Rosetta s. Elkin: Troubling mass tree-planting and afforestation (ep390)

Written By kamea chayne
“What we might want to do is learn where the word desertification comes from and when it should be used and when it is ill-used, at least to move forward into a more hopeful, more informed, more generous future that I think we all want.”
— ROSETTA S. ELKIN

Why should we challenge the idea that mass tree-planting projects are politically neutral—as something that ought to garner universal support? What is the significance of reorienting our goals towards growing trees rather than planting trees? And what could it mean to love drylands as they are, troubling perspectives that problematize their very existence?

In this episode, we welcome Rosetta S. Elkin, the Principle of Practice Landscape, academic director of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture Master’s in Landscape Architecture (MLA) program, and an Associate of The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University. 

Rosetta’s work considers living environments with a particular focus on plant life and climate change. Rosetta teaches planting design, fieldwork, and seminars that advance a theory of plant life between ecology and horticulture. She is the author of books, articles, book chapters, and monographs including Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation.

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Transcript:

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Rosetta Elkin: I think anyone who's really worked with plants, who's had to take care of plants, or has a garden, or farms, or is in some way daily connected with the living plant, as opposed to the resource plant, as it comes out as an object, whether it's in our foodstuffs or in our clothing or whatnot, where you forget that there's this living organism behind it... I think anyone who has had their hands in the soil and worked with plants probably has a sensitivity that I share. And so I would say that's where it started.

It started with gardening, it started with farming. It started with growing my own plants, which is truly what drew me into landscape architecture as a field. Ultimately, however, the field took me quite far away from my love of plants, and so I've spent the second half of my career trying to turn it back, if you will. I teach, also, and most of my students also enter into the design professions that I'm a part of, because they do have a kinship with plant life, but it's very rarely taught in that way. It's taught, again, in this severe environmental context, or at a distance, like they're huge biomes, or the [unintelligible] concept where you get Latin binomial and they're grouped together and they're supposed to stay together on the sheet and in real life, and you move on. I think that's a pity. I think that's an overlooked opportunity.

Kamea Chayne: If we just asked the general public, what are your views on tree planting projects, or planting more trees, without offering any additional context, I think most people would respond positively and see them as acts of doing good for the land and the planet. But of course, anything painted with a broad stroke like that is worth unpacking.

In your book, which highlights and critiques various afforestation projects, you explore "how the complicated ties and relations made in the human world—namely between constructing a scientific truth, generating a resource, and misleading public understanding—are physically manifest in the landscape.” Can you expand on the scientific truth that was constructed and how it's been used to mislead the public into seeing tree planting projects no matter the context to be good for the planet?

Rosetta Elkin: Well, when you plant a tree, you're actually planting another living organism. The word planting, it's kind of simple, in a way, and in other respects, it engages a relationship.

I start the book, as you might remember, with a very simple sentence that says…

Humans are a planting species. No other species plants quite like we do.

There are many, many plants that grow spontaneously and completely without human accord. And then there are plants that we feel the need to stick in the ground, if I can put it that way.

Once you decide to stick a plant in the ground, to take it out of where it has been growing and put it somewhere else, you establish a relationship, because that plant didn't decide to be there. You decided to put it there. It might thrive. It might even like where you put it. But you have to respect that relationship. It's a powerful relationship, because you're in charge, in many ways. Plants do move, but they certainly aren't mobile. So once you've stuck that plant in the ground, there's some responsibility to go back and check on it.

Unfortunately, some of the larger tree-planting projects around the world have no post-planting reconnaissance or any rigorous plans to go back and check on any of the projects. There's no relationship.

They're planting trees, but they're not engaging relations. They, being these projects that are usually backed by scientific fact for a "need"—a "need" to re-green or to offset some sort of carbon mandate, other sorts of destructive, major drought or famine—they're quelled by this desire to plant. And when those desires are met with certain global mandates, tree planting can scale up very quickly to the hundreds of thousands, the millions, and even, we know, of the billion tree planting projects.

So if I can link all of that to your first question, anyone who's planted a tree knows that there [are] certain requirements of water, light, care for other creatures that might want to feed on that plant, and a whole host of questions: like who is planting the tree, and why, and what resources it's taking, and what species are you using. These very simple questions and very simple relations are typically left out of scientific mandates that tell governmental and non-governmental agencies where planting "must" unfold—as if it's some kind of critical contribution that one can't live without getting to the deeper cause of landscape change or interpreting adaptation or other possibilities.

