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Paper short abstract

The element of wood is narrativized as ancient by those who encounter very large trees, imagined as part of a gigantic and inhuman landscape, integrating them into a geological sublime shared by Romantic poets as well as scientists and whetting extractivist and commercial appetites.

Paper long abstract

While forests in Europe are natural-cultural environments, mixing recreational and economic usages, many of their meanings emerge from narratives of them as elemental, i.e. as a substance foundational for human existence. Trees produce wood (in some Asian traditions wood is actually named as one of the five elements), a material used for fuel, buildings, and everyday objects that is indispensable as an (in some ways anthropogenic) element. Thus, forests and trees become deeply entangled with human life as well as with the other elements: earth, wind, water, and fire.

This presentation will focus on narratives shared by foresters, botanists, and travelers who encounter old and often very large trees. Such elemental beings as the ‘1000-year oak’ in Germany or the giant redwoods of California are imagined as part of a ‘gigantic’ landscape, integrating them into a rockier ‘geological sublime’ shared by Romantic poets as well as scientists. The ancient, enormous tree, categorized by foresters as a ‘natural monument’ – a deliberately oxymoronic, Humboldtian term – bridges human and geological time by representing a primordial, ‘inhuman’ age in which megafauna wandered among megaflora. At the same time, the trees represent an enormous elemental, woody resource whetting the appetites of extraction and commercialization. The paper will connect with Pamela Klassen’s on Elemental Religion by looking at the cosmologies in which these endeavors are embedded, reflected in narratives which Naveeda Khan describes as experiments in “commensurating humans to the geological”, including the reality of our species as a geophysical force on the planet.