People-Tree Entanglements: Pine in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Reflecting from the perspectives of a plant scientist, an Indigenous Māori scholar, a Māori tōhunga (spiritual leader), and an arts researcher, we engage with the concept of the "plantationocene" (Mitman 5). Our focus is to reclaim and communicate our different cultural narratives of people and trees, particularly focusing on Pinus radiata D. Don , introduced for commercial forestry in Aotearoa New Zealand. Like many large trees in the era of the plantationocene, pine plays a role in local and global carbon and water cycles, as well as in multiple and diverse cultural narratives. Drawing on Karen Barad's concept of entanglement, we seek to reveal our people-pine entanglements. In this paper, we utilize the methodologies of interviewing, observation, and the tools of narrative inquiry, as well as quantitative scientific techniques, to write back and forwards between personal experiences and the understandings of our wider social-cultural context in Aotearoa New Zealand. This writing back and forth mirrors the movement back and forth between our local experience at home in the Global South and the global theorizing of the plantationocene. We identify the complexity of people-tree entanglements, problematizing a simplistic application of the plantationocene in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand.