Dr. Seuss's celebrated 1971 book The Lorax centers on trees. Truffula trees, to be precise—trees that the once greedy and now contrite Once-ler had been “searching for” his whole life. The Once-ler recounts how he cut down all the Truffula trees to make “thneeds”—profitable garments of dubious utility. Amidst the desolate post-Truffula landscape, the book ends with an urgent and directive hope: the Once-ler tosses down the last Truffula seed to a child—a stand-in for readers and the children to whom they are presumably reading. “Plant a new Truffula,” the Once-ler instructs. “Treat it with care. Give it clean water and feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.” Planting the Truffula seed promises a potential future in which the past is restored—not only Truffala trees but also the many others who relied on them.
Now over 50 years old, The Lorax indicates that tree planting has been a long-standing practice of environmental restoration, one perhaps as old as the recognition of the harm caused by extensive deforestation (see Cohen 2004). Writing in the 1990s, for example, Dianne Rocheleau and Laurie Ross (1995: 408) note that, “Trees have become both icon and currency in the domain of sustainable development.” In recent years, though, interest in tree planting has intensified as a focus of policy, political, corporate, personal, and scientific attention. It is now proposed as a prototypical “nature-based solution” to the climate and biodiversity crises, as well as other social and environmental issues (see Seddon et al. 2021). As historian Jill Lepore (2023) writes in The New Yorker, “Trees are the new polar bears, the trending face of the environmental movement.” Diverse institutions and actors have embraced tree planting as restoration, including the World Economic Forum, nonprofits like the World Wildlife Fund, Republican US President Donald Trump (Council on Environmental Quality 2020; Friedman 2020), and Democratic US Senator Cory Booker (Office of Corey Booker 2023). Not only is tree planting seen as a way to remove excess climate-changing carbon from the atmosphere, but it is also a prominent strategy to adapt to climate change (through flood mitigation, for example), repair landscapes deemed degraded, create habitat for threatened species, and improve people's health and well-being. Popular public-facing English language scholarship and nature writing (Beresford-Kroeger 2011, 2021; Simard 2021), prize-winning fiction (Powers 2018), and soon Hollywood film,1 also celebrate trees’ communicativeness and caring. In this, trees seem to hold important lessons for these divisive and anxious times, lessons that might “save us” (Beresford-Kroeger 2011). In other words, if Dr. Suess were writing now, The Lorax might end with the Once-ler envisioning the Trufulla seed's planting as a cure-all to a broad array of climatic, environmental, social, and personal woes. A line of 2023 graffiti in Harvard Square (Cambridge, Massachusetts) captures the mood: “PLANT A TREE OR DIE” (Figure 1).
A command, Harvard Square. Photo by author, June 2023.
Citation: Environment and Society 15, 1; 10.3167/ares.2024.150108
With its recounting of a destructive past and hope for a better future, The Lorax also indicates the importance of temporality to restorative tree planting. Following this lead, I focus on temporality in this article as one way to explore the recent embrace of tree planting and scholarship about it. The planting of a tree seedling (or “whip”) takes place in a particular moment of time: it took me about eight minutes to plant my first whip; veteran tree planters can do it in a matter of seconds.2 Tree planting projects and policies often foreground that moment by focusing on the number of trees planted or the size of the area they are planted in (Elkin 2022; Rana et al. 2022). In these framings, the moment of planting can seem sufficient for achieving tree planting's myriad goals. But, as I will explore, tree planting is also about the multiplicity of other interconnected moments surrounding it, as well as the meaning ascribed to them. In the restorative tree planting that is my focus here, planting whips in the present is often motivated by visions of the trees or forest projected to grow in the decades to come. Restorative tree planting can also be shaped by a landscape's past and ideas about it. The Lorax, for example, consists primarily of a retelling of past harm to Truffula trees and those who lived in relationship with them (barbaloots, swanny swans, and the Lorax). This retelling of harm motivates the book's ending: the envisioned tree planting that will repair that harm in the future, bringing back the Trufullas, barbaloots, and so on. Similarly, the large-scale tree planting scheme in northern England that I discuss later in the article aims to “grow a better future.”3 The past and future also weave through many scholarly arguments about planted trees. Engaging that scholarship from the qualitative social sciences, environmental humanities, and, to some extent, quantitative social science and land change science, this article examines how attention to restorative tree planting's temporality can elucidate its political dimensions, controversies, and effects.
