“The forest was there for them.’’ These words appear in the middle of Annie Proulx’s new novel, “Barkskins,’’ but their sense — that humanity sees nature as a thing to be used — can be felt on almost every page of this morally serious and magnificent work.

Proulx tells the story of North America through the epic saga of its barkskins: those loggers who came “to clear the forest, to subdue this evil wilderness,’’ and, in doing so, to create a new civilization and amass enormous wealth.

These men — and they were largely men, not women — saw nature as a means to their own ends; not a remarkable gift but an exploitable resource: “The forest was there, enormous and limitless. The task of men was to subdue its exuberance, to tame the land it grew on — useless land until cleared and planted with wheat and potatoes.’’ These are the thoughts of René Sel, one of the novel’s less rapacious characters, and they suggest that even Proulx’s kindlier creations see nature in instrumental terms.

“Barkskins’’ is a massive book. It begins in 1693 with Sel and Charles Duquet, two illiterate indentured servants who come to New France (now Canada) and hear their seigneur declare, “Men must change this land in order to live in it.’’ It ends in 2013, with Sel’s descendants volunteering as part of the Breitsprecher Tree Project — a conservationist effort set up by the descendants of Duquet to deal with the destructive changes people have brought to the land.

Proulx moves from the “evergreens taller than cathedrals’’ and “cloud-piercing spruce and hemlock’’ of New France to the “massive but innocent forest standing complete before the slaughter’’ of 19th-century Michigan to the “ravaged forests’’ of present-day Nova Scotia. We move, in other words, from a world that seems like Eden to one that is decidedly fallen. The forests of North America are largely gone, and global warming — the long overdue bill that future generations will pay and pay — has begun.

But Proulx is a moralist, not a moralizer, and so she offers her critique of Western instrumental reason not through sermonizing but through plot and character, alternating between the Sel and Duquet storylines. Sel marries a Mi’kmaw woman, and their descendants must “live in two worlds,’’ longing but unable to fully inhabit the old, native way of being. Duquet is ruthless and ambitious: “an opportunistic tiger — if he had to tear and maul his way to wealth he would do so.’’ He founds a logging company and changes his name to the less French-sounding Charles Duke. His company grows over the centuries, plowing through the forests of Maine and then Michigan, gobbling up new areas of commerce (plantations in the antebellum South; prefab housing in the booming Midwest), and accumulating obscene amounts of money and land.

Proulx, a skilled plotter, weaves the stories together beautifully: The novel is more than 700-pages long but reads much faster. Like the best realists, Proulx can make us see the world and its inhabitants with greater clarity. Juggling so many different plotlines and characters becomes easier when you have, as Proulx does, a Dickensian gift for quick portraiture: an axe manufacturer with the apt name of Mr. Albert Bone, for instance, “resembled a wizened child but spoke in a voice that was asymmetrically large.’’

“Barkskins’’ is a novel of verbs: chopping and hacking, squaring and lathing, notching and mortising. Here is a typical passage: “They crouched around it, stretching their purple hands. He unfolded a cloth wrapping revealing a piece of moose meat, cut pieces for each of them. Famished, René, who had only hoped for bread, bit and tore at the meat.’’ At the level of sentence, all is vigorous action and muscular physicality.

By ending “Barkskins’’ in the contemporary moment, Proulx suggests that we are the inheritors of a long history of despoliation and rapine. Our ancestors were colonizers of the natural world but also of other peoples. First, we see how French and English colonists destroyed the livelihoods and lives of North America’s native populations. Then, we see how, in the 20th century, Charles Duke’s heirs move on to pillage the people and forests of South America and New Zealand.

Proulx reminds us that the world we live in was made possible by the destruction of the world that preceded it. The novel concludes with Saptisia Sel, the head of the Breitsprecher Tree Project, asking, “Can’t we try again? Can’t we fix what we broke?’’ It’s an urgent question, perhaps the urgent question, one that we should all be asking ourselves now.

BARKSKINS

By Annie Proulx

Scribner, 717 pp., $32

Anthony Domestico, an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, has a book on poetry and theology forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.