For this CEH TALK, we are excited to host Malcolm Sanger. Malcolm is a visiting PhD student from McGill University, currently working on his dissertation which explores how forests and trees figure in responses to climate change.

You can learn more about Malcolm and his dissertation research here.

The event is free and open to everyone to attend. Coffee and tea will be provided.

Abstract
How many trees will save the world? This paper reflects on ethnographic research on the counting of trees done by tree planters and the counting of carbon done by climate scientists in western Canada. Reflecting on the everyday intimacies, bodily techniques, and affective ambivalences this “Anthropocene labour” entails, I elaborate the political economy of reforestation via its piecework. Charting how physicists and geographers interact with earth system climate models to calculate how different reforestation scenarios impact quantities of carbon in the atmosphere, I consider translations made between carbon, trees, and land. These quantifications organize the subsumption of labour and nature towards visions of geoengineering and green (settler) capitalism, and yet numbers are also related to touch (McLuhan), Indigenous land claims (via, for example, Culturally Modified Trees), anti-capitalist science (Liboiron), and participate in the dialectical relation between quantity and quality (Engels) (as in how many trees will save the world). Negotiating between, and maybe inverting, the utopic romanticism of Canadian tree planting and the dystopic dispossessions of carbon management, I draw on environmental anthropology, Marxist geography, STS, and media theory to understand these practices of counting across scales as mediations of a co-constitutive labour and nature.