While people around the world have long planted trees for a wide variety of reasons, including some Indigenous peoples and local communities (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Leach and Fairhead 2000; Maathai 2003; Neves and Heckenberger 2019), this article focuses on the state-, industry-, and nonprofit-led projects that dominate contemporary restorative tree planting. By restorative tree planting, I mean trees planted to address contemporary environmental crises and problems, particularly climate change and biodiversity loss, and associated social issues. My geographic focus is purposefully broad, an approach that follows the contemporary imagining of tree planting as a universal project. This broad approach allows me to highlight patterns in tree planting scholarship and practice across temperate and tropical climates, as well as urban and rural landscapes. Yet, while this approach was useful for seeing the similarities and differences across divergent geographies, my focus on temporality also points to a key insight: that specific places and relations within them across time are essential both to how planted trees grow and what they do.
The article begins with a discussion of tree planting as restoration. Next, I trace how the past and future animate contemporary scholarly discussions of restorative tree planting. This is followed by a discussion of time and contemporary tree planting. Finally, I briefly apply this analysis to my new research on contemporary tree planting in northern England to illustrate how attention to temporality might shape the ethnographic study of the restorative tree planting that is reshaping landscapes around the world.
Restorative Tree Planting
Tree planting can be a tool of environmental restoration in multiple and sometimes overlapping senses. Overall, I approach restorative tree planting as tree planting undertaken to address environmental and social harm linked with resource extraction, pollution, and forms of environmental change and crisis. Restorative tree planting may be motivated by or premised on a characterization of what is “natural” within a landscape or biome. Such characterizations introduce questions like what a landscape should look like, what kind of ecosystems should be at work in it, and what species should live there—sometimes contentious questions that can be based on cultural and moral ideas, in addition to ecological ones. Deviations from what is deemed natural may be understood, for example, as wasted or degraded (Goldstein 2014) and therefore in need of restoration—or other re-words like repair, regeneration, or recovery. Whether a landscape is understood as naturally a forest—itself a consequentially underdefined term (Asselin et al. 2022) encompassing diverse landscapes with their own social lives (Hecht et al. 2016)—or properly something else (grassland, peatland, or desert, for example) can also impact how trees are planted and to what ends. As I explore in this article, paying attention to temporality is one way to elucidate these dynamics.
As The Lorax indicates, restorative tree planting is not entirely new, just as environmental restoration more broadly is not unique to this time (see Merchant 2003). For example, tree planting was important in the nineteenth-century creation of urban parks and tree-lined streets meant to combat some of industrialization's newly perceived environmental and social ills (Lawrence 2008; Pincetl et al. 2013). Trees have also long been planted to replenish or replace natural forests decimated by timber extraction. Such plantation-based tree planting has been frequently accompanied by claims about its beneficial effects (Cohen 2004) and has at times been undertaken in ways that facilitate control over and exploitation of people, land, and resources (Casid 2005; Pluymers 2021; Scott 1999).
Restorative tree planting echoes but also differs from these past planting practices. The recognition of trees’ role in climate mitigation has been particularly important to this expansion. Governments, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals have promoted tree planting through carbon credits, subsidies, and other forms of climate finance. These economic practices have been accompanied by various international commitments to forest restoration, such as the 2011 Bonn Challenge, which aims to “bring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested landscapes into restoration by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030,”4 and the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests.5 Scientific research and reports have also centered tree planting within climate mitigation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018), for example, highlights that increasing the area of land with trees (within areas classified as forests, woodlands, and woody savannas) could play a key role in meeting the international political goal (adopted in the Paris Climate Agreement) of keeping the global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius. This would require adding about 24 million hectares of trees per year until 2030 (Lewis et al. 2019: 26). Two high-profile academic papers from the mid- to late-2010s (with some overlap in authorship) have also been influential in centering trees within climate and restoration discourse and practice: a 2015 Nature article (Crowther et al. 2015) estimated the global number of trees to be about three trillion—a 46 percent drop since the advent of agriculture—and a 2019 Science article (Bastin et al. 2019, 76) quantified the large-scale “global tree restoration potential,” positioning it “as one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date.”
