In "Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation" Rosetta Elkin will address the scalar ambitions of landscape architecture by unpacking the rise of tree-planting campaigns, exposing the human tendency to solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms.
PLANT LIFE: THE ENTANGLED POLITICS OF AFFORESTATION
*and what it means for landscape architects
Drawing on a decade of multidisciplinary research, this lecture addresses the scalar ambitions of landscape architecture by unpacking the rise of tree-planting campaigns. The associations with design are linked to the ecological ambitions of the field, but unfold as some of the largest acts of horticulture ever imagined. Episodes are supercontinental in scale and global in ambition, as described in Elkin’s recent publication Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Plant Life explores the procedures of afforestation, the planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, this work reexamines the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act; rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social.