When Climate Change Comes for the Fairy Tale Forest

In Europe’s coming climate-change created droughts, certain types of trees don’t stand a chance. One such tree, the Norway spruce, currently makes up the bulk of Germany’s Black Forest. Even if you have never traveled to the Black Forest, you’ve likely visited vicariously: It serves as the backdrop to all of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, which include Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

While reporting on the potential plight of Germany’s storied trees, researchers have happily offered suggestions of possible replacements: Silver fir and Douglas fir are both more tolerant to drought than spruce. So the Black Forest may live to see another day, if as a slightly different version of itself. But what if the answer had been that the trees were irreplaceable? What if we had found an answer, but it was already too late? What if climate change continues unchecked, the forest consumed by human apathy? What stories will never be created?

As we consider the potential loss of plant, animal, and human life at the hands of climate change, we must also ponder what we stand to lose in culture—in stories yet to be told. Lost or devastated landscapes stand to radically alter the trajectory of our tales.

What would Grimm’s fairy tales even be without the forest? Where would they take place, and how would that different setting change the meaning, the plot, the moral, the magic? Where would Hansel and Gretel’s mother take them to abandon them? If not for the dark, labyrinthine woods, the pair could have easily found their way home. If Rapunzel’s tower or Snow White’s cottage had been in the middle of a field, they would have been spotted immediately, making for incredibly short stories.

To understand what may be lost when we lose a forest, first we must understand all that it represents.

The role of forests in our cultural imagination is “full of enigmas and paradoxes,” writes Robert Pogue Harrison in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. “If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they have typically been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. . . . In the religions, mythologies, and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray.”

To enter into the forest is to delve into the darkest corners of our psyche, confront our inner demons made flesh, and hopefully come out with a deeper understanding of humanity. We are taken into forests to lose ourselves, reckon with the supernatural, and emerge better for it. In many stories, the woods provide a test of moral character that we fail to pass at our peril.

“Forests are sublime and dangerous, full of mystery, magic, terror, and monstrosity; an enchanted place where anything can happen,” says Maria Tatar, a German folklore and children’s literature scholar at Harvard University. “On one hand, [the forest] is a site of threats, the precinct of monsters—the wolf waiting for Red Riding Hood, the witch for Hansel and Gretel, the briars covering Sleeping Beauty’s castle—but it’s also a place where abandoned children can take refuge: Snow White flees to safety in the forest because it’s home that is full of monsters,” Tatar said.

In The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, renowned fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes explains that, “the forest loomed large metaphorically in the minds of the Brothers Grimm. The forest allows for enchantment and disenchantment, for it is a place where society’s conventions no longer hold true.”

For the Grimms, forests also symbolized popular wisdom and national heritage. Their 1813 journal Old German Forests named forests as the birthplace and continued home of an authentic national culture. Zipes explains that, “it was as though in ‘old German forests’ the essential truths about German customs, laws, and culture could be found.”

Zipes cites 11 Grimm stories where the forest plays a key role and lists 30 characters whose “fates are decided” in the forest. “It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great, and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest possesses the power to change lives and alter destinies. In many ways it is the supreme authority on earth and often the great provider.”

Of course the Grimms did not invent most of these stories; rather they collected and recorded folk tales with oral roots throughout Europe and Asia. But the Grimms re-imaginings firmly placed these stories in the woods of Germany’s Black Forest.

Tatar says fairy tales always pick up bits and pieces of the environment in which they’re created, so it makes sense that the Grimms chose the forest as a symbol. “The German forest is dark, impenetrable: a place where you can easily become disoriented and find yourself in a situation where you can’t get back home again,” Tatar said.

So if not forests, where could these stories take place? We love to re-imagine fairy tales in modern city settings, but they never quite translate. And the forest often still play a key role in these retellings, such as in the TV show Once Upon a Time—the characters may live in a town, but they still regularly enter into the nearby woods. Forests are the opposite of cities; lacking the order, technology, and comfort we have come to expect of built environments. The woods represent the antithesis of this development. By literally cleaning pollutants from our air, trees even go as far as to offer a cure for the problems created by industrialism.

