Forests as Sentient Societies

While Indigenous peoples have long recognised forests as sentient and caring societies, western sciences have only acknowledged that trees communicate, learn and care for one another in recent years. These different ways of coming to know and engage with forests as sentient societies are further complicated by the introduction of automated decision-making into forest ecosystems, raising critical new questions about the confluence of animal, vegetal, fungal and digital life.

Seeded through the Local Alternatives platform, this project considers these emerging intersections of forest sentience through a place-based, Critical Forest Studies approach. The project forms part of an ongoing research residency and participatory arts practice located along the banks of Birrarung, a river in Naarm (Melbourne) on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation. Our recent work focuses on three critical examples located along this stretch of the river:

- an immersive theatre production titled “Wood Wide Web,” which used a combination of analogue and digital technologies to simulate subterranean rhizo-mycelial forest communications with young children;

- the Melbourne Urban Forest data set, a digital platform designed to enable urban citizens to map and interact with over 70,000 individual trees across the city; and

- City of Melbourne’s Greenline Implementation master plan, which looks to revitalise cultural and vegetal life along the northern bank of Birrarung over the next five years.

Our analysis of these examples puts western process philosophies into conversation with Indigenous knowledges of more-than-human relation and multispecies kinship, building on a series of publications focusing on critical forest studies along Birrarung (Rousell & Tran, 2024; Rousell, 2023; Rousell & Penaloza-Caicedo, 2022). We argue that the current wave of public excitement about the western scientific “discovery” of forest intelligences risks projecting settler colonial images of learning, communication, familial structure and futurity onto nonhuman societies. Resisting the common reduction of forest communication to either cybernetic or romanticised abstractions, we further question the methods by which different publics have come to revalue forests as sentient and caring communities.

What are the pedagogical consequences of coming to understand forest communities through positivist science and technology, rather than through the immanent, relational and pluralist ontologies of Indigenous philosophies and sciences as living practices?

Exploring the contours of this question leads to a series of propositions for an ethic and pedagogy of immanent care that engages respectfully with Indigenous knowledges, as they have been generously shared with the wider public along Birrarung Marr.

References:
Rousell, D., & Tran, J. (2024). Thinking with Forests as Sentient Societies: Towards a Pedagogy and Ethic of Immanent Care. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 40(2), 258-275.

Rousell, D., & Peñaloza-Caicedo, A. (2022). Listening for futures along Birrarung Marr: Speculative immersive experience in environmental education. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 38(3-4), 431-450.

Rousell, D. (2023). Weaving the pluriverse: Childhood encounters with the underground worlds of Birrarung Marr. Children's Geographies, 1-17.