I feel like it's so simple in a way. I wrote this whole book, and actually, it all boils down to just a few words, which is, we should be growing trees, and we should get rid of this language of planting trees, because as soon as you say, yes, I planted a hundred trees, the question really ought to be, but how many grew? How many thrived? How many lived? And the likelihood of you having a relationship with a hundred trees is pretty low. So I'd rather see communities growing trees, and I'd like to see the rhetoric change as well, so we can all talk about fewer trees that thrive and grow.

Kamea Chayne: So it's not about planting trees, it's about growing trees—that really relational aspect. It's not just checking things off of lists like we've accomplished this, but it's really about that long-term realization that these are living beings who need ongoing care and tending, to ensure that they can thrive and become synergistic parts of their communities where they are.

A key point you've made is that afforestation is often viewed as being politically neutral—something that people on all sides can unite and get behind in the name of the health of our shared planet. Of course, our conversation will reveal that afforestation ought to be viewed as political - something that many Indigenous and local communities around the globe already know and have experienced firsthand.

But I wonder if you could share a little history, particularly about the early state-funded afforestation programs in the United States with federal mandates to plant trees in the Great Plains. How does this illustrate a form of shallow environmentalism with no relationship to place?

Rosetta Elkin: We're a product of our times.

When the westward expansion in the United States was confronting treelessness, finding fewer and fewer trees from the very arborized East Coast, it was at first met with a kind of joy—that one didn't need to clear land to farm or settle. But embedded in that whole rubric is the fact that settler societies have a tendency to superimpose their ways on existing, local contexts.

In the case of westward expansion in the United States, it was really incentivized, as we know, from early American history... And that was exaggerated by certain policies like the Timber Culture Act. I talk a lot about the Timber Culture Act, in particular, because it really mobilized these takings. These takings I'm talking about is basically the great land grab, pushing any other kind of life besides the one incentivized by early federal and regulatory agencies to Europeanize and civilize the so-called West, which of course, was only the West to the settler colonialists.

So trees became a form of management, a form of care, in their case, where they thought that bringing in new plants and new agriculture or new foodstuffs to those contexts would be a way to claim—that's what the Timber Culture Act really did, is it formalized the claims. If a family or a settler group planted a certain number of trees, they could send that claim to Washington, and in return, they would own the land. Land that was never under those kinds of declarative terms, prior to Federal Conservation mandates, New Deal Policies exaggerated that by the thirties.

And I think it's actually maybe a nice time to interject a little. We didn't do it at the beginning, but…

I really deal with afforestation in this research and it's not reforestation. Afforestation is the deliberate planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments.

So like Texas to the Canadian border, straight up the 100th meridian, this is a very sparsely treed environment. Rather than enjoying that, the tall grass prairie for the most part, the short grass prairie, the wetlands, the incredible biomes of such a large expanse... the sort of mentality that if there aren't trees here, then somehow we need to plant them. That's something that people didn't question. I'm making sweeping remarks here, but that's essentially a misunderstanding of dry lands, of dry places, of not fully grasping the dryland landscape ecology and dynamics and the complexities of the plants that thrive there, which are, for the most part, living underground, unlike trees, which live a great deal of their life above ground.

I decided to cover afforestation because it is extreme, but it still sheds light on other projects that are about major tree planting. If you put a little baby tree in a hole, in a humid environment, it's probably going to take. You're giving it just what it needs. You put a little tree in a hole in a sub-Sahara or in western Mongolia or in Nebraska, and it's not going to thrive, without you. It might thrive with you. It might thrive with others, but it's unlikely to thrive on its own. It just simply doesn't have the rich inputs that woody tree life require, which is why they are there in the first place on an adaptation level.

So context matters. And yeah, I think that starts to at least scratch the surface of your question. But it's multilayered, and I don't want to just pin it on this early American example I use. It sets the tone, for sure, because it's historically the oldest example, but in many ways, it's the most careful example or case study that I use because of some of the folks that were involved in it.

