A Tree is a reader on vegetal agency, plant knowledge and the interaction between plants and people, with a specific focus on trees. Its aim is to nurture and encourage dialogues and to share inspiration on exercising arboreal kinship by taking the time to think about trees differently through imagination, art, music, storytelling, poetry and images.
Like all plants, trees make the world. They literally create soil, shape landscapes and affect the climate. They produce oxygen. They provide us with fuel, food, building materials and shelter, and form ecologies where a myriad of species come together to enter into various symbiotic partnerships. Trees are wonderful to think with, and humans have been doing so – through meditation, storytelling and as partners in problem-solving – probably for as long as they have walked the earth. Trees are also time tellers, rather than following industrial time, clock time, or any time defined by human activity, trees relate to their own experience of time.
The contributions in A Tree inspire us to move beyond large systems of oppression and towards exorcising anthropocentrism, capitalism, individualism, heteronormativity and coloniality by learning from and with tree time.
