Arboreality: Revisioning Trees in the Western Paradigm

A sample of my completed dissertation, Arboreality: Revisioning Trees in the Western Paradigm, is available to view on ProQuest. Please take a look!

First paragraphs:

Humans are intimately linked with trees, and our shared history will become our shared future. Trees are not only often older and larger than humans, but are very different in their livingness as sessile, modular beings. The woody, perennial plants form the backbone of forest ecology, providing habitats for mammalian, avian, amphibian, and insect species. Their roots connect soil systems, their trunks verticalize water, and their canopies create hidden worlds in the sky. We know them as photosynthesizers, tasked with transforming sunlight into sugars and sustenance for themselves and other forest occupants. They offer an exchange for the air we breathe in their contribution to just one of various planetary cycles.

We have grown as a species in the shade of trees, built societies in the openings of forests, and created empires of economies, societies, and stories with and within arboreal boughs. In the Western imagination, forests are primary to society and vast stands of trees, and the clearing of such stands, established the ground of our civilization. Trees form our homes, the pages of our books, and are incorporated into our products including toothpaste. They provide fruits and nuts, just a few among innumerable edibles, and a dwelling for medicinal knowledge. Trees have been a location for civic assemblies, shelter for marriages, markers for birth and death, and symbols of oppression and intolerance as well as hope. Beyond the woods, affluent neighborhoods amass trees in parks, gardens, along streets, and in yards with curb appeal. These trees provide habitats and beautify the space, impacting our health and psychology.[1] Notably, less affluent urban regions are often relatively devoid of trees and green spaces, a social commentary in the landscape.[2]

Trees inspire brilliance and excite fears. They appear in myth, story, poem, and song in guises from primordial characters to archetypal divinities. Religious iconography and lore makes use of trees and woods in origin stories and throughout religious practice. Trees appear as vessels for spiritual wisdom, as subjects of praise, and as loci of mystical experience. Far beyond the mundane, the forest can be a place of mystical beauty or chthonic terrors and issues a sublime experience for the romantically inclined, leading to important poetical works. Trees appear as themselves in our written works and are a primary metaphor in Western literature. The visible structure of a tree lends itself to hierarchy, prevalent in the Western paradigm, and forms a symbolic configuration for our thought and cultural organization.

And yet, we have created systems of dominance and resource extraction that have led to environmental destruction, deforesting the planet. Forests are carbon sinks and by sequestering carbon directly affect climate change, which as a planet-wide crisis, urgently requires response.[3] Human activities are extinguishing animal and plant species and, in particular, razing forests at astounding rates of deforestation. Impacts on global forests are intertwined with cultural systems of oppression and colonialization, and this destructive impulse is connected to the intellectual tradition that fostered the Western paradigm. Trees and forests are at risk planet-wide, and the scale and weight of destruction continues to expand. The way we see trees, particularly in Western culture, is representative of the larger trend of environmental destruction worldwide. Although thinkers and scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, ecological degradation continues to worsen and expand. Our current planetary-wide issues, particularly our changing climate, are forcing new ways of thinking about our impact on the Earth. Though hotly debated, many claim we have moved into a new geological epoch characterized by human-born changes: the Anthropocene.[4]  This planet-wide destruction is presenting us with new challenges that do not conform to our previous experience, putting us under duress to find novel solutions. While technology and scientific knowledge have advanced, the scope of the problem continues to outpace both our technical abilities and political will.

This project seeks to revision, or see again, trees and our human relationship to trees in the Western paradigm. Through studying our lived experience of trees, we can better understand our interconnections to nonhuman others. Thinkers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Joanna Macy provide a frame for this work of revisioning. Paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in the preface to his masterwork, The Human Phenomenon, tells us he wants to help us see.[5] For Teilhard, this seeing is the development and increase of consciousness which is essential to human being and our continued, collective growth. As our consciousness increases, the way we interact with the world changes, and his project suggests that the world can be made different if we envision differently. Buddhist teacher, philosopher, and activist Joanna Macy, following social thinker David Korten, calls our moment the Great Turning, our opportunity to transition to a life-sustaining society. She identifies three inter-related dimensions of the Great Turning including holding actions, structural change, and the shifting of consciousness.[6] Holding actions postpone the impending destruction through activist behaviors such as boycotts, protests, and civil disobedience, and structural change involves the slow transference to new societal institutions that promote sustainable culture. Along with these two concrete dimensions, a shift in consciousness is necessary to support the societal changes necessary to move past destruction, and involves reconsidering the underpinnings of our thought, especially our thought about ourselves and our relationships to the non-human world. Macy calls this aspect of the Great Turning a “cognitive, spiritual, and perceptual revolution.”[7] Following this call for a shift in consciousness, this dissertation is an inquiry into the way in which our changing, complex relationships to trees illuminate a broader transformation of consciousness currently underway and catalyzed by environmental crisis.

[1] For example, one famous study showed that viewing green space, particularly trees, from a window after surgery may improve recovery times. See Ulrich, “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery,” 420–421.

[2] Jesdale, Morello-Frosch, and Cushing, “The Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Heat Risk-Related Land Cover in Relation to Residential Segregation,” 811–817.

[3] Bonan, “Forests and Climate Change: Forcings, Feedbacks, and the Climate Benefits of Forests,” 1444–1449, and Canadell and Raupach, “Managing Forests for Climate Change Mitigation,” 1456–1457.

[4] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 44–47.

[5] Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, 3.

[6] Macy, World as Lover, World as Self, 143–147.

[7] Macy, World as Lover, World as Self, 146.