Kamea Chayne: Context is always key. And there are certain tree species that do well, in particular, in drier climates, and certain ones that also require wetter climates. So there's a nuance in the whole field, of all the different species of trees that there are as well.

This conversation is really timely, because I've been sitting with the question of why people typically celebrate turning desert ecosystems into lush forests, and not arable land into deserts—and what does this reveal about how we place value differently on different ecosystems. The point isn't to justify desertification, of course, but to question why we don't see the conversion of deserts and drylands into greener terrains as a loss of an ecosystem which supported a unique biodiversity of life that needed and contributed to that type of landscape.

As you share, "By definition, drylands are the context of afforestation, and attest to the scale of the “problem” because they occupy 41.3 percent of the total planetary land surface. It is simply too much to accept that such a large portion of the planet is less than hospitable to humans." To these points, I would love to hear more about your invitation to love drylands as they are, and what it means that afforestation typically doesn't take into consideration the pre-existing relationships above and below ground in the drylands they disrupt and transform.

Rosetta Elkin:

The managerial tactics of tree planting do not love the landscape. They have only directives and no understanding. You can't have understanding when your mandate is to plant a million trees.

You're just checking your boxes. It doesn't matter whether they're tree units or other kind of units, the likelihood is very low that there's care taken between systems or species or objects. And that's not just theoretical. That's super practical—you just can't. Like one person can't care for a million anything. I mean, millions of things like micro-organisms care for us. But it's very hard for our individual to have that much generosity and that much time, frankly—we're just inadequate.

So, I do think it comes down to human exceptionalism. I write a little bit about that, but I'm trying to also, in the same vein that you're curious about this, flipping of biomes, I'm curious about our human exceptionalism, especially in this time. Deserts are hard to densify and hard to urbanize and hard on humans. I used the word hard three times there. Just replace it with anything you want. At a basic level, we don't thrive in dry lands, as Homo sapiens. We can tolerate them, but we can't multiply at the same rate or speed as we can in humid biomes. And so it's an affront, right? It's an affront to our adaptability and our exceptionalism, our theory of the human as at the top of Aristotle's Ladder. And, we aren't. We are totally interdependent.

We don't see nature as apart from us. We are in nature, as a co-production. We're part of it. But it's hard for a lot of people to come around to that, because it can be disappointing, or it can be humbling. But I think that's at the root and the heart of the fear of the desert. It's a fear of survival. And it's not even always true deserts. It's often very virtuous places like grasslands. So, then [there are] other questions like, why plant trees in grasslands? Why try so hard to make a forest in a grassland? That's very interesting also, because it's a little more subtle than what you're talking about. But it does boil down to a respect for trees over all of plant life. And that's the same as the human exceptionalism. We have a bit of a tree exceptionalism.

I don't know why. I mean, I would love to know why, but maybe I'm just curious as you are to unpack that. This is an attempt, for sure. And it's something that I continue to write about—why we want cultivated seed and not wild seed. One of the things I say in the end, is that the world is already fully planted. We don't actually have to be a planting species. If we learn to live with the plants that are all around us, including in dry land biomes, the soils are full of dormancy. You know that if you just pull up a paver and wait, right? Whether it blows in or it emerges from below, plants will take over. And so why do we move that dormancy and that life in the soil out of the way and bring in another plant?

It's for beauty, it's for health, it's for religious rituals, spirituality, it's for love, it's for care, curiosity, food. There's a lot of reasons, but tree planting seems to be a very empty reason. It's a very bureaucratic reason. It's so you can report back the mandate that it was planted, which is essentially promoting economic development and not human life.

Kamea Chayne: There are so many layers to this. And I want to go into that offsetting piece in a little, but off the top of my head, I think about how marketing a project of like planting a million trees, sounds a lot more like attention-grabbing, than, say, a project that is supporting like five trees to really grow big and thrive, for the rest of their lives. So there's that mindset shift for people in terms of what is it that drives fundraising, what is it that drives donations? So we also have to be thinking about that as people who are on the donating end, like people who are supporting these different types of projects out there, asking for people's support.

And then also just, I guess, an ecosystem with a lot of trees in the capitalistic system that we have—that can be viewed as a lot more profitable, a lot more "productive", because trees can be cut down as "resources", whereas a desert? There's not much for the taking, for the economy, there. And then, of course, corporate privatization and control over patented seeds, as opposed to the seeds that already exist everywhere, that are not under the control of particular people or entities. [There are] lots of things that came up and maybe more of these themes will come out as we speak...

