These days my feed is saturated with news about trees. It seems like every week we learn more about their sociality, their longevity, and the vital role they play in upholding biodiversity and regulating global climate through carbon storage. Arguably, all this output suggests a shift in tree culture strongly influenced by ecological science. On the one hand, such a shift speaks more meaningfully to the current (changing) climate in the sense that it acknowledges trees as important actors in global and local ecosystems, whose complex multi-species entanglements demand that we rethink the way we manage our forests. On the other hand, this prevailing (pop)scientific way of looking at trees threatens to drown out their cultural history and the role they play in the formation of individual and collective subjectivities.
As Jared Farmer writes, “one of the
innumerable minor privileges of American whiteness is the freedom to appreciate
trees as just trees: anodyne features, ahistorical objects” (815). Doing so
would be to misremember centuries of “arbonationalism,” during which American
settler-colonists used trees as political and historical motifs to indigenize
themselves, in order to legitimize their presence in a landscape from which
they had displaced its indigenous people. Innumerable treaties with Native
Americans were written under ‘treaty trees,’ only to be broken by the
settler-colonists, who preferred to remember the ‘massacre trees’ instead, as
it meant they could comfortably identify as victims and cast the Native
Americans as violent brutes. During the Revolutionary War ‘liberty trees’
became places for patriots to assemble and speak their own law in the face of
the English oppressors. Trees continued to function as silent witnesses to
vigilante justice when, before and long after the Civil War they bore the
weight of countless of Lynched African Americans. In short, “trees associated
with the making of freedom referenced the taking of liberties” (816).
We may want to ask ourselves what narratives
and identities contemporary trees serve. Apart from the heritage tree, can we
speak of an offset tree? These are the trees ‘green’ airlines encourage you to purchase
when you book a flight, or the trees corporations and governments pledge to
plant, while refraining from scaling back their reliance on fossil fuels. In
short, I fear a deracinated view of trees such as the one that threatens to
prevail if we do not meet the surge of ecologically-minded arbo-science with an
equally powerful, politically and culturally informed perspective, leaves the
door open for colonial violence and greenwashing.
Last year I nominated Barkskins by Annie Proulx, and The
Overstory by Richard Powers as two of the best books I read that year.
Though topically similar both novels take very
different approaches to tree culture in North America. In provocation, I would
argue that The Overstory is about
trees and the individuals whose lives are tangled up in them, whereas Barkskins manages to see the forest through the trees. Written in a tone
of scientific wonder, The Overstory is clearly a celebration of the way trees rally people together under the umbrella of environmental activism. Barkskins, on the other hand is decidedly more acerbic, and follows two families, indigenous and settler-colonial, with less love for the individual,
but more rigorous attention to the systemic exploitation, and injustice
suffered by the indigenous, and the poor at the hands of the timber barons. Whereas one induces wonder, the other induces outrage. Ask yourself which is the more politically useful emotion.
Laura op de Beke
Works Cited
No comments:
Post a Comment