Conference Abstract

Trees are in the air these days. Beginning in the late 1990s, during the early explosion of
internet enthusiasm in the west, the concept of a "wood wide web" began to be adopted by
botanists, dendrologists, and natural scientists, based in part upon research by Suzanne Simard
and others showing that trees reciprocally exchanged nutrients with mycorrhizal fungi through
their roots. Contemporary writers publish large, sweeping novels about humanity from an
arboreal perspective, of which Powers’ The Overstory is only the most well-known. And artists
create projects that dramatize the ecological implications of deforestation for climate change or
collaborate with trees as artistic agents and media.

Over the first decades of the 21st century, the analogy between arboreal and human
networks has captured the scholarly imagination, helping to create what Solvejg Nitzke and
Helga G. Braunbeck have called "arboreal imaginaries.” But scientific, literary, and artistic
interest in trees is not a new phenomenon. Many ancient and indigenous peoples have complex
legends, traditions, and practices involving trees as nonhuman people. Sacred groves have been
venerated in ancient religions. The world tree is a mythological concept that reappears in
mythologies across the world, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil is at the heart of
Judeo-Christian religion. From the classical era on, myths and stories about people turning into
trees or vice versa have inspired numerous works of literature, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
Giovanni Bellini’s Apollo and Daphne, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Charles Chesnutt’s “Po’ Sandy.”
Western artists, too, have long taken trees as their subjects, from Dutch landscape painting of
the 17th century, to 19th and 20th century artists like Pisarro, Cezanne, and Emily Carr.
Historically, arboreal imaginaries have also played an important role in German cultural
imagination, particularly in German notions of belonging and Heimat. Trees and forests as
symbols, metaphors, and chronotopes have featured prominently in German negotiations of
national character, identity, modernity, and gendered constructions of nature/culture, but also
discourses on sustainability and environment.

Indigenous cultures, unlike those predominant in the west, have long treated trees and
plants (like human and nonhuman animals) as persons. Shaman Davi Kopenawa, in
collaboration with anthropologist Bruce Albert, has powerfully articulated the Yanomami belief
that "the forest is alive," but is being threatened by the destructive actions of white people.
Anishinabe scientists like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Mary Geniusz have written brilliantly on
the interconnections of native cosmologies with Western science. Kimmerer's Braiding
Sweetgrass, which narrates in part the difficulties she encountered as an indigenous woman in
her efforts to integrate Western science with Anishinabe traditional knowledge, has become a
best seller and is a regularly assigned reading on college and university syllabi across the
curriculum.

Recent academic interest in the arboreal crosses the disciplinary boundaries of human,
social, and natural sciences in pursuit of the complex relations among human, nonhuman, and
more-than human realms, drawing on the concept of entanglement developed by such scholars
as Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and others. Ideas of tree
communication, cooperation, and cognition are verified empirically by tracing chemicals
transferred among trees and fungal networks, measuring how trees attacked by insects and
other pests emit chemical warnings to their neighbors, and mapping how “mother trees” share
more nutrients with their kin than with other neighboring trees. These and other instances of
multispecies entanglement have led natural scientists to claim that trees share cognition with
humans, what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn might call “thinking like a forest.” They have also
inspired writers and artists to create literary and visual mediations of these arboreal-fungal
networks.

Arboreal entanglements figure in the recent explosion of novels about trees and forests.
Powers’ The Overstory, which traces the obvious and hidden relations among a network of
human, nonhuman, and more-than-human actants, has spawned a minor cottage industry of
critical essays. Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, an epic novel about the multi-century entanglement of
a North American logging dynasty with the displacement and decimation of a native Micmaw
family, has generated important scholarly work on the relations of settler colonialism, the
genocide of native peoples, and deforestation. But these two massive novels are hardly alone in
depicting the entanglement of trees, forests, and humans. Among other recent arboreal novels
are Michael Christie’s Greenwood, Daniel Mason’s North Woods, and Elif Shafak’s The Island of
Missing Trees. Recent interest in tree communication and cognition has inspired Norwegian
author Karl Ove Knausgård to include an extensive section on late 20th-century Russian
research on these topics in his recent Wolves of Eternity.

Artists as well have been inspired by these arboreal entanglements. In an extraordinary
exhibition from 2019 called Trees, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris
assembled an amazing group of artists, scientists, and philosophers to dramatize the multiple
arboreal entanglements of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human entities. Curated with
anthropologist Bruce Albert, the exhibition includes work by botanist Francis Hallé,
neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, and philosopher Emanuele Coccia in dialogue with a wide
range of arboreal art, including contributions by artists primarily from Europe and South
America working in multiple media. Emerging and well-known artists across the world have
staged individual shows on arboreal entanglements, including Charles Gaines, Zoe Leponard,
Maya Lin, William Kentridge, and dozens of others.

On a planet where, at the end of the last Ice Age, trees and forests covered more than
half its land mass, arboreal entanglements have radically shaped human and nonhuman life on
this planet. Métis scholar Zoe Todd cites the claim by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin that the
Anthropocene should be dated to what they call the “Orbis Spike” of 1610, the statistical dip in
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the death by disease and genocide of up to 50
million inhabitants of North America in the previous century. Because indigenous people had
for centuries cleared masses of trees for their own farming, rapid afforestation resulting from
this indigenous holocaust worked to sequester so much carbon dioxide that the planet saw a
period of global cooling.

Historians have traced the history of forestry and forest management and their proposed
solutions to planetary problems of land use and climate change brought about by thoughtless
and rapacious deforestation. Environmental activists deploy tree sits and other measures to try
to slow down deforestation and the destruction of old growth forests, at the same time as
massive neoliberal reforestation projects have been launched in the name of reducing
atmospheric carbon dioxide. Attention to planetarity brought about in part by recent discourse
on the anthropocene motivates atmospheric scientists to measure the global impact of loss of
forest cover on the climate change crisis. Jennifer Gabrys has shown how forests have become
increasingly networked by means of digital sensing technologies, to the point where they have
become technologies themselves for managing the planet’s environment.