This idea of change and how we perceive anthropogenic change is also one I've been leaning into as well. Because anthropogenic change isn't all the same—just like how viewing climate change as anthropogenic has been contested because not all humans contributed to the same forms of change leading to ecological breakdown.

So I want to dive deeper into this as well, because here, we're talking about an invitation to appreciate and support drylands just as they are. And to question transforming them through afforestation, which pressures and disrupts the pre-existing relationships there. And I know that perhaps initially, those climates wouldn't have been hospitable to supporting the growth of the trees. But we also know that every being contributes to changes in the landscape as well, and the new presence of more greenery also changes the water cycle and brings in more moisture into the landscape to then better enable their survival.

Besides this, I was listening to Native scholar Lyla June give a TED talk, in part sharing about how Native Americans augmented grasslands through intentional burning to expand habitat for buffalo—which their life and foodways depended on. Though by default, expanding grasslands also meant the suppression of more arborized terrains with biodiversities in their own right. We also know that beavers expand wetlands with how they reconfigure logs in their waterways. And a lot of tree species are allelopathic, meaning they change the chemistry around them to make them less hospitable for certain other beings, giving more room for other species they are more directly reliant on.

So I guess what I've been curious about is undoing the binary of anthropocentrism and eco-centrism. Because humans, like all other beings, have a set of relationships that we need in order to thrive. And humans, who are deeply rooted in place, not talking about those who've lost a sense of our entanglement But rooted peoples, like all other beings, will do what we need to augment our entangled webs of life—which are going to be what will make life more hospitable to said human communities and their more-than-human communities.

I would be interested in hearing what this sparks within you and also ask: is the preservation of existing relationships in the exact, current earth and land configurations that they exist in right now, what we should view as conservation work that is what's considered healthy for the planet? But then this current configuration even before climate change and mass extinction has been the result of rooted peoples co-transforming their landscapes with other beings in their networks. And otherwise, if non-change isn't the goal, is there a degree of change and human-contributed change that could be viewed as regenerative?

Rosetta Elkin: I'm picking up on what you call rootedness, and also what you just said, which was non-change. I mean, I don't think Indigenous practices were at all about non-change. In fact, they were extremely changeable, and setting fire to a grassland is a way to keep it tree-free and therefore easier to hunt. You can see your hunt. And so having these large pastures that were cleared to drive some ungulates into so it was easier to hunt… That's design, right? But it's design with the logic of the biome, and not against it.

There's a kind of understanding there, that I think you're calling rooted. I talk a little bit about landlessness in the book. And I'm inspired by Aldo Leopold's use of it, but also Vine Deloria Jr. He says, really, and I'm going to use the word Indian because it's in the quote. But he says that the real authority of Indigenous dispossession is in the making of Indian landlessness. The making of landlessness is actually the tactic—when you take not just the physical land away, as if you put a fence around it and you plant trees, you appeal to the federal government, you say, okay, this is mine now... but it's actually in breaking the relations that people have to their land, if you are landful, if I can say landful, meaning you know how to eat, how to thrive, how to find joy, how to recreate and really how to live even religiously with the land in partnership. That, of course, includes plants. It includes all living organisms. That's a little bit what I was trying to say about nature as a co-production.

I think many Indigenous cultures around the world understand their role as part of nature and not outside it. And really that making of landlessness is to break the spirit of a whole people who consider the land as kin and everything on it and everything in it. So the non-change and the rooted and the landlessness, it's altogether one dialogue, and we can't kind of plant our way out of it. These ideas that like, oh well we've done too much harm to this one area, or there's destruction here or strife, let's plant it with trees, and that will offset our guilt, our past, our history. It's too much of a one-liner, right? There's no way there isn't a second agenda behind that. And it masks too much not to pull back the curtain, so to speak.

So, I mean, I'm with you. I like what you're saying. And one of the reasons I turn to plants is because they connect us. We are an entirely plant-dependent species. There is no human, there's no dinosaur before the plants conditioned the planet for creatures to evolve. There's no human as common ancestors. There's no Darwin to prove common ancestors.