The number of projects and institutions devoted to tree planting has also increased. Reporting for The New York Times on contemporary tree planting, Zach St. George (2022) details how, following Bastin and colleagues’ 2019 Science paper, a wide variety of organizations, businesses, and public figures embraced the goal of planting a “trillion trees.” Elon Musk even temporarily adopted “Treelon” as his Twitter name. Among the institutional initiatives are the World Economic Forum's Trillion Tree Initiative, the Trillion Trees Campaign,6 and the Trillion Trees program, plus many other governmental, nonprofit, and corporate pledges to plant millions and billions of trees. The numbers of trees planted and organizations planting them, or paying others to do so, appears to be increasing as well (Holl and Brancalion 2022; Martin et al. 2021). Meredith Martin and colleagues (2021), for example, found an almost 300 percent increase in the number of organizations engaged in tree planting over the past three decades—organizations that report having planted 1.4 billion trees in 74 countries.
There are many forms of tree planting that could be characterized as restorative and many tree planting projects have multiple, connected goals. Among them is the goal of restoring local landscapes, particularly woodlands and forests that have been cleared or deemed to be degraded. Here a landscape's designation as “naturally” a forest or some other ecosystem (e.g., grassland) is particularly relevant. This kind of restorative tree planting also often aims to increase arboreal and other kinds of biodiversity by planting diverse and “native” tree species and increasing and connecting existing habitat (Lewis et al. 2019; Tölgyesi et al. 2022).
Climate-motivated tree planting can also be understood as restorative. Trees’ capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere is frequently enlisted to restore the climate, at least to some degree. Planted trees act here as a “natural” form of carbon capture and storage that promises to help stabilize the climate and, some proponents hope, enable a degree of continued fossil fuel usage. Trees can also be planted to restore and enhance a landscape's ecological functioning to adapt to a changing climate (e.g., flood mitigation for more extreme weather events [Carrick et al. 2019]).
Restorative tree planting often also has social goals. Many projects at least purportedly aim to bring economic and other benefits to local rural communities that are seen as in need of improvement (e.g., Weston et al. 2015). Planting trees in urban areas and postindustrial landscapes can also aim to benefit local people by, for example, “bring[ing] back nature to spaces where the environment has been exploited and damaged by extractive industries such as coal mining” and “increasing social capital, raising property values, and attracting inward investment, new businesses and new jobs, both within and out with the forestry sector” (Kitchen et al. 2006: 835). Moreover, planting trees can be part of often controversial efforts to promote “right-sized” or “green” development in shrinking cities and deindustrializing regions (Hollander et al. 2009; Schilling and Logan 2008). Here, planted trees are meant to restore land value, local economies, neighborhoods, and communities.
It is not always possible to distinguish restorative tree planting from other tree planting practices. This is in part because tree planters of all kinds tend to advertise trees’ often sacrosanct position as a social and environmental good. It also stems from the problematically polysemous meaning of tree-related categories like “forests”—a category that can include tree plantations (Asselin et al. 2022)—as well as from overlaps in tree planting programs, practices, and theories. Moreover, planting trees may be restorative in some ways but not others. For example, tree plantations—which remain the dominant approach to tree planting in many places (Heilmayr et al. 2020; Lewis et al. 2019)—may capture carbon even as they undermine local biodiversity, ecological functioning, and human communities. It is not always easy to disentangle restorative tree planting from the creation and maintenance of tree plantations, which can be motivated by efforts to replenish—or restore—timber while also touting trees’ social and environmental benefits (Cohen 2004). While my focus is primarily on explicitly restorative tree planting, I also bring in some scholarship focused on plantation forests because of their telling entanglement.
Time and Tree Planting
Each planted tree appears to be planted in a specific moment in time. This focus on the moment of planting can enable a kind of triumphant accounting: plant a million of trees or a million hectares of land and then declare “mission accomplished.”7 Indeed, many tree planting institutions do not report monitoring trees in the years after they are planted, especially their survival rates (Martin et al. 2021). Global-scale analysis can also support this kind of understanding. Place-specific dynamics and relationships can be obscured when broad swaths of land are viewed primarily as past or future forest. Envisioning almost a billion additional hectares of canopy cover capable of storing up to 205 gigatons of carbon (Bastin et al. 2019), for example, can allow at least some readers, organizations, and funders to skirt thorny issues such as where these trees will be planted and what and who inhabits those landscapes now. Global-scale tree and carbon numbers can, in this way, enable an imagined standardized global forest unmoored from the specificities of ecologies and politics.
