Trees Are Shape Shifters

Abstract

This book explores the Anthropocene predicament through an investigation of landscape history and contemporary climate change politics in Italy. Moving from details of encounters with trees and terracing systems in the Tuscan Apennines, it explores our capacity to project our imaginations from details of plant and landscape form in order to tell larger-scale histories of plant disease, fire, and agrarian change. The morphologies of cultivated chestnut trees and of landscapes bring the past into the present, they bear witness to disasters, and they bring humans into projects of long-term care for trees, terracing systems, hillsides, and drainage systems. Around the world, scientists, activists, and policymakers have tried to persuade ordinary people of the urgency of climate change. Such approaches assume that ordinary people do not have their own ideas about climate and that a shared understanding of climate is necessary for effective climate change policies. Climate change policy in Italy encounters popular knowledge and concern about landscape stability rather than ignorance about climate. Vernacular models of climate/landscape/plant assemblages have inspired largely invisible forms of landscape care, and concerns about air pollution have transformed biomass energy policies in Italy. Attention to tree and landscape form can allow historians and anthropologists to give regional accounts of global environmental change that complement the limitations of global climate change science and policy.