Still from Once Upon a Time, via ABC

Deserts don’t work either. “T. E. Lawrence once said of the desert that it is a place without nuance, only of light and dark in their opposing contrast,” Harrison notes. “We might remark that the forest, on the other hand, is all nuance. It blurs distinctions, evoking lost kinship between animate and inanimate, darkness and light, finite and infinite, body and soul, sight and sound.”

Not grasslands or prairies (though a certain Little House makes the prairie a place of unexpected adventure.) Caves? Underground lairs? The ocean at first seems to offer many of the same elements as forests: the potential for unusual creature encounters, darkness, a sense of the unknown. But the ocean has its own distinct symbolic history.

Folklorist Wilhelm H. Riehl, a contemporary of the Grimms, wrote that, “in the opinion of the German people the forest is the only great possession that has yet to be completely given away. In contrast to the field, the meadow, and the garden, every person has a certain right to the forest, even if it only consists in being able to walk around in it when the person so desires.”

Woods aren’t necessarily essential to cautionary fairy tales—in African folklore, Tatar says, the Red Riding Hood narrative is framed as a home-invasion story—it’s just that we’ve imbued the forest with a level of meaning that no other environment can fully recreate. “As a very real part of the landscape, repurposed to mythical ends, it became a rich symbolic space. The woods get you in touch with something transcendent, a deeper meaning. These stories can be used to help you navigate the real forest and the figurative forest of home, because life is full of monsters,” Tatar said.

Even if the Black Forest survives by being transitioned into a fir forest, it will still be different, changed. A forest of firs is not the same as a forest of spruce. A spruce tends to be more dense and bushy than a fir, and its branches curve up at the ends, pointing skyward in a seeming defiance of gravity. A Norway spruce has long, thin cones; Douglas fir cones are round and fuzzy. Douglas fir has a sweet, fruity smell, while Norway spruce gives off more of a resinous, grassy aroma. These visual and olfactory differences may seem minor, but they will change the way the forest is described in a story, alter its feel.

This isn’t the Black Forest’s first brush with man-made environmental ruin. Back in the 1980s, acid rain damaged roughly half of its trees. It was images of these blackened trees that helped spark the country’s contemporary environmental movement.

Is there an image out there that will tell a story that makes the rest of us finally take climate change seriously? An emaciated polar bear perched on shrinking icebergs hasn’t quite been the eye-opener climate scientists had hoped. Perhaps a picture of Disney princesses meeting their untimely demise thanks to a lack of forested refuge?

No nation’s forests will be immune to the effects of climate change. In the U.S., warming temperatures are currently expanding the domain of the pine-destroying beetle ever northward, while droughts fuel uncontrollable California wildfires. We may never know what tales will go untold as we lose islands, coasts change, flooding worsens, storms strengthen, species go extinct, and forests wither.

Modern writers have imagined all manner of futures for our climate-changed world. This growing genre of “cli-fi” has produced many fine stories, which, if it can’t succeed in changing hearts and minds, may help us to come to terms with whatever the future brings. But this addition to our culture feels like a hollow victory, hardly a silver lining to such a dire circumstance as this. “I believe in the storytelling instinct: that human beings will always find a way to tell stories to make sense of our world,” Tatar said, offering a glimmer of hope. “Maybe in the future, we will be re-enchanting the forest, making it a place where we can get back in touch with animals and nature now that we are the predator.”

Climate change is our collective moral test, the physical manifestation of our sins of gluttony, sloth, greed, selfishness, consumerism, and unchecked industrialism. We have entered the threshold of a forest filled with lush, healthy greenery and teeming with diverse wildlife. The question is, will there be any woods left by the end of the story, or have we run out of places to hide?