Presentation short abstract

EVERY TREE gathers postcard stories about trees, showing relational values of joy, serenity, and grief. It maps how emotions shape human-tree relations, revealing inequalities in access, safety, belonging. It argues emotional political ecology strengthens urban forestry beyond 'nature as therapy'.

Presentation long abstract

Urban greening is often justified through simplified wellbeing narratives that focus on 'the self' (trees reduce stress; nature heals). Using Every Tree Tells a Story (EVERY TREE), a participatory citizen science project in Glasgow based on using artist-designed postcards, this study takes emotions seriously as political: they draw attention to, and organise attachments, to place; shape claims-making; and illuminate social-spatial inequalities.

We analyse, curate and present postcard narratives and drawings from an emotional political ecology perspective, attending to how participants describe joy, calm, wonder, fear, anger, and grief in relation to specific trees and treescapes. Rather than treating emotions as individual mental states, we read them as relational and situated: tied to life-course events, family memories, migration, loss, more-than-human perspectives, and everyday practices of care. We also track how emotions cluster around socio-spatial conditions, access to safe greenspace, housing precarity, street maintenance regimes, and experiences of exclusion.

Methodologically, EVERY TREE reflects on the possibilities of arts-based citizen science (inviting vulnerability, capturing non-instrumental values, enabling intergenerational participation, engendering imaginaries of place) and what it can obscure (silences, self-selection, translation into policy categories). We argue that centring emotion can shift urban forestry from “trees for wellbeing” toward “trees for just and caring futures”, where governance is accountable to lived feelings and the more-than-human relations they express.