Free preview: This is Chapter 1 of The Last Blue: Trees, Cities and the Sky We Are Losing, shown in full. The whole book has 20 chapters and is free with a free account.
It mixes nonfiction and eco-fiction to show how cutting trees, urban sprawl, dirty water and smog are one connected story, and how Pakistani cities can win the sky back.
Chapter 1: The Last Canopy
Part I: Roots of the Old World
Before the city reached the river bend, there was the Bela.
Locals used the word for the stretch of low forest and tall grass that follows a river across the Punjab plain. This one was small, a few hundred acres of shisham and kikar, mulberry and tamarisk, with reed beds along the water and a floor of leaf litter that smelled of rain even in June. At dawn the air under the trees was cooler and heavier than the air in the fields beyond. Rose-ringed parakeets left the branches in green, screaming clouds. A hoopoe worked the ground with its crest lifted. Somewhere in the reeds a jackal finished its night-long argument with the dogs of the nearest village.
Baba Rehmat had walked the Bela every morning for forty years, as his father had before him. He kept no records, but he knew the place the way a man knows a face. He knew which shisham leaned north after the flood, which kikar the owlets used, and where the jungle cat left its prints in the wet clay.
The morning the surveyors came, he was sitting under his favourite tree with a cup of tea going cold in his hand.
Adnan, the young surveyor, set up his tripod at the edge of the grove and squinted through the instrument. He was polite. He greeted the old man, asked permission before stepping over a fence, and apologised for the noise of the stakes. On his tablet, the Bela was a pale polygon labelled vacant land. The word was not a lie in the eyes of a map. No one lived inside those boundaries, and nothing was being sold from them. A tree produces shade, fruit, nesting space and clean air, and none of it appears on a land record.
A rarer forest than anyone knew
The Bela was also rarer than either man understood. Pakistan is one of the least forested countries in South Asia. By international estimates, only about 4.8 percent of its land was covered by forest in 2021, down from 5.9 percent in 2000, against a world average of about 31 percent. The loss has a long history. Under British rule, forests in Punjab and elsewhere were cut for railway sleepers and fuel. Independent Pakistan inherited thin woodland and a growing population that needed timber, firewood and land.
Adnan drove his first stake into the soft ground. Baba Rehmat watched the orange ribbon flutter, and he did not yet say anything. Above the canopy that morning the sky was a deep, ordinary blue, the kind nobody thinks to photograph because it has always been there.
Key takeaway
Pakistan has very little forest left, and every grove that remains does quiet work that no land record counts.
What the rest of the book covers
- Chapter 2: The Axe and the Blueprint
- Chapter 3: Promises of a New Society
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