Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation

"In Plant Life, the misadventures of tree planting campaigns around the world expose a fundamental failure to understand things that are alive. Human cultivation—a blunt apparatus often focused only on an above-ground outcropping—usually manages to kill plants. Rosetta S. Elkin’s lush and stringent narratives travel instead within the roots and ramifying relationships that huge forests and grasslands generate when they are simply allowed to grow—a live rhizosphere in the crust of the earth."—Keller Easterling, Yale University "With climate change comes a recognition that we are part of a global landscape and that we need to think at this scale. However, even as we need to ‘think global, act local,’ what Rosetta S. Elkin shows in her in her deep and multi-faceted reading of afforestation projects is that in doing so we must really ‘think local, act global.’"—Julian Raxworthy, University of Canberra "Tightly argued and rigorously researched, Plant Life draws on history, geography, political ecology, botany, landscape ecology, and climate science to present a powerful critique of afforestation. "—Landscape Architecture Magazine "Delving into philosophical treatises, colonial archives, and botanical manuals that span such themes as soil science, plant morphology, and taxonomy, Elkin convincingly argues that planting is a social—not ecological—act that radically reshapes landscapes based on models of standardization and replicability."—H-Net Reviews