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Silenced Knowdleges and Memories in the Tropics (02)

The Forest as a Library

What Trees, Soils, and Rivers Remember

A catalogue...

I remember the moment with perfect clarity.

A Public Libraries Congress in Bogotá, in 2024. A special one — not filled with the usual discussions of digitization, metadata standards, and access policies, but with talks, for the first time in the country, of epistemic justice, of biodiversity, of care policies...

And then, one of the experiences brought to the table shocked me. A library from the Colombian Amazon brought a... how should I call it? A catalog? But it was not of books. Not of manuscripts. But of pieces of wood.

At first glance, they looked like the typical specimens from a herbarium, neatly labeled and classified. But this was something else. Each fragment was a reference, a key to an immense, untamed archive. The forest itself. Each slab was a link to a document, a particular tree: a volume in an endless library where knowledge and memory are stored in rings of growth, in resin, in scent, in texture. And where every item is part of an immense network connected underground by micelia and aboveground by lianas, and embedded in narratives of origin and histories of the peoples who inhabited those territories for centuries.

The realization settled in my head like a new truth I had always known but never clearly articulated: The rainforest is a library. Any territory is.

A Library Without Walls

Walk through the Amazon, or the Congo, or the mangrove forests of the Pacific, and you step into a catalog of memories, stories, and wisdom older than any printed book. But unlike a traditional library, this one is not stacked on shelves or stored on hard-drives. Here, information is encoded in roots, whispered through the canopy, traced in the patterns of the ground.

The trees are records, real documents — their rings holding the history of droughts and floods, their bark inscribed with the chemical blueprints of medicines yet to be discovered. The soils are archives, layered with centuries of organic memory, each stratum a footnote in a living text. The rivers are indexes, carrying the past downstream, shifting the script with each season.

If a document is anything that holds knowledge or memory in it, why can't a tree be one? Why wouldn't a forest be a collection, and a territory, a particular landscape, couldn't be considered a huge library and archive, a repository of thousands of events depositing like geological strata, one over the other, over the millenia? Why can't we consider the rainforest, a biological system, an information system as well? Why can't we consider its many connections as paths within a bio-knowledge ecosystem, where millions of organic data connect and combine to create new things through the logic of evolution?

Why can't we accept that there are libraries without walls?

This library in particular, the rainforest, is not a silent one. It rustles, hums, drips, and breathes. Sometimes it howls. But who has learned to read it? To access it?

To protect it?

The Knowledge It Holds

For centuries, Indigenous peoples and local communities have read the documents of these natural collections as fluently as a scholar reads an ancient manuscript. They know the grammar of the flowers, the syntax of the branches, the phonetics of leaves rustling. They recognize the past stories written all over them —the one telling how the rivers originated in a huge ceiba that exploded, or that other one explaining how the moon traveled up to the sky from the higher branches of a tree— and the predictions they house for the future. To them, the rainforest is not "wild" — it is a structured, documented, methodical library. An archive of preservation and survival.

When this universe of knowledges and memories came into other hands' control, it was often torn apart. Trees became timber. Soils became data. Rivers became obstacles to be crossed. The meaning was lost in translation, the footnotes ignored, the citations erased.

Colonial Misreadings

When European explorers first documented the rainforest, they treated it as a huge enemy bent on attacking them. An unmapped wilderness, a blank space waiting to be cataloged and explained — in alien terms. But the knowledge was already there. The Amazon is not, as some researchers once assumed, a natural forest untouched by humans. It is a landscape deeply shaped by millennia of care — by Indigenous fire management, by food forests cultivated in secret, by carefully nurtured ecosystems where every plant had a role.

To name something is to claim it. To rename it is to erase its previous history. The taxonomies of Linnaeus and the labels of botanical gardens often stripped these trees of their original names, of their relationships to human knowledge systems, of their roles in memory and medicine. In Western libraries, a tree might be identified by its binomial name and categorized with a number of biological features. In Guna Yala, the Kuna people know that Kwamuty, the creator, fabricated the first human being using the wood of a tree; that the octuplet heroes discovered salt and edible plants through the paluwala, the "tree of salt"; that trees are the sources of nuckukana, small magical figures... One name appears in scientific databases; the others have carried entire communities through generations.

And in the library of the rainforest, those names matter.

A Call to Reread

The Colombian librarians who brought their wood catalog to the professional meeting were making a statement: The library is not just in the books. The archive is not just in the papers. Knowledge exists beyond the structures we have imposed on it.

The question is: Are we willing to read it?

What happens when libraries and archives recognize the knowledge stored in landscapes, in plants, in oral traditions, in the embodied practice of walking through the forest? What happens when we admit that some of the greatest repositories of science, history, and philosophy exist outside institutional walls and servers?

How do we connect these living knowledge systems with our literocentric libraries and archives? And most importantly: How do we preserve those natural repositories — not just by documenting them, but by ensuring that they and their keepers, their readers, their caretakers continue to exist?

If a library burns, we call it a tragedy. If an archive is lost, we mourn the knowledge that vanished with it.

Then what do we call the deforestation of the Amazon, or the disappearing forests of Southeastern Asia? The displacement or the direct genocide of local knowledge keepers? The destruction of an archive so vast, so irreplaceable, that no amount of digitization or academic publishing will ever restore it?

To protect those libraries, we must first acknowledge their existence. To preserve them, we must listen to those who know how to read it. And to truly learn from it, we must let go of the idea that knowledge is only valid when written in the language of the West.

The forest is a library. It always has been. The only question is: Will we learn to read before we turn the last page?

About this post

Text: Edgardo Civallero.
Publication date: 13.03.2025.
Picture: Flower fallen in the forest of Barro Colorado Island Natural Monument, Panama. @ Edgardo Civallero 2025.