The respect for plant life has been lost in the making of landlessness. We have to call it out when that respect is so overtly broken, like in a billion tree program.

And that's I guess, where I start. That's where I start in hoping to have a more collaborative practice between species.

Kamea Chayne: It definitely calls for a lot more humility on our end, as we work with and care for plants who came and evolved long before we did.

You mentioned earlier how dry lands are less hospitable to human population growth, and I think I have a yes/and inquiry here. Maybe this also puts into question what hospitable means and refers to, but I think about how Indigenous peoples around the world and their cultures emerge from and are interwoven in the diverse landscapes across the globe—from wetlands to drylands to forests to coastal regions.

So perhaps this vision of afforestation and greening the planet as the definition of environmentalism isn’t so much about making places more hospitable to humans, but making them more familiar to particular groups and cultures of humans who never established nor cultivated relationships with other types of landscapes that require different ways of living, eating, and relating to each other and to community.

Because I can imagine land-based and indigenous peoples whose life and cultures and foodways depend on prairies and grasslands, or on arctic tundras, to not agree with the idea that greening their landscapes into tree-filled terrains means making them more hospitable—based on the unique, place-based sets of knowledges their peoples have accumulated and passed down.

Rosetta Elkin: I couldn't agree with you more. Tree planting is just another colonial practice.

You just said that greening an area that is inhospitable is making it comfortable or more hospitable to a certain group of people and unfamiliar to another group. So take the African project to green a wall from Dakar to Dijbouti. Why? Why do we need that project? [There are] chapters on it in my book, but really at the end of the day, it's the sub-Sahel. Wouldn't it be odd?

Wouldn't it be a very extreme form of geoengineering if our sub-Sahel was green? Who does it help? Whose interests are involved? This is environmental history and political ecology and colonialism all at once in a tree-planting project. And it's getting UN awards for “nature-based solutions.”

It seems odd to me. So I'm happy that it sounds like you agree that it's sort of curious, isn't it? Because you're claiming it when you do that. And you're claiming it as something that it isn't, which means that you would then express that a greener environment would be "better". Better than what? Better than how people are already living there?

The assumption that drylands are empty? It's the same as assuming that the 100th meridian was empty where Indigenous Americans lived. There was this assumption that there's nothing going on there. So it can be filled. It can also be filled with solar panels, by the way. It can be filled with whatever Western mentalities believe need to be superimposed in these "empty" places.

[Drylands are] not empty. They're neither empty of human life nor plant life, nor creature life. They're so rich, diverse, and full, in fact.

The scholar Diana K. Davis, she wrote this book called Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, and she's written about arid lands more broadly, and if anyone's interested in that, I just highly recommend you pick up her book. I cited her many times. I'm inspired by her work, but she has traced a lot of that to sort of early Rome—a lot of the sub-Sahel I'm speaking of, in particular the settlement of the sub-Sahel to the Roman invasions and the setting up of a kind of Western aesthetic there. History, power, knowledge, it all comes out in those books that she's written. It's the same sort of rehearsed practice. It's just not colonial settlement moving west; it's European invasion moving into Africa, and then the practices just seem to endure.

Kamea Chayne: You mentioned some things that the United Nations has been greenlighting. I recently wrote a piece on diversifying anthropocentricisms, and I remember reading something from the UN where they made the statement that drylands are associated with economic poverty and food insecurity, kind of implying that dry lands are the problem.

When I read that, I was more curious to challenge a lot of the other structural things that have been implemented that have prevented open migration and the commons. And the same sorts of small plot, intensive farming that maybe works in other types of terrains, but does not work in drylands because maybe these are places that historically have required communities to be able to openly migrate with more freedom. And of course, putting into question things like land privatization, land ownership, borders and power dynamics and access, and a whole host of other issues that I see as being the compounding factors, and not dry lands in and of itself as being what it is that causes food insecurity.

Rosetta Elkin: The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) really developed only in the mid-20th century, let's not forget. And that was after centuries of abuse of primarily drylands. And of course not only, but I think a lot of us living in humid biomes or boreal forests like I am anyways, you forget that over 40% of the planet is considered a dryland biome. It's easy to think of them as small by comparison to how much humidity there is. So the UN and especially the UNCCD, I go into the history a little bit in the book, but it's hinged on the term desertification.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification really is set up to solve the dryland problem as if drylands were a problem rather than a biome.

