‘The Republic of Arborea’: trees and the perfect society

Abstract

This essay explores the persistence of trees or forests as a utopian locus of liberty and individual authenticity, with reference to two texts, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees and Sam Taylor’s The Republic of Trees. Both texts have some commons themes, such as the adolescents’ escape from authority by retreating to the forest. The young revolutionaries in each text are most at home with/in trees; both also engage explicitly with Rousseau’s revolutionary idealism. Calvino’s fable, set in the eighteenth century, recounts the tale of a young aristocrat, Cosimo, who at age 12, rebels against his family and renounces forever any actual contact with the earth. Cosimo’s younger brother, the narrator, ends the novel with the grim acknowledgement of the changes about to be wrought in the new century, the nineteenth, where trees themselves ‘seem almost to have no right here’, ‘swept away by this frenzy for the ax’, and where ‘old’ and ‘natural’ indigenous trees are displaced by imports from ‘Africa, Australia and the Americas, the Indies’ (217). The Republic of Trees is also about a young rebel who, with his companions, flees from authority and takes up residence in the forest, but the context is the twenty-first century. The four friends who have run away to live in the woods take A History of the French Revolution and Rousseau’s The Social Contract to aid them, but in a tale that is also reminiscent of The Lord of the Flies, the consequences are disastrous. The article discusses the politics of utopia and dystopia, in both an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment context, including the way that these ideologies impacted on forests and on bio-relations. Finally, the article proposes that the declaration of the rights of trees and all nature, as outlined in Cosimo’s ‘dead letter’ treatise, may now have found its viability in a new forest locus and political context: Ecuador.