{"id":435,"date":"2020-06-02T16:55:18","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T15:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/?p=435"},"modified":"2020-06-03T09:23:32","modified_gmt":"2020-06-03T08:23:32","slug":"planting-and-stewardship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/2020\/06\/02\/planting-and-stewardship\/","title":{"rendered":"Planting, Stewardship and Value"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How do trees and tree planting fit into a sense of place and stewardship? Shane Finan<\/a> discusses how art can play a role in this in the second of his CRE guest posts.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo credit<\/em>: Shane Finan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Henry David Thoreau saw trees as essential\nfor healthy places: \u201cA village that has them not will not be found to work\nwell. It has a screw loose, an essential part is missing\u201d (Higgins, 2017 quoting; Thoreau, 1906). Thoreau felt the deep loss of the natural environment, and, from\nextensive observation, saw how the natural environment forms mutual\npartnerships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There has been a recent surge in popularity in the idea of tree-planting to \u2018re-green our planet\u2019. Botanist and chemist Diana Beresford Kroeger<\/a>, one of the early advocates of mass tree planting, has recently changed her argument slightly to emphasise the more urgent need to preserve the ancient forests that we have. This follows similar arguments, such as the backlash against<\/a> a project to plant one trillion trees<\/a>. Forty-six scientists put their name to a paper arguing that planting alone will not solve the current climate crisis (Veldman et al., 2019), and that unplanned planting, such as introduction of non-native species, lack of fire controls, etc., could be more detrimental than not planting at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Many people only see the value of the forest in what it provides in timber and fuel.
Photo credit<\/em>: Shane Finan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A detailed study on rainforest preservation\nhas found that indigenous communities are ideally suited to replanting efforts,\nand simultaneously finds that deforestation has more negative impact than\nreforestation has positive (Walker et al., 2020). It concludes that \u201cthe outlook for Amazon forests and their\ncontinued stewardship by [Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities] is tied to\nthe political and economic future of Brazil\u201d (p. 3023). Indigenous knowledge is shown to hold a value that is beyond\nquantification or economics: The ecologically conscious practices of the\nindigenous groups helps the forest to thrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the beginning of 2020, I have been working\nwith the Kielderhead\nWildwood Project<\/a> in Kielder, Northumberland, in anticipation of an art residency\nthere<\/a>. The project is a rewilding effort run by Northumberland Wildlife\nTrust, where members of the community are planting native trees in a large area\nof north England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kielder was described to me by one of the\nregular volunteer planters as \u201cthe remotest place in England\u201d. The village was\nbuilt to service the local forestry in the 1920s, but over time the forest was mostly\ncut for its economic value. As a result, the place has lost a large part of its\nidentity. This is something the wildwood project has the potential to restore,\nand even improve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asking local communities to be involved in the creation and maintenance of a forest has benefits. Aside from physically replanting a forest, it creates a sense of responsibility, identity and memory of place that connects the community and that place. Place-attachment is the concept of forming a close cultural, historical or social memory of a place, whereby people value a location and give it an identity that creates a relationship between them and the place. In a recent example from China, the role of place-attachment is seen to be crucial for grass-roots forestry management: \u201cAt the policy level, given that place attachment is an important predictor of pro-environmental behaviour towards heritage forests, efforts should be devoted towards the promotion and articulation of the cultural and historical values of heritage forests\u201d (Cheung & Hui, 2018, p. 44).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
The yew cloister in Gormanstown, Ireland, is an example of an artistic and cultural creation of place: The garden was planted in the early 19th Century as a concessionary gift from one of the Preston family, the owners of the estate, who forbade his daughter to become a nun.
Photo credit<\/em>: Shane Finan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By providing value to place, local\nresidents gain a connection through social, historical and cultural memory. Folk\nmusic, stories, sculpture, events, artistic interventions, and the process of\nengaging people in place are all enablers of cultural association, creating a\nrelationship between people and places. Art groups like Transition<\/a><\/em>\nand Grizedale Arts<\/a><\/em> promote this\nsense of place and stewardship by encouraging communities to grow, care for and\nmaintain their places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art is valuable in its ability to create\nconnections, and even more so in its creation of a different type of value. Returning\nto Thoreau, he argued that<\/a> trees\nshould not be cut unless necessary: \u201cEvery tree is better alive than dead\u2026and\nhe who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it\u201d. This type of value in the life of a tree is a value for the whole\nforest. Artists create this value by showing the individual as the universal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stewardship is about what we value, and why. A steward needs to value each organism, not just the number behind it. The value is not in one trillion trees, or in the 39,000 that the wildwood project hopes to plant, but on the single one that connects the forest together. If one person takes stewardship for that one tree, the forest will survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cheung, L. T., & Hui, D. L. (2018). Influence of\nresidents\u2019 place attachment on heritage forest conservation awareness in a\nperi-urban area of Guangzhou, China. Urban\nForestry & Urban Greening, 33<\/em>, 37-45. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Higgins, R. (2017). Thoreau and the Language of Trees<\/em>: Univ of California Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thoreau, H. D. (1906). Excursions and poems<\/em> (Vol. 5): Houghton, Mifflin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Veldman, J. W., Aleman, J. C., Alvarado, S.\nT., Anderson, T. M., Archibald, S., Bond, W. J., . . . Zaloumis, N. P. (2019).\nComment on \u201cThe global tree restoration potential\u201d. Science, 366<\/em>(6463), eaay7976. doi:10.1126\/science.aay7976<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walker, W. S., Gorelik, S. R., Baccini, A.,\nAragon-Osejo, J. L., Josse, C., Meyer, C., . . . Schwartzman, S. (2020). The\nrole of forest conversion, degradation, and disturbance in the carbon dynamics\nof Amazon indigenous territories and protected areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117<\/em>(6), 3015-3025.\ndoi:10.1073\/pnas.1913321117<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How do trees and tree planting fit into a sense of place and stewardship? Shane Finan discusses how art can play a role in this in the second of his CRE guest posts. Henry David Thoreau saw trees as essential … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7295,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7295"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":444,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/cre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}