I am a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University, having completed a MA in Anthropology also at McGill and a BA in Anthropology and Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Toronto. At CEH, I will working on a part of my dissertation that considers representations of talking trees in contemporary environmental science, philosophy, and politics.

My research more broadly explores how forests and trees appear in responses to climate change. I organize these responses via material and symbolic “communications” with the environment, and via the categories of planting trees and talking trees. Telling a history of industrial reforestation requires an engagement with the dispossessions of both settler colonialism and capitalism, which I ground in Marx’s early Debates on the Law of the Theft of Wood and the work of Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis. Also centred in Canada, I have conducted an ethnography of the contemporary infrastructures and labours of tree planting and those of climate scientists and geographers studying potential negative carbon emissions from reforestation. Turning to talking trees, my dissertation looks at the work of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard and its uptake in popular culture, historicizing it in the settler and climate anxieties of a tradition of Canadian women writing from and about the forest and within anxieties around communication itself. Finally, my research considers a mid-19^th century moment when two men simultaneously invented the means by which to make paper from wood to focus on the material and transformations that underlie wider relations between trees, communications, and language.

Overall, my work takes up “environmental communication” to challenge and improve our responses to climate change. If we plant trees to deal with the carbon in our environments, we have to do so in ways that consider the dispossessions of settler capitalist histories of reforestation, and if we conceive of trees as talking to alter our relations to the environment or other humans, we have to acknowledge what anxieties and politics that participates in.