Agri-culture is in opposition to the wild untamed forest. Therefore we have deforested most of our world. Easter Island is a prime example.

We cannot imagine the world before agriculture. What we can do is to pick out just one example from the preagricultural world, an example which hopefully will work like a slap in the face:

"How serious that worship [tree worship] was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a standing tree. The culprit's navel was to be cut out and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound about its trunk." (The Golden Bough)

The navel is a good symbol for 8. The tree is your mother and to hurt her must be punished in kind.

The guts are the primal rivers below, those which Mercury has occupied:

"This terra-cotta mask shows the unlovely face of Humbaba/Huwawa, the guardian of the cedar felled by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The title of 'God of the fortress of intestines' is also given to him, and some scholars conclude from this title, as well as from the pictorial evidence, that Humbaba was the inhabitant and lord of the labyrinth, a predessor of Minotaurus." (Hamlet's Mill)

The punishment says exactly what has gone wrong, what the culprit has done. To peel the bark of the living tree is to sell your mother for a quick profit. The culprit has gone crazy - he has become a merchant, he does no longer live in the forest, he dwells in a city, in a perverse culture designed by cunning man.