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Short abstract:

By outlining the practices and processes of tree planting in northwestern Canada, this paper adds trees and wood to elemental and infrastructural discourses around contemporary environmental philosophy and politics.

Long abstract:

Though “wood” is – in Greek (hyle) and Latin (materia) – related to “matter” itself it has been left out of recent accounts of elements that draw on these traditions (Pinkus, Peters). Furuhata issues a corrective in asking for attention to non-Western elemental traditions, while others have called for a “xylomedia” history (Ruiz & Kaminska). Counter these more essentialist, irreducible, or even “relational” elements (Starosielski), trees and wood point to the mutability at the heart of matter—“the passive principle ready for the form” (Evelyn). But encountering, accessing, extracting, transporting, transforming, and maintaining this element requires extensive infrastructures responsible for lasting representations of and changes to environments.

While these infrastructures facilitate the expansion of capitalism and settler colonialism through their interventions in the lives of plants, they can also have critical, life-giving qualities (Kinder, Barney, Cowen, Berlant). Thinking about elements and infrastructures with trees and wood illuminates contemporary debates surrounding environmentalism and politics through the category of ‘life.’ I will consider these questions through the processes and practices of tree planting in northwestern Canada. Tracing how these various infrastructures – nurseries, boxes, ex-military helicopters, caches, trucks, bags, shovels, hands, etc. – function to make and grow ‘life’ reveals how they also define and distribute ‘life.’ With elements like carbon – the building block of life on earth – and infrastructures like logging roads, we can think through our relation to trees and wood, their place as a renewable and sustainable resource, and how we might organize environmental political action.