Of course, they link it to health issues and the interdependence between human health and access to resources. But really, most of the time, human health is suffering in dry lands because of abuses from non dryland environments and populations. So the term desertification is in itself quite political.

I prefer the term drought. It's very simple. You're either in a drought-stricken or drought-vulnerable environment. You're either waiting for drought or just coming out of drought. Indigenous Americans in Nebraska, broadly, not that it was called Nebraska, used to say that drought was like a whale that would rise up and you didn't know where it would take a breath, but it would pass. There are ways of understanding that drought came in, but drought also left, and you wanted to have enough foodstuffs and you would expect it, but it kind of moved and it almost moved underground like the entire grassland biome was an organism, like an ocean, and drought moved through it.

Now, drought is mostly created by overproduction, overconsumption, overgrazing, overpopulation, everything. Every time we top it, every time it goes over, it's no longer really perceived as a natural process of a biome, the same way a rainstorm might be. So it's problematized. And if it's a problem, then it needs a solution.

Desertification is a term that was coined by a French forester in 1949, and his name was André Aubréville. He used it to describe the humid biome. He was working in Cote d'Ivoire, which is humid, not dry, in our generalized terms here. So it's a rainforest. He used the term to describe what would happen if slash-and-burn forestry was repeated over and over, over a decade or two decades or some years. And what would happen is in this very humid biome, the ground would desertify, which would make it less profitable for the foresters. Because if you slash and burn and slash and burn, and you keep doing that, then you have an endless and easy supply to extract from. But if you couldn't keep extracting, then you have to change tactics.

But the French authorities were very smart, I suppose, they engineered their way out of that by using the term to refer to deserts. So by expressing dryland or drought-prone areas as desertified, they made a call for fixing it by planting trees, which allowed them to just grab more terrain, more area and territorialize further. They didn't have interest in deserts before, because as foresters, they didn't know how to have interest in deserts before. But they just started moving north and they started moving west and they started planting trees as a way to invest in the future under the rubric of desertification.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with that history. It's just part of our history as a human species.

What we might want to do is learn where the word desertification comes from and when it should be used and when it is ill-used, at least to move forward into a more hopeful, more informed, more generous future that I think we all want.

But we've got to shake some of these keywords that are problematic.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and words that so many have accepted and never questioned, so this is really important.

This conversation really hits deep for me because in the past year I really feel like I've been called to see the climate crisis as a symptom of our relational crisis—which has been the breakdown of place-based, rooted relationships and communities. Because the more severed those relationships are, and the more disassociated human communities and their impositions are from place, then the more water, energy, resource-intensive it becomes to maintain that community's various systems—food, infrastructure, and so on. So, your invitations to focus on the relationship aspect, rather than for example to reduce our ecological crises into decontextualized mathematical equations, really hits home for me.

But because the climate crisis has been so heavily centered on carbon emissions and sequestration, tree planting and greening drylands in general often only receive nods of approval and cheers of celebration. I remember in an interview a while ago on soil carbon sequestration, I'd asked my guest about her views on projects of afforestation in China, in places where desert ecosystems with biodiversities of their own right are being turned into lush, wetter green landscapes, and her take on it back then anyway was that given the disproportionate levels of deforestation and land desertification still going on, any form of greening and enriching soils and the land ought to be viewed positively.

I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this offsetting way of looking at afforestation, and how you've thought through this with the lens of climate change, or how you've challenged the idea of seeing them as wins purely because they technically will draw down more carbon compared to a desert ecosystem, and climate change seems to be the top issue that most people who are plugged into these conversations are really concerned about.

Rosetta Elkin: Well, it's true. We should all do what we can with the land under our feet. I take issue with trying to solve deforestation with afforestation. I think we should be very mindful. We need to stop deforestation in its tracks. Just in the Amazon alone, I tried to contextualize it for my students the other day, because they're in New York, so they understand the size of Central Park, so it's something like 500 Central Parks a day that we're losing in the Amazon. It hurts your head.

Why are we fighting deforestation with planting little trees in drylands? It's not a one-to-one relationship.

We've got to stop that abuse of the planet and of mature, deeply-rooted and engaged biomes that welcome a host of life, and understand the environmental impact of letting that go for our future, for our children, for their children. I mean, what kind of ancestor do you want to be, right? We're the ancestors that let that go.

