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Paper short abstract

Folk stories are rife with narratives of the regenerative powers of trees. So too are IPCC carbon capture narratives. The Anthropocene has proven these narratives to be increasingly naïve, if not detrimental, to facing the necessary challenges of climate apocalypse.

Paper long abstract

The idea that the trees can save us, that is, provide a sound means of carbon capture and storage (on a geoengineering scale) is an alluring promise that resonates among popular audiences and is consistently included as one tool in various global warming mitigation models (i.e., the IPCC). The promise of reforestation is further bolstered by cultural narratives: Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees (1953); the American myth of Johnny Appleseed; the Norse myth of Yggdrasil, the World Tree; and worldwide indigenous traditions harkening back to animist belief systems. At Arizona State University, Professor Klaus Lackner is actively engineering his “mechanical tree”, a metal contraption for filtering CO2 out of the air. I argue that the reality is, by contrast, dark. Lackner’s engineering efforts reveal a perverse technophilic geoengineering ethos. In fact, the promise of engineered reforestation is what Lauren Berlant (Chicago) calls “cruel optimism,” or what Naomi Oreskes (Harvard) calls “Human Adaptive Optimism”—the belief in the power of human ingenuity to save us with some just-in-time technology that does not exist. These narratives of reforestation have lulled us into a false sense of comfort, belying the reality of how limited reforestation really is as a tool for carbon capture, deceiving us into thinking that the solutions to our problems are so simple: plant trees! Plant lots of trees! The trees, however, have promised nothing. Ultimately, this paper turns to Richard Powers’ Overstory as a sobering narrative corrective of our apocalyptic realities, in contrast to our narcissistic carbon confabulations.