Yet the idea that trees are planted in a particular moment is misleading. Diverse scholarship highlights that the places where trees are planted are not empty and that what has happened and what will happen in them—and how these pasts and futures are understood in the present—can determine whether planted trees survive and what their effects will be. For restorative tree planting in particular, people's understanding of the past as necessitating restoration may be particularly salient. As Dolly Jørgensen writes, “the overarching aim of restoration is to bring back something that has been lost in a particular place's environment” (2019: 2; see also Carse 2022). Scholarship on tree planting suggests that examining the time before and after trees are planted is one way to move attention to the ongoing ecological and social dynamics that matter greatly to tree planting's efficacy and effects.
When tree planting is understood as an ongoing process, rather than a singular act, it comes into view as a relational practice. This approach moves attention beyond the number of trees planted or area planted—with those metrics’ temporal focus on the present—to past and potential future relations needed for planted trees to survive and thrive beyond the moment of planting. It moves attention from tree planting to “tree growing” (Duguma et al. 2020), and to the ways that past relations between ecologies, humans, and other species shape landscapes. In what follows, I discuss scholarship on contemporary tree planting, focusing on temporality across these three categories: ecologies, people, and nonhuman species. These categories were created in my review of the literature, and there is some overlap between them.
Ecologies
Scholarship points to the importance of past and future local ecologies to tree planting. Some critiques of tree planting are, in part, temporal arguments. They assert that to understand tree planting's future effects necessitates understanding established ecological dynamics. For example, some scholars point to the negative effect of planting trees in areas characterized as grassland in terms of biodiversity and carbon (Elkin 2022; Parr et al. 2024; Tölgyesi et al. 2022; Veldman et al. 2015, 2019). To give a concrete example, a prominent critique of Bastin et al.’s article highlights the importance of what is on land before new trees are planted because, where trees replace snow, ground, or grass, they can absorb more solar energy, increasing warming (Veldman et al. 2019).8 All of this impacts tree planting's restorative potential. For example, Pushpendra Rana and colleagues (2022: 2) show that many of the trees recently planted in the Indian Himalayas are located in places “where the potential restoration and carbon storage benefits are limited” for reasons including “poor biophysical suitability” (see also Zeng et al. 2020). As a result, some argue that “basic knowledge of the previous forest types or ecosystem present in the area ought to be an essential part of all landscape restoration” (Lindbladh et al. 2007: 284). In other words, past ecological dynamics matter to what happens to planted trees and what they do.
So do future ecological dynamics. For example, some studies have highlighted tree planting's negative impacts on or trade-offs with future water availability (Filoso et al. 2017; Fleischman et al. 2020; Pincetl et al. 2013; Tölgyesi et al. 2023). Assessments like Stephanie Pincetl and colleagues’—that “treating the urban forest as a homogenous entity can lead to gross errors in quantifying the net value of ecosystem services” (2013: 482)—therefore applies more widely to planted trees. Examining the heterogeneous ecological pasts and futures of the specific places where trees are planted moves attention away from the moment of planting and complicates claims about the restorative impacts of contemporary large-scale tree planting commitments.
People
People are also important to planted trees, beyond the moment in which they plant them. Looking to the past and future is one way that scholars make this kind of argument. As Susanna Hecht, Kathleen Morrison, and Christine Padoch (2016: 5–6) write about tropical forest resurgence, forests are complex “artifacts of human ideas about nature, expressions of economies, and places mediated by institutions and their materialized practices,” and they are “rooted in and contingent on human actions and social configurations in the past.” As such, understanding tree planting's future effects requires attention to past and ongoing power dynamics, land conflicts, and other social relations.9
Scholars have shown how these past and ongoing social relations shape tree planting's impact on people. In particular, a number of studies have found that some kinds of tree planting can negatively impact the lives of rural people who live near them (Adams et al. 2016; Asselin 2022; Fleischman et al. 2020; Lewis et al. 2019). Jodie Asselin (2022), for example, shows that the EU-mandate to increase forest cover to combat climate change has effectively locked up land in Ireland, negatively impacting some farmers. Pamela McElwee and Tran Huu Nghi (2021) show that, in Vietnam, even tree planting that purposefully involves smallholders has mixed social effects. Understanding and addressing the “underlying drivers of deforestation” (Brancalion and Holl 2020: 2355) that created the need for restoration in the first place is also essential—things like government and corporate policies, cultural beliefs and practices, power relations, and poverty, both past and present.