I'd rather think of carbon offsetting as like, I mean, it's just not offsetting. We need a better word for it, but it's basically outsourcing. It's like, okay, I did something over here and I'll make up for it all the way over there. You're compensating for a loss in one area by trying to make a gain in a totally other area of the world.

Kamea Chayne: And deflection, too.

Rosetta Elkin: Right. So yeah, carbon deflection. Call it something that it actually is. It's much more accurate. And it's like saying, well, I'm going to rip up my backyard and concretize it, but I'm going to buy three trees for my neighbor. Really? That's not an equation. Nobody would buy that. And they know that ripping up your whole greenspace for three young trees is not going to do it. And that all of a sudden because you concretized your backyard, the bunnies will go somewhere else. The turkeys will go somewhere else. And the birds will go somewhere else. And all the critters will go somewhere else. And they're not all going to go to those three trees that you convinced your neighbor you could offset your footprint with. The repercussions are so vast and so wide.

I don't know why we're aiming for zero, or what a carbon assessment really means. These projects that show data with so much confidence, and it seems very outsized to the issue of environmental justice. I know having worked on land restoration projects how hard it is to restore land and how many years it takes, and that often it looks like a restoration project, but it doesn't function like one. So right away it will look like a salt marsh, but it won't function like a salt marsh for like fifty years.

Restoration isn't a hit-and-run kind of design typology. It's re-establishing relationships between organisms that don't currently have a relationship. And relationships take time…

which is the time that we don't have in deforestation. You're taking down time when you're taking down the Amazon.

Kamea Chayne: It's just very reductive to fixate on the chemistry of climate change. They're kind of like the symptoms of the deeper relational crises and the deeper stresses of the problem. So, for example, our cortisol levels typically show how stressed we might be, but there are ways to lower our cortisol levels without doing anything about alleviating the source of that stress. So simply lowering emissions or lowering or sequestering carbon is way too reductive, and we really have to dig deeper to, I believe, the relational aspect of it, which is what gets reflected in the symptom of this imbalance in atmospheric carbon.

And before we start to close off, I want to go into your more recent work, looking at retreats, which also calls for a deeper understanding of and focus on healing relationships. As you write: "Retreat is a catalyst because it unsettles, and thus begins a process of recovering broken relations—amending connections. To write about retreat is to defend the discomfort it inevitably raises, to use it to heal our relationship with other species, and the lands, waters, and soils that sustain us."

As an example, you critique the post Sandy hurricane and post superstorm responses and campaigns and plans to Build Back Better and to increase budgets going towards resilience planning—which all sounds good at the surface. But what troubles did you take with this idea of Build Back Better and its conceptions of resilience planning, kind of reflecting rigidity and non-change and a refusal to listen to the land, and what did you mean with your interest to not build back, but instead to cede, unsettle, and to retreat, as a way of actually renewing relationships to place?

Rosetta Elkin: Retreat is respect for the land that's left behind. And I think that's very important in relation to relocation, which some of your listeners might think, oh, relocation and retreat, that's kind of the same thing. I think it's really not the same thing. And that's one of the reasons I called the book Landscapes of Retreat, because relocation is object-oriented. You can relocate a church, but you can't relocate a congregation. A congregation has to come together and decide to retreat. Otherwise you treat human communities like objects when you just say, Well, you can just pick up and move over here.

Communities that decide to retreat on their own without help from the government, without major regulatory planning, don't get a lot of press, because there's no... well, there is always friction, but the friction isn't as overt because they go through a process where they recognize vulnerability in the land that they're living with, whether it's through a storm or earthquake or tsunami, and then they decide let's build elsewhere, and out of respect for what just happened here, rather than let's push back the risk and report our foundations right here. I guess that's a kind of simplistic way of trying to unpack it, but it really did come out of the post-Sandy planning, because to talk about retreat at that time was extremely unpopular and taboo even, and [there was] a kind of shock at the term.

So the book comes out of trying to collect cases of retreat in the world where people have moved in tandem with risk, with vulnerability, with land-based relations in a kind of understanding of what they're living with, rather than against it, I suppose, rather than building a sea wall, rather than building up higher, rather than blaming the government, rather than—the list is long. Or rather than advocating for a pure relocation, which is usually hard on communities' cohesiveness, like the ability for a community to stay together socially, spiritually.

