Concerns about climate change, contamination, and biodiversity loss have placed forests at the forefront of environmental discussions and negotiations at global and national levels. Forest conflicts are on the rise (Nousiainen and Mola-Yudego, 2022) and these tensions are informing discussions on what societies want from their relationship with forests. These current debates about uncertain (forest) futures (Chakrabarty, 2009), cannot be separated from the historical connection between the nation/state, nationalism, and nature. Not only is the birth of scientific forestry itself connected to the development of the modern state (Scott, 1998), but contemporary forest interventions are often bound to state-making. For example, public tree-planting is still today an act that displays environmental concerns as much as an attempt to construct communal bonds and identities (cfr. Radkau, 2008), and carbon sequestration through forest management is likewise often entwined with the national imagination (Baldwin, 2009). As the radical examples of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy teach us (Lekhan, 2004; Armiero et al., 2022), managing the physical environment – and forests in particular – has been utilized to manipulate collective memory, as specific arboreal landscapes are identified as belonging to the (history of the) whole nation regardless of the political intentions behind their formation (cfr Shama, 1995). In this way, ecological communities of trees, as complex multispecies assemblages, can be subsumed within efforts to exploit, control and impose order on state territories.
We invite papers that critically explore the relationship between forests, political will and collective identity, and forest growth, transformation, and nationalism across the Global North. This volume aims to build on existing scholarship that analyses the connection between the nation state and forestry to better understand the entanglement between a resurgence of nationalism in Europe, Canada, and the US, and recent efforts to rethink forest affordances and futures. Our focus on the Global North is meant to encourage both epistemological approaches to the development of forestry as a scientific discipline within specific social, cultural, and political settings, and explorations of shared histories of forest management that imposed strong ideas of forest interventions and tree planting as “national projects.” We thus welcome both (1) historical cases and (2) contributions discussing today’s lived reality from across the social sciences and humanities (including but not limited to History, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, etc.) as well as more interdisciplinary pieces under the umbrella of the Environmental Humanities.
The deadline for the submission is on the 30th of November. Please, send an abstract of max. 300 words and CV of max 4 pages to the editors at: jodie.asselin@uleth.ca, db307@st-andrews.ac.uk and agata.konczal@wur.nl.
The chapters invited to the edited volume will be selected by the 1st of February 2025.
We expect the submission of the completed chapters by the 1st of August 2025.
Foreseen publication date of the edited volume: 2026
Volume editors:
- Jodie Asselin (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Lethbridge University)
- Damiano Benvegnù (Reader in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, University of St Andrews)
- Agata Konczal (Assistant Professor with Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, Wageningen University)
Armiero, M.; Biasillo, R.; & Harderberg, W. 2022. Mussolini’s Nature. An Environmental History of Italian Fascism. MIT Press.
Baldwin, A. 2009. Carbon Nullius and Racial Rule: Race, Nature and the Cultural Politics of Forest Carbon in Canada. Antipode. 41(2), 231-255.
Chakrabarty, D. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry. 35(2), 197-222.
Lekan, T. 2004. Imagining the Nation in Nature. Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945. Harvard UP.
Nousiainen, D., & Mola-Yudego, B. 2022. Characteristics and Emerging Patterns of Forest Conflicts in Europe-What Can they tell us? Forest Policy and Economics. 136, 102671.
Radkau, J. 2008. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment. Cambridge University Press
Schama, S. 1995. Landscape and Memory. Harper.
Scott, J.C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. Yale University Press.
Image: Wikimedia Commons. Universidad Complutense, Campus de la Ciudad Universitaria de Madrid