These factors are also relevant to restorative tree planting in postindustrial areas and urban brownfields (De Sousa 2014; Kitchen et al. 2006; Rink and Schmidt 2021). In these landscapes, new trees can be planted to restore both environments and local human communities in the wake of industrial decline and contamination, even as industrial pasts are sometimes embraced as heritage (Nuttall 2020). The social benefits of postindustrial tree planting, though, do not always accrue. Looking beyond the moment of tree planting helps to make sense of these failures. Tree planting can burden residents who are expected to perform tree maintenance, for example, with government agencies or organizations often only funding the initial act of planting (Shcheglovitova 2020). Mariya Shcheglovitova found in Baltimore, for example, that in already neglected neighborhoods, the dead trees that can result from this outsourcing of trees’ future care “become another piece of decaying infrastructure akin to vacant buildings and broken pavement” (idem: 239). This research confirms Morgan Grove and colleagues’ (2018) findings, also focused on Baltimore, about how histories of racial injustice continue to shape patterns of environmental burdens and benefits, including through tree planting.
Restorative tree planting can also push local people from their communities. Sarah Safransky (2014) explores this dynamic in Detroit's Hantz Woodlands, tracing its aim to restore Detroit land values by using tree planting as a way to remove land from the market. Local people's opposition to the new woodland as a “neo-colonial land grab by a white businessman in a Black city” (Safransky 2017: 1080) illustrates how tree planting can get entangled in ongoing, racialized struggles over land and power that connect past and future. Geoffrey Donovan and colleagues (2021) found something similar in their quantitative analysis of tree planting in Portland, Oregon as a potential tool of “green gentrification,” through which environmental improvements contribute to the future pricing out of established communities (see also Anguelovski et al. 2019, 2022; Connolly 2019; Gould and Lewis 2016; Haase et al. 2017). Outside the United States too, tree planting has sometimes been a tool to take land from marginalized people by characterizing their past land use as degraded, dangerous, or wasteful, as Irus Braverman (2014) analyzes around planted pine trees in Israel and Palestine, and Zsuzsanna Ihar (2022) traces in the planting of olive trees in postindustrial Azerbaijan. And yet planting trees can also be a practice to seek enchantment (Macpherson 2018) that, perhaps, restores the planter as much as the landscape being planted. The complex impacts of tree planting on people can come into view through attention beyond the moment of planting.
People's actions also matter to the survival of planted trees. As in “nature” writ large, the “nature” in nature-based solutions like tree planting is not natural in the sense of human-free, but rather is profoundly social (Osaka et al. 2021). As Rose Pritchard (2021) argues, “tree planting is a social science. Tree planting is done by people and for people. It is shaped by human political systems.” Research on tropical forest conservation shows how Indigenous and other local people can be important to trees’ and forests’ survival (e.g., Blackman et al. 2017; Fa et al. 2020). Corroborating this dynamic in the context of restorative tree planting, scholars have found lack of community involvement to be among the factors that can undermine planted trees’ survival (Rana et al. 2022; see also Brancalion and Holl 2020) and that forest restoration depends on “prioritizing local communities” (Erbaugh et al. 2020). Common challenges, such as limited government funding and the effective abandonment of trees after their planting, mean that local participation and “stewardship” can be particularly important (Davies and Santo-Tomás Muro 2023). Emphasizing the importance of local people for tree survival, and the potentially deleterious impact of tree planting on those people, Forrest Fleischman and colleagues (2020: 949) argue that “effective climate solutions require social systems that support people to conserve ecosystems.” Similarly, Marlène Elias and colleagues (2022) offer “people-centered rules” for ecosystem restoration, including tree planting.
Nonhuman Species
Looking beyond the moment of planting to landscapes’ pasts and futures also indicates the importance of other species to restorative tree planting. Among these species are other trees. Some scholarship links increased carbon sequestration and climate resilience to tree diversity (Hutchison et al. 2018; Messier et al. 2022; Mori et al. 2021), contributing to arguments against monoculture tree planting (Donatti et al. 2022; Lewis et al. 2019; Martin et al. 2021; Tölgyesi et al. 2022). Prioritizing diversity can entail an assessment of what counts as a “natural forest” in a landscape, in terms of species mix, density of planting, and other factors. It also militates for expanding existing forests and woodlands that already have a diversity of tree species as a restoration strategy (Hughes et al. 2023). These landscapes can also be important habitats for many birds, mammals, and other species.
