

We don't have much native forest here at all

in terms of hardwoods.

We have a huge increase in commercial tree farming all over

the world, of plantations of monocultures that are usually

exotic trees that are not adapted to local conditions.They're deserts.

They're deserts, they're not providing for biodiversity.

Again we need to emphasize why are the native trees and natural

forests so important, it's because they're adapted to

the place, extremely custom, customized.

We forget that this planet was a rock a long, long time ago,

and it was through plants and eventually trees that the soil,

humus was created and built up.

And with the major loss of soil, with the clear felling

of forests in uplands all over the world causing major

flooding problems, erosion, the loss of natural forest has led

to major infertility.

So, it's important again that communities can protect

themselves and their soil by creating their own local

community mixed native woodlands.

[birdsong]

Native species are always value added.

This is the Scots pine.

It has been planted in North America,

throughout North America, and it's an invasive specie there.

But in all of Europe, up to the boreal forest, including Russia,

this tree is the king of the forest.

These seeds are edible, and this area is full of birds,

and they'll plunge in here and they'll take their food

from this supermarket.

The supermarket of this tree holds a fatty acid,

a linolenic kind of acid that builds their brains

and it builds their babies.

Why does Ireland now not plant this native species,

or supply the supermarket for all of the migrations of

birds and let us not forget all of the butterflies

and the insects?

Where you have native species, you have biodiversity.

If you've got biodiversity, you have health.

Standing here at the foot of a native species, the Scots pine,

Pinus silvestris to you all.

[train chugging]

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Narrator: Fairy tales are filled with enchanted forests.

Places of danger and transformation,

home to witches and fairies.

[♪♪]

[children laughing]

But few forests evoke enchantment more than

the Black Forest of Germany.

[moo]

[♪♪]

Like Ireland, German culture is deeply rooted in the forest.

Germany has managed to remain more than 30% forest covered.

[♪♪]

Germany is a highly industrialized nation,

yet for them, sustainable resource management

is a way of life.

In 2013, Germany celebrated 300 years of

sustainable forest management.

We have 50% needle trees and we have 50% leaf trees,

and half of all the leaf trees is the beech tree.

We are looking forward that we don't have stands with one,

only one tree.

We have no monoculture.

In Germany it's very important where you get the drinking

water, and the forests are a very important area

for clean water.

And we don't get compensation for this,

but we do this for our people

and for all of our wellness also.

And we have a discussion in whether there must be a change

that the forest owner should get money also for this...

Yeah, like a grant.

...get a grant for, for this job he do for, for example,

for drinking water, for our good air.

We have very much people on this area,

and so we have also a lot of emissions,

and the forests are important to get to absorb the emissions.

[birdsong]

We are thinking a very, very long time schedules

when we think about forests.

I mean we inherited the forest from our grand grandfathers,

and we are benefiting from it now,

that we consider it our duty to leave the quality or to leave

the possibilities for the next generation to do just the same

as we do today, that's our understanding of sustainability.

[♪♪]

Diana: When I was a young girl in Ireland,

there seemed to be no end to everything.

And I remember being told that the hair on a person's head,

you couldn't count their hairs, it was endless.

And the same kind of thinking was applied to the fresh water

lakes, and the fish in the sea, there was no end to the fish

and the trawling that could take place,

and the forests could come down everywhere.

There was such a richness on this planet that there

was no end to it.

The same goes for mining, ores of all kind could be taken out

of the earth and there was no end to them.

[♪♪]

But today, it is not infinite, it is finite.

There is an end to the forest, there is an end to the great

ocean, the saline ocean, the fish in the sea,

there is an end to mining,

there is an end to all of these things.

We have to manage our resources sustainably.

[♪♪]

Narrator: This is one forest in need of preservation,

not restoration.

It is the largest forest system in the world.

It is holding its breath, and all we need do is preserve it.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Diana: The boreal is the last great working forest

in the world.

It is about 30,000 years old.

This forest system feeds the big and the small; caribou, bears,

deer, wolves and wolverines, beaver and snow leopards,

down to the minute mammals, just to name a few.

It is the breadbasket for migration and nesting for many

of the planets songbirds and waterfowl.

[♪♪]

The boreal entombs a vast tonnage of cold carbon storage

in the permafrost of the ground and waterways.

In order to survive its seven-month harsh winter,

with short days and reduced sunlight,

the boreal has evolved over time into a complex web of cold hardy

species, each dependent on all the others for its survival.

[birdsong]

That's why I call the boreal forest the mastermind

of the world.

[birdsong]

Lots of people are aware and know of the Amazon.

But the planet holds this giant secret to the north.

Narrator: The boreal sits upon the north of the globe

like a crown, right across northern Canada and Scandinavia,

and then across into Russia, where it is known as the Taiga.

It even touches northern Asia, and Hokkaido,

the most northern island of Japan

and into the Kuril Islands.

The boreal accounts for 30% of the global forests.

Diana: In Canada, the backbone of that forest holds a pine tree

called the Jack pine, or the pinus banksiana.

They are lean and frugal, these trees.

They're conifers, remember.

They hang onto the needles for up to 7 years.

So it means their pull of nutrients out of the soil

isn't very great.

They can survive in very tough conditions.

