Against redemptive tree pedagogies
Tree stumps - the chopped up and discarded remnants of trees that rooted and lived on our college and university campuses - have been carried to the playground and inside the child care centre. At two different campus child care centres, these tree stumps have taken on a narrative imbued with redemption: publicly displayed signs on campus and online posts explain that the trees were removed in the name of aesthetics and campus expansion (read: profit), but to ease discomforts, the stumps were salvaged, rescued, revived and repurposed by the children who are now using them to learn. Our tree-cutting actions, publicity materials state, are atoned by the children’s reclamation in the name of learning.
We want to be against these redemptive tree pedagogies. We are inspired by Alexis Shotwell (2016), who offers that “one of my imperatives is to be against without predicting all the things there are to be for” (p. 19). What possibilities are opened when we have a ‘no’ to redemptive tree pedagogies? We think, together with Natasha Myers (2018), that “[photosynthetic ones] are the world-makers we need to heed if we hope to grow livable worlds” (p. 55). With Shotwell and Myers, we want to notice the saw marks torn into tree trunks; we want to refuse the logics of human supremacy that justify tree-cutting in the name of profit; we need to unsettle the relations that romanticize childhood and unload responsibility of caring for the tree trunks onto children. In being against, Shotwell (2016) argues for “complicity and compromise as a starting point for action” (p. 5). How might we respond with cut trees with children if we both refuse redemptive logics and (or, while we) take seriously how we are implicated in, and entangled with, living, dying, cut, and re-moved trees on campus?
By Lisa-Marie Gagliardi and Nicole Land
References
Myers, N. (2018). How to grow livable worlds: Ten not-so-easy steps. In K. Oliver-Smith (Ed.), The world to come: Art in the age of the Anthropocene (pp. 53-64). Florida: The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art.
Shotwell, A. (2016). Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press