Powerful, metamorphic, mediative : trees, climate change and the intricate geographies of objects / Florian Weisser

Abstract

This paper unpacks the intricate geographies of trees in the current fight against climate change. Through a multi-sited ethnography of forestry programming in Uganda, I explore how trees are entangled in different worlds ranging from global donor paradigms and scientific realisms of climate change to vernacular cosmologies and life worlds. Denaturalising trees as taken-forgranted elements in current environmental governance, I trace trees’ various reincarnations the praxis of development projects, show how they matter to Ugandan post-colonial politics and nation building and examine how they link up otherwise different rationalities. In doing so, I advance the current debate on object-oriented geographies. By marrying object-oriented philosophies and their adoption in geography with post-ANT writings, I present three ways in which objects are related to the world: powerful, metamorphic and mediative. This approach does not put ANT-inspired thinking at odds with ‘pure’ object-oriented philosophy but opens up space for future geographical inquiry. To do so, however, I argue that we need to be more precise with regard to what kinds of objects we actually envisage.