Toward an Arboreal Ethic of Place
This essay was presented at the International Society for Environmental Ethics Summer 2023 Annual Meeting on June 29, 2023.
Abstract:
Trees and plants are receiving renewed attention as work in both the sciences and humanities is affirming their intelligence, agency, and relationality. Biologists are studying previously unknown vegetal capacities including learning, memory, and communication, and critical plant studies scholars are rethinking the role of trees and plants in relation to human beings, for example Matthew Hall’s argument for including plants in the category of persons. Trees can be both larger and older than humans, making them especially compelling vegetal exemplars. With these views arise new challenges for human relationships to trees, especially as the global state of forests continues to worsen with ongoing deforestation and climate change. If trees are more than merely instrumental beings, are trees worthy of ethical consideration? Building on Michael Marder’s vegetal ethics and employing Edward S. Casey’s phenomenology of place, I will propose an arboreal ethic that considers the needs of trees as well as our human inter-connection to plants while also justifying our need to depend on them for our livelihoods.
In a step toward an arboreal ethic, I will uncover some of the unique issues trees pose to Western ethics and suggest the possibility of respectful relationships with trees and plants. Our arboreal neighbors’ lives are intertwined with our own through exchange of breath and our use of them in innumerable ways. Contrary to animal ethics, where it can be claimed that humans should avoid eating or using any animal products, humans must use plant products for our food, medicines, products, and shelter. Even a fruitarian diet, eating only the fruits and nuts that a tree would typically discard, does not address the use of tree products for building, fuel, and a multitude of other items. An arboreal ethic must account for our human need to take trees’ lives for our own sustenance and security and may not be founded on total lack of harm. An arboreal ethic also considers that specific trees and ecosystems have differing needs as well as the varying ways human cultures across the globe are deeply intertwined with local forest environments with attention to the primacy of Indigenous peoples’ relationships to land.
Taking a phenomenological approach, trees themselves are grounded in a particular place. Casey’s phenomenological work on place gives insight into one approach to arboreal ethics by considering how trees create place both within and outside of the forest. While trees may not have a right to life, they may have a right to place, and an arboreal ethic of place considers both individual and surrounding, acknowledging ecological interrelationships. Place provides a foundation for an arboreal ethic which recognizes trees as non-human others that can be considered for some rights and also acknowledges that our lives depend on taking theirs. I will also address arboreality both in arguments for the rights of nature and in in ecofeminist place-based ethics to support an ethical stance for trees. Such an arboreal ethic that takes place into account has the potential to expand ecological ethical concern.