Cities of Trees: Reforesting the Birthplace of Industrial Capitalism

FAIN: FT-291553-23

Maron Estelle Greenleaf
Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH 03755-1808)

Ethnographic fieldwork toward a study of a large, contemporary reforestation project in North England.

This project is an ethnographic and historical study of an ongoing large-scale, government-sponsored tree planting project in the North of England. By 2032, the region—the highly deforested and heavily urbanized birthplace of industrial capitalism—will host 50 million new trees. Called the Northern Forest, this new landscape is meant to both address climate change and improve human lives and livelihoods in a deindustrializing region. Drawing from and contributing to the humanistic social sciences and the environmental humanities, this project asks how planted trees become a forest—using this seemingly simple question to explore issues of environmental care, repair, imagination, and justice. The project also asks how the history of land use shapes the envisioned forest of the future. In so doing, it explores how human-environment relations are enlisted in efforts to imagine and practice living a good life as the climate changes in former industrial centers like the North of England.