ABSTRACT
There is in European and western literature a persistence of reference to trees or forests as a utopian locus of liberty and individual authenticity. Who can conceive of a Utopia without trees? From Eden’s Tree of Knowledge to the Liberty Trees of the American and French revolutions, the tree has a symbolic aspect which, in its ‘cultural surplus’, transcending cultural and historical specificities, is a ‘prefiguration of wholeness or a better way of being’ (Levitas 2013, 5). Collectively, as forest, the wild wood is also to be greatly feared, as many an instructive fairy tale or illustrative allegory will attest. Although forests have often constituted an atmospheric backdrop in literature, one way or the other, they have lately also been a topic for scientists, environmentalists and politicians. This is for various reasons but above all, it is because of their general and often drastic diminishment across the globe. Recently, however, and this is also in the contemporary context of ecological crisis, trees have been discussed with a new emphasis.
They are construed, in a democratic and utopian vein, as being integral to a good society, not simply as ‘the backdrop for human action, a set of resources, or another set of interests’ (Sargisson 2013, 128) but, rather, as citizens and subjects with whom humans interact, to the benefit and flourishing of both. The dominion that mankind has assumed over the natural world has become indefensible; as Marius de Geus noted as early as 1999 in Ecological Utopias: Envisioning the Sustainable Society: ‘an ecologically viable society’ requires not just ‘an awareness of environmental issues’; what is required in no less than ‘a completely different attitude towards nature’ (cited in Sargisson 2013, 117). Bruno Latour in Politics of Nature: How To Bring Sciences Into Democracy, reinforces the view, along with many others (Andrew Dobson, John S. Dryzek, Daniel Botkin, Timo Maran, Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett, to name a few), that: ‘nothing is more anthropocentric than the inanimism of nature’ (Latour 2004, 224). He adds his own call for change: ‘I am asking [….] that the question of democracy be extended to nonhumans’ (Latour 2004, 223). Jane Bennett goes even further, developing a ‘Creed’ that states: ‘I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to non-human bodies, forces and forms […] even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp’ (Bennett 2010, 122). Recent utopian writing also calls for the ‘rewilding’ (Monbiot 2013) of an overcivilised world which ‘limits the range of our engagement with nature’ and ‘pushes us towards a monoculture of the spirit’ (Monbiot 2013, 154). ‘Of all the world’s creatures,’ states George Monbiot in his recent Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, ‘perhaps those in greatest need of rewilding are our children. The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world’ (Monbiot 2013, 167).
