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Alanis Obomsawin is a Canadian Abenaki filmmaker, singer, and activist who has spent over five decades at the National Film Board of Canada documenting Indigenous life, history, and resistance. Born in 1932 on the Odanak reserve in Quebec, she is one of the most celebrated documentary filmmakers in the world and the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and national honors. Her work has consistently returned to the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land — a relationship based not on ownership but on interdependence — and this quote has become one of the most widely shared environmental statements of the past 50 years.

June 22 is World Rainforest Day, raising awareness about the importance of rainforests and the urgency of their protection. World Rainforest Day exists because the planet's lungs are being destroyed at a rate that has no precedent in human history — cleared for cattle, for soy, for palm oil, for the economic logic that treats a living ecosystem as a line item. Obomsawin's quote has endured because it states the ultimate consequence of that logic with a clarity that no scientific paper can quite match. The rainforest is not scenery. It is the foundation of the biological systems that make human life possible. You cannot eat a balance sheet. And when the last tree is gone, there will be no second chance to remember that.