The word resilience actually is very similar to that word desertification we were talking about. It's like this word that just sort of took over.

I might argue that retreat is a more resilient strategy. It's a stronger form of adaptation to recognize the risk you live with.

And I love that you keep saying symptom. This is reminding me of how I think of where our planet is in terms of its sickness. Our planet is sick and that's why we call it climate change. But that's one label. We know that the planet's kind of in an unhealthy state, and it feels like a lot of projects like tree planting or Build Back Better are using very singular solutions [to solve] systemic problems.

And when that happens in medicine, it’s an ill alignment. If you go to your doctor and you say, I'm sick, and then the doctor says, well, you have this. You kind of want to say, Is there a pill for that? Like, when am I going to get better? Can we solve this?

Some sicknesses can be solved with taking a certain treatment or a certain course of medication. But if you go to your doctor and they say you have heart disease. You can't take a pill for it. You can't take a shot. The cure, the so-called treatment is, you got to exercise more, you got to stress less, you got to get outside, you might want to change jobs, you have to lose weight, whatever it is. I don't know what the list is, but it's a list that changes behavior. And the only reason to do it is to live longer. You don't have to do any of those things. You could choose not to, and then you'll just live shorter.

That's the difference between being chronically sick and episodically sick, where it comes and it goes. So if you're chronically sick, you can't just throw a solution at it. And our planet is chronically sick. It is not a singular sickness that we can solve. It's got a chronic sickness. We have to treat it.

Like you're saying, there are these symptoms that come up and they should be cues where we learn to change our relationship with that symptom somehow.

Kamea Chayne: In mainstream discourses, there's a lot of language around fighting against climate change so as to be able to continue the status quo. And I think I'm more interested in reframing the response, not as fighting against it, but actually listening to climate change and what all of these symptoms are trying to tell us, in terms of how we should change in order to realign ourselves with our extended bodies of the planet.

We are coming to a close here. I think the common denominator between the two main themes we discussed today is the need to go beyond simplistic framings of what doing good means. Like planting trees sounds great, building back better sounds great. But what happens if we could take on a more relational lens to understanding healing—healing lands and healing communities?

As we wrap up here, I'd love for you to share any calls to action you might have and more offerings on what it could mean for people to center place-based relationships as we embark on our diverse pathways towards healing ourselves and our communities.

Rosetta Elkin: Well, I just think we need to get outside more. So I would say get outside, whatever it is you do. Start a practice that gets you outside. Go for the same walk every day. Learn the names of the trees on your streets. Figure out which berries are edible, which ones aren't. Stare at the sky at night, if that's what you're into. But we have to reconnect to the planet in pretty simple ways, to know or, to use your terms to listen to it. We have to be open to the listening to know what our planet is up to. And I think we're typically under a lot of layers of noise and concrete and instability, so much so that we're quite far away from the land itself, from the Earth itself and from its systems. Whenever I'm stuck, I just go outside.

~ musical intermission ~

Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?

Rosetta Elkin: Right now, I'm reading a book called Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition, and it is referenced by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her work on The Serviceberry, and the gift economy of the serviceberry as a plant that gives a lot. I don't have so much to say about it yet because humbly I'm only on page 70 and it's a long book. But I am enthralled, and I think it should be in wider circulation.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Rosetta Elkin: I garden. And I don't mean that in a horticultural manner or in a kind of leisure class way. I get outside and I try to communicate, collaborate and nurture the plants around me.

Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Rosetta Elkin: My students, and any student of any age anywhere, who decides that more knowledge is more engagement, and more engagement gives you more power. And we should all be students of life forever more. So when you decide to take that step and just engage with others in an intellectual generosity that we call education, then I'm inspired by that.

Kamea Chayne: Rosetta, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an honor to have you here and [it’s been] such an enriching and thought-provoking conversation, so I'm so grateful. For now what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?

Rosetta Elkin: Keep dreaming green. I love your title. It's fun, and I think we all need to love and have a little more fun. We had a very heavy conversation, but really, if we can love each other a little more, we can love plants a little more, we can love the land a little more, then I think we'll get there.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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