Even detached from existing forests, tree planting can be a strategy to increase biodiversity (see Di Sacco et al. 2021). But research also points to the potential for biodiversity loss when other ecosystems are planted with trees (Abreu et al. 2017; Temperton et al. 2019; Veldman et al. 2015). Whether tree planting is understood to facilitate or undermine biodiversity, then, hinges in part on what species (and ecologies) are deemed to be “natural” to a landscape—a characterization of that landscape's past.
Other species can also be important to tree planting's success. In particular, scientific research has increasingly highlighted the importance of mycorrhizal fungi in soils to tree growth and trees’ restorative benefits, including carbon sequestration (Anthony et al. 2022; Steidinger et al. 2019). Some humanistic scholars have explored the “rhizosphere” (Jones and Hinsinger 2008) as comprised of multispecies relations at the “root-soil interface” that shape planted trees’ future (Elkin 2022: 14; see also Gan et al. 2018). As research reveals these and other symbiotic relations above and below ground, land itself can appear as “alive with millions of unnamed species and unknown relationships that surpass the human imagination” (Elkin 2022: xiii). Yet the presence of other species, such as deer (Redick and Jacobs 2020), can also undermine planted trees. Understanding these complex relationships necessitates expanding attention from the moment that a tree is planted to the multispecies interactions in the periods before and after planting, which shape landscapes’ pasts and futures.
Discussion: Tree Planting's Entangled Temporalities
When we look beyond the moment in which trees are planted, we can see them as entanglements of ecological, human, and nonhuman relations and interactions, past and future. They come into view, as Rosetta Elkin puts it, “as living, breathing, earthly interfaces between the soil and the climate, between sociocultural and biophysical conditions” (2022: 9). Looking beyond the present moment also helpfully undercuts the neat categories I just used to organize the previous section's literature review—ecology, people, and other species. All interact to influence whether a planted tree lives and what it does. Methodologically, trees’ entangled temporal relations indicate the utility of tracing “human and nonhuman histories” together to reveal the “particular ecological assemblages” that enable species and individual trees to grow as they do (Gan et al. 2018: 41).
Temporality's relevance to restorative tree planting is not surprising. Like planning generally, it entails envisioning the future. But the fact that to human eyes, trees are so slow growing complicates this futurity. Trees can stretch time out in ways that can frustrate planners’ ambitions but also encourage us to think beyond ourselves. The consequential gap between human and tree temporalities can be seen, for example, in two tree planting maxims: “the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the second-best time is today,” and “a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” The maxims point to tree planting's futurity—how it is an act undertaken today whose primary benefits will occur in the future. In the first maxim, tree planting is always something best done in the past; in the second, the gap between the whip's planting and the grown tree is a sign of societal maturity. In both, tree planting conjures the past, acts as a way to envision the future, and encourages us to think beyond the present—and ourselves. The human-tree temporal gap can also allow people to study the past and envision the future in more expansive ways (Farmer 2022) and may militate for and support a different “temporal ethic” that is more attuned to trees’ temporality (Desai 2017: 166). Some trees planted today may become the “ancient trees” of tomorrow, whose veneration “create[s] solicitude between worlds, kinship between species” (Farmer 2022: 29), and who might “entice people into caring for processes that stretch beyond human lifetimes” (Mathews 2022: 9).
