Tree

I never promised you a rose garden.… When landscape architecture becomes a laboratory for the Anthropocene

“…Insofar as the effects of the Anthropocene on the planet's processes and climate are the effects of a particular form of human culturethat of the industrial Westthis thinking marks out routes for resistance and change, even revolution, to counteract industrial culture's detrimental consequences for all the planet's inhabitants. It thereby implies a wider planetary ethics that encompasses non-human residents, including soil, rocks, water, plants, trees, animals, and so on (Battles, 2017;Tsing et al, 2017). In Hamlet, withering flowers or rotting foliage are used as metaphors for human finitude, and potentially pertain to the survival of the entire human species; but they are also tokens of the possibility of living on in the material sense of nature's eternal return.…”

“…This is a huge field of scholarship and critique. Some examples that have influenced my work are Battles (2017); Davis and Turpin (2015); Descola (2013); Haraway (2016); Harman (2018); Latour (2018); Morton (2013); Stengers (2015); Tsing (2017). See also Steiner (2017); Steiner and Veel (2020).…”

Arborealism, or do novels do trees?

“…Far more intriguing and radical in its outlook than Iovino and Oppermann's material ecocriticism, which against its own best intentions perpetuates 'one of our supreme fictions that the landscapes, the elemental forces, the creatures of the world, all align in relation to us' 37 , is Patrícia Vieira's concept of phytographia. According to Vieira, the world as we know it has always been, and continues to be, scripted by plantsquite literally.…”

“…101 Possibly the most appropriate term to capture her post-meditative state is 'bewilderment', resonantly invoked by Matthew Battles as 'mingl[ing] wildness with precarity, mystery, exile beyond the edges of norms and qualities'. 102 I anticipate resistance to my reading of The Overstory, especially the notion that under Powers' authorship paratextual arborealism evolves into dendrographic narration not just of, but indeed by trees. However, as Hitt explains, the entire point of the ecological sublime is 'to jolt us momentarily out of a perspective constructed by reason and language, a perspective that, in modern Western culture, has rendered nature mute'.…”