The Political Life of Trees
PROJECT IS COMPLETED
Project period: 2014-2017
A Comparative Investigation of the Political Entanglement of Humans and Trees among Indigenous People and Radical Environmental Activists.
Conflict over forests is not a new thing, but over the past 10 years forests and trees have become the objects of renewed political interest. In the international climate negotiations, forests were represented as important carbon sinks, and their conservation as key to mitigating global climate change. At the same time, escalating conflicts around extractive industries such as logging and oil exploitation and an upsurge in environmental and climate activism, in different ways point to the multifaceted political life of trees.
The project aimed to investigate human interaction with trees in order to describe and theorize the forms of politics and political potentiality emerging from this interaction. The focus wass on political activism and escalating conflicts, and combined this with a theoretical inquiry into the entanglement of material objects and human projects. Fieldwork was undertaken in the Ecuadorian Amazon and among radical environmental activists. My comparative engagement with the political life of trees aimed to contribute to the current debate on comparative methodology within anthropology by exploring how trees, as scales of change in the two contexts, can theorize each other. This was supplemented with data already generated during the climate negotiations.
Stine Krøijer was PI on the project.
Stine Krøijer
Department of Anthropology
Mail: stine.kroijer@anthro.ku.dk
Phone: +45 35 32 15 81
The project was funded by:
The project is funded by The Danish Research Council/Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation (FKK).
Project: The Political Life of Trees
Principal investigator: Stine Krøijer
Start: 2014
End: 2017