In an effort to meaningfully post my way through my PhD, I will be sharing a series of critical response essays to this blog. The first three installments come from a directed readings organized by myself and my colleague Adriana DiSilvestro, along with Dillon Mahmoudi and Dave Lansing. We are meeting every two weeks during the Fall ’22 semester and discussing selected monographs and essays. The themes are broadly capitalism, life, and infrastructure.
There are many reasons a critical geographer may look askance at something like the Great Green Wall; because it’s a neoliberal development scheme that privatizes outright or at least removes lands from the commons in the name of sustainability and “development”. However, it was interesting to live in the mind of a landscape architect who looks at these projects askance for how they reproduce botanic logics. The genealogy here of contemporary afforestation measures that goes back to Theophrastus and Aristotle and highlights paths not taken by orthodox …plant knowledge workers? — such as plant morphology or John Weaver’s fascinating subterranean root lab. I am used to studies that start in the early modern period. Through Plant Life, I enjoyed learning about how philosophical debates about being, wholeness and essence from the second century BC still reverberate today. These “subterranean”, horticultural strains of plant knowledge have persisted, Elkin shows, even though we ultimately are living in the botanist’s world.
I was reminded often of Keller Easterling’s notion of spatial software. These are easily reproduced spatial zones that could be at the scale of a warehouse or of an entire city, with “copy+paste” forms of governance and a similarly cookie-cutter approach to the built environment. I kept thinking, particularly with the Great Green Wall project and about “trees” as a catch-all solution generally, how the “units” of afforestation, together with the underlying logics of parts etc. function also as a form of spatial software. The question isn’t should we plant this, or even where; instead, it’s simply how many trees do we need to plant in relation to the size of the supposed problem? In other words, how big or small do we need to scale this woody software? Greening, afforestation, they’re able to scale (supposedly) just like software (supposedly) platforms can. I am reminded of back-end platforms for transit agencies, many of which claim to be fit for systems as large and as complex as NYC or as small and simple as Tulsa, OK. But actually in the case of the Great Green Wall, these are spatial vaporware – they don’t exist, they’re served to drum up hype; they’re welfare for consultancies. Why do these projects persist? Are they more money laundering for petrodollars? Are they purely about social engineering and enclosure, another way of proletarianizing pastoralists and sending them to cities to work? It is well established how forestry (like in the case of the US and the dust bowl) has a nationalist inflection but what is the role in neoliberalism exactly? Maybe a dumb question.
I think for critical geographers concerned with enclosure, we could learn from how the varied assemblage of state and non-governmental actors mutate the notion of productivity when they enclose, say, forested areas of Burkina Faso because they’re moisture holding. How do they bend and mutate these capitalist logics and then coat it with a green or ecological veneer?
I think the spatial forms of these efforts are interesting as well. The narrow band of trees across the Sahel proposed in the Great Green Wall project had me thinking of Neom, the linear city in the Saudi desert. What are some other spatial forms that are “memed” in these ridiculous “green” “smart” “eco-” futures?
This also stirred up some methodological questions for me and my interest in the policy mobilities realm. Just general stuff like, why do we study these goofy documents and conferences and thought leaders, and what questions do we need to ask them to generate something as empirically thick as Elkins’ book?
Turnstile Jumper 