I'm trying to remember the name of a novel I read a long time ago.
The story goes like this:
There's a planet that's a gold mine of natural resources -- mainly a large forest if I remember, but basically not ruined. A human crash lands on the planet, meets the local lifeforms, and realizes that when humankind finds this planet, they will steal all of their resources. So, he helps protect them by writing instructions about what to do when the humans do finally arrive. He dies (all of this happens before the story actually starts).
So, humans find the planet, and as predicted plan to basically steal all of it's resources. But the local lifeforms have these instructions which they have studied, follow like a religion. They end up tricking the humans, so that they cannot ruin their planet. In the end, it ends up being a legal-type trick such that the locals clearly "own" the planet and hence the humans can't take anything / ruin anything.
I somehow think that the word "forest" is in the title, although I could be totally wrong about that. Everytime I try to hunt for it, I find the book by LeGuin "The Word for the World is Forest", which is not this story.
Any help would be great!
The story goes like this:
There's a planet that's a gold mine of natural resources -- mainly a large forest if I remember, but basically not ruined. A human crash lands on the planet, meets the local lifeforms, and realizes that when humankind finds this planet, they will steal all of their resources. So, he helps protect them by writing instructions about what to do when the humans do finally arrive. He dies (all of this happens before the story actually starts).
So, humans find the planet, and as predicted plan to basically steal all of it's resources. But the local lifeforms have these instructions which they have studied, follow like a religion. They end up tricking the humans, so that they cannot ruin their planet. In the end, it ends up being a legal-type trick such that the locals clearly "own" the planet and hence the humans can't take anything / ruin anything.
I somehow think that the word "forest" is in the title, although I could be totally wrong about that. Everytime I try to hunt for it, I find the book by LeGuin "The Word for the World is Forest", which is not this story.
Any help would be great!
