The Forest Does Not Forget

A Forest That Remembers by Forgetting

In the high-Andean forests near Bogotá, Colombia, as it happens in many other similar ecosystems, memory does not reside in archives, nor in monuments.

It circulates through matter.

It seeps, decomposes, and reconfigures. Where institutional repositories aim for stasis — freezing documents against time — the forest maintains informational continuity through transformation. It remembers by disassembling, by feeding the present with residues of the past.

For archivists, librarians, and museologists, this challenges an inherited orthodoxy: that memory is best protected through control and containment. The forest proposes an alternative paradigm: that memory systems can be resilient precisely because they allow for decay — and design for it.

These observations do not amount to a metaphor, nor an allegory. They form the preliminary foundation of what I have begun to call ecosemiotic archivistics: a way of thinking about memory systems that draws not from institutional models, but from ecological ones. If archives, libraries, and museums are to remain meaningful infrastructures in a time of planetary crisis, then perhaps they must learn from the forest — not to imitate it, and certainly not to perform a cheap or superficial biomimesis, but to understand how memory persists through entanglement, transformation, and decay.

Decomposition as a Memory Practice

Decomposition in the forest is not merely a biological process; it is a form of information reconfiguration. As organic matter breaks down, it is not erased but redistributed across ecological strata. Leaves, bark, fruit, and carcasses are reduced to molecules and absorbed by fungal networks, microbial communities, and plant roots. These redistributed materials retain spatial and temporal markers — concentrations of nitrogen, isotopic traces, fungal colonization patterns — that testify to their origin and path of transformation.

This process offers a material model of appraisal in knowledge & memory management practice: the selection, revaluation, and elimination of information based not on permanence, but on relevance, potential reuse, and (ecological) utility. Unlike formal appraisal frameworks, which often presume stable criteria and human oversight, the forest performs appraisal through contingent interaction. Context determines what is retained and in what form. The system does not ask what should be preserved indefinitely, but what can be metabolized into ongoing processes.

Importantly, this metabolism is not chaotic. It is highly patterned and distributed across agents: fungi regulate nitrogen availability, detritivores accelerate decomposition based on moisture and pH, and microbial communities shift in response to substrate composition. The forest edits with precision — and without central command.

Humus as Contextual Metadata

One of the most important final products of decomposition — humus — is not informationally neutral. It contains no discrete records, no readable units, but it holds layered chemical, microbial, and structural data that reflects a history of transformation. Soil ecologists routinely extract this data to reconstruct past land use, species composition, climatic variation, and ecological disruption.

In knowledge & memory terms, humus functions as a form of residual metadata: the cumulative, often unintended traces left by documents, users, and systems. Examples in digital environments include file histories, version logs, checksum variations, metadata remnants after deletion, and embedded formatting codes. These traces do not reproduce the "original" object but offer a dense context for interpretation — often richer than the object itself.

The forest, then, teaches us that meaning does not require full preservation. Partiality and degradation can generate powerful interpretive frameworks, especially when the system retains relational coherence. Just as compost retains information through chemical patterning, a backup log or derivative record may reveal critical paths of use, modification, or reinterpretation.

From Custody to Compost: A Shift in Professional Role

Accepting decomposition as a valid epistemic function demands a shift in how memory work is conceptualized. Professionals in archives, libraries, and museums are often trained in custodial ethics: to preserve, protect, and maintain the integrity of materials. This ethos assumes that loss is a failure to be prevented through redundancy, digitization, or migration.

But the forest suggests an alternative role: that of a semantic composter: a professional who curates processes of decay. In this role, the emphasis is not on preservation for its own sake, but on designing decay that leaves meaningful residues. Digital preservation, for instance, can embrace the idea that certain elements (interface layers, access logs, user annotations) survive longer than the primary object — and that these can be valuable forms of memory.

Moreover, composting is a situated practice. There is no universal protocol for what decomposes when. Context — ecological, social, technological — determines sequencing. This aligns with recent critiques of universal preservation standards (e.g., ISO models) and calls for situated, adaptive, and regenerative approaches to memory work.

Toward a Theory of Resilient Forgetting

What the cloud forest demonstrates, in practical terms, is that forgetting is not the opposite of memory. It is part of its infrastructure. The forest maintains continuity not by resisting entropy, but by embedding entropy into its epistemic system. The loss of form does not imply a loss of meaning. Rather, meaning mutates. It settles into new carriers. It fertilizes what comes next.

In the field of knowldge & memory management, this challenges the metaphysics of stability and the assumption that preservation requires identity over time. The forest offers an alternative ontology of memory: relational persistence through transformation. Memory survives not in what remains unchanged, but in what re-enters the cycle of use.

This concept aligns with emerging discourses in post-custodial archival theory, critical digital preservation, and epistemologies of the South — all of which question the colonial, institutional, and technological biases embedded in preservation logics. What the forest contributes is a working example of distributed, context-rich, adaptive memory infrastructure.