Some thoughts on treescapes of the future

 

 

 

Calling for a decolonisation of the climate change agenda, Sultana (2022), writes “I want to interlace with the fleshiness of climate, the pasts and presents in our bodies, minds, soils, kin – where the theory is in the flesh.” When I try to write about treescapes 200 years from now, I think about how ((more than) human?) imaginaries might shift as much as material realities. I know that trees have memories, relational networks and complex systems of communication, but I only know this in an abstract way. I desire to know about trees from the inside (Ingold, 2013), with all their fleshy and lived reality. Might this be part of the future of treescapes?

 

Sultana (2022) also draws on Tuck and Ree’s (2013) beautiful writing on ‘A Glossary of Haunting’. Tuck and Ree take up and rework Deleuze’s notion of desire as a counter to damage-centred narratives about communities, writing “Desire is what we know about ourselves, and damage is what is attributed to us by those who wish to contain us.” (p.648). Desire, then, is about acknowledging the depths of the debt and coming to terms with the historical trauma and damage of the situation, without assuming a neat resolution or absolution will be possible. At the same time however, desire is hopeful and agentic, emphasising that which continues to thrive and carry on despite scars of the past. Whilst Tuck and Ree (2013) are writing about settler colonialism in north America, the work of Sultana (2022) powerfully illustrates the imbrication of colonial histories with global climate politics. Moore (2017) has also traced how the legacies of the ‘Capitalocene’ are grounded in ‘cheap nature’ and ‘cheap labour’. In other words, capitalism’s requirement for the exploitation of land, communities and resources in the global south, and the expulsion of many people of colour from the category of ‘fully human’, lies at the heart of climate crisis. Perhaps, in a possible desire-centred future, treescapes will thrive with and despite their damaged past in which they were classified as inert and a source of ‘cheap nature’.

 

How might young children learn with and from trees in the future? In their speculative fiction piece about the future of Black-affirming early childhood education, Nxumalo and ross (2019) describe a deeply intuitive pedagogical practice where children are taught “to listen to the stories of the land and of water, to feel the stories and engage with their pain, beauty and layers of history, in ways that make visible anti-Black and settler colonial pasts.” This notion of land stories is a dominant one within Indigenous knowledge, and Ghosh (2021) draws on Kimmerer’s work to make clear the distinction between scientific knowing about plants and knowing their songs and stories. Kimmerer tells a story of a plant scientist and an Indigenous guide; impressed by the guide’s extensive knowledge of plants, the scientist compliments him. The guide “nods and replies with downcast eyes. ‘Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn the songs.’” (p.96). Ghosh then repeats a question Kimmerer asks;

“How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” She adds; “Our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories. But who will tell them?” (p.97).

 

Would more-than-human stories that operate through bodies and are characterised by “fleshiness” (Sultana, 2021) be one way to begin to attune to future treescape imaginaries ‘from the inside’? Importantly, Nxumalo and ross’ work joins growing critiques of the whiteness undergirding many assumptions about childhood and nature, which can so often involve “re-enacting colonialism’s terra nullius through settler love for the ‘empty uninhabited wilderness’ that erases both Black and Indigenous relations to land” (p. 507). Viewing engagement with treescapes as political and historically situated then, rather than neutral, apolitical and intrinsically good, would be a starting point for considering future treescapes from the point of view of early childhood education. The writing and Nxumalo and ross, Sultana and Tuck and Ree all undergird my own desire to know trees from the inside, via some mode of thought that is not yet available to me. 

 

Abi Hackett

 

References

 

Ghosh, A. (2021) The Nutmeg’s Curse. Parables for a Planet in Crisis. University of Chicago Press.

 

Ingold, T. (2013) Making. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.

 

Moore, J. W. (2017) The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44 (3), 594-630.

 

Nxumalo, F. and ross. K. M. (2019) Envisioning Black space in environmental education for young children. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22 (4), 502-524.

 

Sultana, F. (2021) Climate change, COVID-19, and the co-production of injustices: a feminist reading of overlapping crises. Social and cultural geography, p.447-460.

 

Tuck, E. and Ree, C. (2013) A Glossary of Haunting. In S. Holman-Jones, T. Adams and C. Ellis Handbook of Autoethnography, P. 639-638.