[wind blowing]

[♪♪]

There is a secondary forest of lichens,

which covers the forest floor as a carpet and surfaces the trees.

These lichens clean the atmosphere and pull nitrogen

out of it.

And the forest lays down needles over vast periods of time,

and those needles don't decompose but they are a source

of protein for the lichens,

which take about a hundred years to grow.

Then there are the tripe lichens on rocks,

and they take more than a hundred years to grow.

And then there are the bryonia lichens on all the trees,

just lacing the trees, and they take an awfully

long time to grow.

[♪♪]

Narrator: Its remote northern location has largely saved

the boreal from the fate of the southern forests,

but the age of mega projects is rapidly changing that.

In the boreal forest of northern Alberta, Canada,

are the tar sands.

[♪♪]

A resource extraction project of immense proportions...

...with plans to expand over an area almost

twice the size of Ireland.

[♪♪]

Diana: This once living landscape...is now dead.

[♪♪]

Giant hydroelectric projects are flooding on a similar scale...

then mining and logging.

In all of the forests all over the world,

there are trees that represent a biomass of about 300 billion

tonnes of carbon dioxide, about a quarter to a third of it in

and under the boreal.

If the boreal forest comes down, we are looking at the release

of an enormous tonnage of carbon dioxide into the air.

Enough carbon dioxide into the air that it will make it

toxic for us.

[♪♪]

You see, you can't replace or replant that boreal forest.

You can never replace this complexity.

Once it's gone, it's gone.

[♪♪]

[birdsongs]

Narrator: In the heart of North America,

bordering the east shore of Lake Winnipeg, is Pimachiowin Aki,

similar in size to the country of Denmark.

It holds a forest growing to its full potential.

And it is by no accident this forest remains pristine.

The Aboriginal people have fought to keep

this land untouched.

If the voices of its people are heard,

it will become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Aboriginal peoples have been guardians of this land

for thousands of years.

Narrator: Sophia Rabliauskas, from the Ojibway nation,

has spent her life in the Poplar River area in the heart

of Manitoba's boreal forest.

Bird.Bird, yes.

Diana: For somebody to come in and say to you well we're going

to cut all your trees, we're going to log this area,

well it's going to destroy your health first and destroy your

families, it will be...

Sophia: It's a threat even just to say, you know,

we're gonna do that.

This is our plan and it's a threat,

it was a threat to our way of life.

Diana: It must be very scary.

And it is, and that's why we took it upon ourselves

that we are not gonna allow this to happen.

And we were very fortunate that we were able to find people

who are out there to stand with us against these developments

that continue to take and take and take,

and that's the mentality that's out there.

And I would, you know, get people saying to me,

you will continue to keep your people in poverty because you're

stopping development, you know, you're stopping the community

from benefiting from these projects.

In the past, there were all these developments going on near

indigenous communities and none of those indigenous communities

ever benefited from these projects or gained.

We continue, those people continue to live in poverty.

Those people continue to have their resources extracted

from their lands.

So, the idea came that maybe we should do a land use planning,

how the land is continued to be used to this day.

Narrator: To help in the protection of their land,

five Anishinabe Ojibway First Nation territories,

provincial and federal governments,

have all come together to propose Pimachiowin Aki,

'the land that gives life', as a designated UNESCO World Heritage

Site to ensure mindful protection of both their culture

and of these lands into the future.

Diana: They realized the land is most valuable to everyone

left as it is, with the trees growing in the earth.

We have been able to maintain that land for thousands of

years, the way it is, untouched by development,

pristine boreal forest, healthy ecosystem.

When I was walking through the bush with my father and when he

said, "You know, don't forget to stop and look around you

and feel the earth around you, the beauty."

So each generation has its responsibility.

[speaking Ojibway]

[♪♪]

Be grounded, don't lose that, that's the wisdom of the land.

It reminds you of who you are.

Once you connect to that land,

you will do anything to fight for it.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

We look around us here, we've got how many thousands

and thousands of tons of material in this oak wood,

where has it come from?

It hasn't quarried from it; it hasn't taken from anything.

Yeah, it's taken from the atmosphere.It's taken from the air,

it's taken from the water and the sun.

And it's created this wealth.

The earth needs over one-third cover, forest cover,

and more to have a balance and to ensure fertility of soil...

And oxygenation of the air....and oxygenation of the air.

So, we can't wait for organizations,

we can't wait for politicians.

It's not rocket science to put the forests back.

Communities could be trained to engage in the restoration

and collecting the seed, creating the nurseries.

There's plenty of work to be done restoring the forests.

Yeah.

[♪♪]

Diana: Once you connect with that land,

you will do anything to fight for it.

[♪♪]

A Bioplan for Biodiversity.

A Bioplan to reverse pollution.

Evergreen.

Evergreen, yeah, evergreen species.

One more!

Woman: Shiinoki.

Crowd: Shiinoki.

Woman: Shiinoki.

Crowd: Shiinoki.

Woman: Shiinoki.

Crowd: Shiinoki.

I didn't want to damage the root.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]

Narrator: At times and long ago, I saw,

touched and heard that which was being born, a heartbeat,

a sound amongst the stones, was that which was being born.

[♪♪]

[♪♪]