The Place of Trees and Trees in Their Place

Abstract

Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002, xii + 252 pages (paper).Reviewer: Wayne Fife Memorial University of NewfoundlandI originally encountered this as part of a reading group at Memorial University. I took extensive notes on it before we met and what follows is to be taken as my own opinion, but that opinion has inevitably been influenced by the lively discussion that this work engendered among our group. Reaction to the ranged from not liking it very much at all to deciding that it usefully considered a number of issues related to human and non-human agency, questions about re-conceptualizing and why human beings have such an attachment to place. One thing that we discovered in our discussion was that the differences in our perceptions of the were partially related to why each of us was reading it. Those who read it more as just another book and compared it to other theoretical works concerning poststructuralism, network theory, and/or political ecology tended to be least satisfied with it; while those who read it as a work that pertained more directly to research problems that they were currently engaging with tended to feel that they gained far more from it. As I am currently involved in research associated with national parks and other issues relating to nature tourism, I was the member of the group who most found Tree Cultures to be useful, as it helped me think through a number of important issues related to political ecology in general and national parks in particular (although national parks are not part of the book's overt agenda). I would, therefore, recommend this primarily to researchers struggling first hand with issues involving relationships between and the non-human world, especially those that revolve around organic entities such as trees or other non-conscious beings.Tree Cultures can be divided into two main parts. Part 1 is entitled Placing in Cultural Theory and Part 2 Trees in their Place. In the second part, four case studies from England (involving an orchard, a cemetery, a heritage trail, and a town square) are used to illustrate how some of the concepts discussed in Part 1 can be put into practice in actual research situations.So many concepts are discussed in Part 1 that only a few of them can be considered here. Primarily, the authors are interested in the issue of non-human agency and whether other organic and non-organic entities can be considered to have agency in the world. Their clear answer to this question is yes. Nature 'pushes back' and injects its own materiality and dynamism into what [David] Harvey terms 'socio-ecological processes' (p. 30). In explaining why and how they have arrived at this answer, Jones and Cloke are careful to steer away from anthropomorphic romanticism or suggestions that trees, or other similar elements of nature, are just like humans in their agency. Instead they make the case that the key feature of intentionality in human agency needs to be replaced with the notion of purposefulness in the case of non-human agency. Purposefulness in relation to trees, for example, has to do with fulfillment of their embodied tendencies to grow in certain ways and to reproduce (p. 7). As an illustration of this principle, in a case study chapter on Arnos Vale Cemetery (a Victorian cemetery in Bristol), they show that a variety of tree species that were originally planted as an adjunct to the human enjoyment of the cemetery (which was used extensively for walking) became wild over time and self-seeded new trees to such an extent that by the contemporary period thousands of gravesites had been destroyed or altered by trees and the overall character of the cemetery irrevocably changed. This leads the authors to state: The agency of trees in Arnos Vale has clearly been an active co-constituent in the changing nature and contested cultures of the place (p. 152).One of the points Jones and Cloke make is that such non-human entities as trees have been largely overlooked when we consider agency because of the limited notions we normally apply to both scale and time when considering the effects of agents. …