The relevance of temporality should not be surprising since restorative tree planting is such a characteristic practice of the Anthropocene—this unofficial epoch of human-environmental and geological entanglement, harm, and responsibility. Time is central to the idea of the Anthropocene, not only because it is an epochal term but also because it draws attention to the past and future. As Gabrielle Hecht (2018: 114) writes, for example, “the Anthropocene gains traction over the present by predicting the future, by asking that we position ourselves as geologists millennia from now, uncovering technofossils in future stratigraphic layers.” A special issue of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2016), for example, analyzes how methods of modeling and interpolation, which the issue's editors, Andrew Mathews and Jessie Barnes, argue are increasingly central to environmental science and management, make future-oriented knowledge claims that shape the present. Conversely, in their edited book, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (2017) draw attention to how today's landscapes are “haunted” by past environmental and more-than-human relations. The past shapes the future of planted trees—both human's understanding of where trees should be and the past and ongoing social and environmental relations that shape the landscapes into which they are planted. If, as Mathews and Barnes (2016: 10) write, “the question of the past, then, if looked at in the right way, has always also been a question about the future,” for tree planting—and perhaps for restoration more generally—the reverse is also true: the question of the future is also a question of the past. These pasts and futures can be multiple, Mathews (2018: 387) argues, and “multiplying our understandings” of them “and of who might be helped or hurt by these futures, makes the Anthropocene political.” Tree planting is one moment in which pasts and futures come together—one shaped by the ecological, human, and nonhuman relations that proceeded it and whose impact will be shaped by those relations into the future.
Planting Trees in the North of England: Ethnography of Restorative Tree Planting
How might attention to temporality shape the ethnographic study of environmental restoration? Here, I briefly explore this question through applying it to research I began in 2022 in the North of England—the birthplace of the industrial capitalism that has caused or contributed to so much of the damage that restorative tree planting seeks to address. Known for its historically industrial cities, verdant sheep pastures, and now mostly shuttered or converted “dark Satanic mills” (Blake 1998), the region is one of the least forested in Europe and is home to millions of people. It now also serves as the site of a large-scale civic experiment in tree planting. Over the coming decades, volunteers, contractors, and nonprofit workers are slated to plant tens of millions of trees in this urban and agricultural landscape. Part of this effort is the new “Northern Forest” initiative through which the national government is funding the planting of at least 50 million trees across a 120-mile urbanized and agricultural belt of land. Its aim is to “grow a better future” in this region whose past is so linked to contemporary environmental crises.10 And it is just one component of the extensive restorative tree planting occurring in the region. Attention to temporality may help to illuminate the social and environmental dynamics and politics that are central to such restorative tree planting efforts.
Trees are planted in particular moments. Take a tree planting event at which I volunteered in March 2023 in Greater Manchester. There, over 20 other volunteers and I learned to plant trees from a woman in her 20s. This is what we learned: First, cut a square hole with a shovel at the center of one of the white X's that she had spray painted on the grass every two meters. Next, put in the leggy whip, roots down, of course. Pack the dirt back in around it, grass-side down, and hammer in a wooden stake about an inch or two from the whip. Then comes a mat: a biodegradable burlap-like square with a slit to the middle from one corner. Surround the whip with the mat and secure it with small bamboo pegs. The mat will kill the grass, insulate the soil and roots, and then nutritiously degrade. Finally, the shield: a tube (often plastic, but in this case biodegradable) slipped over the stake to protect the tree from deer and rabbits in its first few years. These are among the many tools used to plant trees (Figures 2 and 3). How we planted the whips that day in Greater Manchester matters to if and how they will grow and what effects their growth will have.
Tree planting tools. Photo by Author, March 2023.
Citation: Environment and Society 15, 1; 10.3167/ares.2024.150108
First tree planted. Photo by Author, March 2023.
Citation: Environment and Society 15, 1; 10.3167/ares.2024.150108
Yet all sorts of other moments also matter, and these require looking to the ecological, human, and nonhuman relations that are important to this particular place. The Northern Forest is large; an online map shows it encompassing thousands of square miles and many northern English cities.11 In this, it facilitates a generalizing imagination not unlike initiatives that envision a trillion trees. Yet those trees are planted in particular places, each with its own history that shapes what trees are planted, how they are planted, and the futures they may help to create. There are former coal mines, old sheep pastures, and strips of land at the edges of roads. The history of each may be important. For example, the place in Greater Manchester where I learned to plant trees was targeted for planting to address the recurrent flooding of a road lining its bottom. The land manager of the site described the parcel to me as “redundant”: it was bumpy and soggy and so could not be used to graze animals. That topography and hydrology will shape the future survival and health of the trees planted, and therefore their efficacy in flood control.
