A Review of Shaul Cohen’s Planting Nature: Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America

By Adam R.

 I suspect most of you reading this have planted a tree.  Likewise, I suspect most considered it a relatively uncomplicated act of good stewardship or community beautification at the time.  In Planting Nature: Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship, Shaul Cohen contests this widely held assumption.  In this book, he critically examines the discourse surrounding tree planting with a focus on three sectors: non-profit organizations, the government, and the timber industry. 

Cohen outlines how these actors collaborate in crafting and disseminating the narrative of tree planting as a civic act of environmental stewardship. Presumably, this act empowers the individual with the ability make a substantial and often quantifiable contribution to combating multiple environmental ills.  He positions this collaboration within the framework of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, which poses that powerful institutions maintain the self-serving status quo by educating and recruiting individuals into activities and ideologies which run counter to their own self-interest.  Concerned with widespread environmental degradation, Cohen sees the portrayal of tree planting as a straightforward, easily accessible, and well-funded panacea as a distraction from the dramatic structural changes necessary. To be clear, Cohen is careful to articulate that he not anti-tree planting per se, but is suspect of its role in conservation:

 It is not that tree planting is harmful to the environment, but that tree planting provides a proxy.  The act substitutes cosmetic physical changes that are morally satisfying for the radical reorganization of society and culture that would address the underlying attitudes and actions that have led to such widespread degradation of the natural and human world (Cohen 21).

In Chapter 1: Taking Control of Nature, Cohen goes into detail laying the book’s radical theoretical foundation and traces the long political and cultural history of tree planting.  Throughout Europe and the ancient Mediterranean, planting was frequently promoted to combat wood shortages, often to secure a sustainable supply of timber for royal navies. Cohen argues that in this way, it was imbued with a sense of national pride, civic duty, and moral good. As cultural and religious symbols, trees have long represented the benevolence of nature, and through the act of planting, an implicit (and sometimes explicit) endorsement of the belief that human manipulation and mastery of the environment for the overall good is both achievable and desirable. The continued presence of this theme in the American context is elaborated on in Chapter 2: Planting Patriotism, Cultivating Institution, where Cohen introduces the major actors in the tree planting discourse of the United States.

Chapters 3 through 6 provides histories of the non-profit organizations The National Arbor Day Foundation and American Forests, federal and state government, and the timber industry as they relate to tree planting.  Specifically, he outlines the origins of their engagement with tree planting and how they engage with one another in delivering a unified message of tree planting to individuals and communities. 

Particularly compelling is his discussion of the non-profits. He argues that while conventional wisdom suggests such organizations exist solely to serve a mission, it is apparent that occasionally they select a mission solely to exist.  Easily accessed and comprehended by the public and historically regarded as an apolitical act of good stewardship, tree planting is a mission that that elicits membership and financial contributions, two ingredients essential to the continued existence of any organization.  Often the bulk of these financial contributions come from large corporations, both inside and outside of the timber industry.  In exchange for assuring the solvency of non-profits, corporate interests benefit from public association with the cause.  Of course, this is contingent on the mission remaining uncontroversial and not posing a threat to a given industry’s interest.  The government, too, plays a role by lending legitimacy and authority to the mission and serving as a primary agent of consolidating and disseminating the message at the state and local levels.

While much of the book deals with tree planting among communities and individuals, it does address the source of the vast majority of trees planted; the reforestation of public and industrial timberlands as part of presumably sustainable forest management.  As an individual who interacts with both the state and commercial forestry apparatus, I found his general characterization of forest management off putting at times.  Cohen does not engage in discussion of what does constitute good, sustainable forest management, though one gets the impression very little would.  This is the weakest portion of the book, but it is important to remember that forest management is not Cohen’s area of expertise, nor is providing alternative forest management strategies his purpose. 

We are reminded of this in Chapter 7: Celebritrees.  This final chapter of the book is the most effective in conveying Cohen’s central argument.  While the preceding chapters focus heavily on the institutions and ways in which they capitalize from promoting and associating with tree planting, they paint a picture more reminiscent of simple “green washing” than an act of cultural hegemony.  After all, it is no surprise that companies contribute to causes for public relations purposes, nor is it shocking that sometimes even non-profits must make compromises to ensure they can continue their work into the future.  However, Cohen argues that the way in which tree planting leverages individual buy-in is more pernicious than simply good PR. 

While tree planting unarguably has many benefits, the hyperbole in which these costs are presented (particularly in regard to carbon sequestration) lend the individual a false sense of power and accomplishment in combating environmental problems.  Presented as a cure all, easily implemented by anyone with a shovel, tree planting facilitates the perpetuation of the status quo.   Cohen makes a compelling case that this status quo benefits the main actors in this book while those idealistically planting trees bear the burden of the long-term environmental costs. 

Citation: Cohen, S. E. (2004). Planting nature: Trees and the manipulation of environmental stewardship in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press