People are also important. Diverse scholarship shows how tree planting both depends on and can impact people in ways that are specific to particular localities, even as they may also be part of more generalizable patterns. In the North of England, for example, I need to pay attention to how tree planting may interact with long-standing processes of both enclosure (Christophers 2018; Hayes 2020) and woodland management (Rackham 2006)—that is, how tree planting may be enlisted in privatization that limits people's access to land or, conversely, how it may increase access and counter privatization trends into the future. (The newly planted “redundant” land in Greater Manchester, for instance, is meant to become publicly accessible.) Also important are not only the people who planted on the day I volunteered but also those who will attend to the land in the years to come—those in the organization sponsoring the tree planting, the landowner and manager, and those who walk through the area. Finally, studying tree planting requires attention to other species. In the North of England, these include fungi, deer, rabbits, birds, and sheep. Their established patterns will also shape the future of these planted landscapes. Moreover, tree planting may push out some of them out—certain grasses and sheep, for example—while inviting others in.
To do this research, I can draw on methods of studying and writing advanced by other scholars in recent years. These practices can illuminate the environmental and multispecies relations that make landscapes—with their arboreal, human, and other inhabitants—come into being in places like industrial and capitalist ruins (Gan et al. 2018; Tsing 2015; Tsing et al. 2017), peasant-tended hills (Mathews 2018, 2022), and mangrove swamps (Ogden 2011). Such methods can help to move attention beyond tree planting numbers to the complex network of relations into which planted trees enter and through which they will grow or die.
Conclusion
With its alluring promise to address the climate crisis while improving local landscapes, tree planting has become a flagship restorative practice of the Anthropocene. Its appeal has only grown since The Lorax was first published over 50 years ago. Yet tree planting is not inherently restorative (Parr et al. 2024), and to understand what all this tree planting is actually doing requires looking beyond the moment of planting to the heterogeneous relations—past, present, and future—through which trees live, die, and shape the worlds around them. Planting a Truffula seed, as The Lorax instructs us to do, is only possible and potentially meaningful because of the history recounted in the book. Moreover, whether the seed survives, and whether other Trufulla trees, barbaloots, swanny swans, and the Lorax, then come back will be determined not only by the singular act of its planting. It will also be influenced by what has happened there in the past and by the future human and more-than-human relations that make that particular place what it is. This is because even when landscapes, like the one in The Lorax, are deemed degraded and in need of restoration—itself a political characterization—they are often filled with people, nonhuman species, inequalities, and attendant relations of power (see Elias et al. 2021). Moreover, they are also shaped by myriad climatic and ecological dynamics. Planted trees enter into those relations, shaping and being shaped by them.
Attention to temporality can reveal the environmental politics at stake in practices of restoration. It can be a way to help instantiate the popular tree planting motto “right tree, right place,” since determining what tree is right for a place requires understanding the entangled relations that have made that place and will make it into the future. This approach may counter tree planting's moral status as an inherently “virtuous act” (Cohen 2004: 15) in mainstream environmentalism and often popular culture writ large. It may reveal, for example, how trees planted to restore the climate may not have locally restorative effects. Since it always takes place in particular places, planting a tree is also a claim about what lives (human and otherwise) are permissible and desirable there and about what the land itself is for. As such, planting requires assessments that are as much moral and political as they are ecological, meaning that sometimes the “right tree” may be no tree at all. This is especially true if tree planting is taken as moral or legal license to deforest or otherwise emit more carbon elsewhere, as has sometimes been the case during this current tree planting phase (see Elkin 2022). Tracing temporality, then, can be a way to support more ethical and effective restorative tree planting in this time when it is posited as a solution to so many social and environmental problems.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to all the tree planters in northern England who have been willing to spend time with me and teach me what you know.
Notes
Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree is being adapted into a movie starring Amy Adams.
See, for example, a speedy Canadian tree planter in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgmCe3mVES8.
The New York Declaration on Forests currently has two hundred endorsers including governments, businesses, Indigenous organizations, and NGOs; https://forestdeclaration.org/.
This effort predates the others (St. George 2022).
I am referring here to President George W. Bush's 2003 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier six weeks after the United States invaded Iraq in front of a “mission accomplished” banner. In fact, the war in Iraq officially continued until 2011 and some US troops remain in the country.
Bastin et al. (2019: 78) note that they do not support converting native grassland to new forest.
This line of analysis draws on political ecology scholarship about the sometimes-negative impacts of environmental conservation on colonized and marginalized people. See, for example, Agrawal and Redford 2009; Neumann 2002; West 2006; West et al. 2006.
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