AR Ecologies: planting trees

In the first episode of the series AR host Sabrina Syed embarks on a tree-planting knowledge search starting deep in the forests of Amazonia. From Sebastião Salgado and his mission to replant his home forest, to Maria Smith afforesting London’s streets, the land we choose to plant on is put up for question. Weaving stories from Suzanne Simard, Fiona Watson and Paulo Tavares, the concept of planting and its colonial history is unravelled with voices blurring the line between forests and architecture.

AR Ecologies, a podcast by the Architectural Review, explores the tension between architecture and ecology through critical positions which launch each chapter. Instead of standalone interviews, each episode weaves curious and critical voices together to meet, discuss and give space to perspectives outside an architectural orbit. The first season revolves around Trees, an audio counterpart to our October 2021 issue.

Keep up to date with AR podcasts and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Bibliography

Plantationocene: when trees are worth more dead than alive, AR October 2021, Sophie Sapp Moore
The Man Who Planted Trees (1953), Jean Giono
Amazônia (2021), Sebastiāo Salgado, ed. Lélia Wanick Salgado
Finding The Mother Tree (2021), Suzanne Simard
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013
In the Forest Ruins on e-flux (2016), Paulo Tavares
Forest Law (2014), Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, 2014
Outrage: the Amazon rainforest under threat, AR October 2019, Fiona Watson
The Global Tree Restoration Potential in Science (2019), Jean-Francois Bastin et al, Science, 2019
Researchers Find Flaws in High-Profile Study on Trees and Climate (2019), Katarina Zimmer
Xʷc̓ic̓əsəm Garden, UBC Vancouver (the garden Suzanne Simard mentions in the episode)

Transcript

AR: This is a curious podcast. In our new series on architecture and criticism, we'll be exploring the tension between architecture and ecology through critical positions that launch each chapter. Instead of standalone interviews, AR Ecologies is set up to be episodic. You will hear a mixture of voices weaving in and out of our conversation surrounding ecology. While architecture is the common thread that links everything together, our voices are out of orbit. They include scientists, engineers, activists, writers and more. We want to dwell in the in-between spaces of the topics we bring to the table, the grey areas that shift from anthropocentric to ecological, and, with the help of our guests, hear stories we never considered before. Our first series will focus on trees in all stages of life, from seed to material: an audio counterpart to the AR’s October issue.

‘Trees aren’t a simple solution to the problems that humans have made’

In the age of ecological emergency, trees must go beyond their limited architectural definitions. What happens when trees are discussed beyond their role as objects or material, but as a form of a spatial practice – as beings with networks, rights, connections. Trees aren’t a simple solution to the problems that humans have made. They hold their own agency. They are entangled with the world, and we with them, in ways that are too complex to grasp all at once, but can reverberate through the perspectives we share. So, from the forests in British Columbia to contested land in the Amazon, to the wood we use in our homes, our three chapters will travel, weaving their way through geographies and stories, all connected to trees. I am your host, Sabrina Syed, Editorial Contributor and researcher at the AR.

This episode is all about planting trees. Planting is widely regarded to be a positive step towards countering the climate and ecological catastrophe. We’re inundated with studies, campaigns, international projects to plant billions of them to unlock this immense untapped potential of trees in all the spaces that we don’t account for. But it’s also a really complex and politically loaded act that can also become violent. That’s because planting always, always comes back to land and transforming land inevitably brings up questions of ownership, colonisation, displacement. What are the knowledge structures we need to question in order to plant trees ecologically?

Sebastião Salgado: I was born inside the trees. There is a big difference when you grow up in places where you have a lot of forest. And our Atlantic Forest was probably one of the most important forests on this planet by concentration of biodiversity.

AR: That voice is photographer and ecologist Sebastião Salgado, who with his wife Lélia, founded Instituto Terra in his homeland of Brazil, where he replanted the forest of his childhood and now helps others in their region to do the same. Planting trees is one thing, but designing for authentic biodiversity means essentially designing for an entire architecture, because the forest is home to so many more: human and non-human.

Sebastião Salgado: Forests are cities of biodiversity: it’s a city. A forest is complete. In a forest there are millions of visitors, billions of residents! A forest is a metropolis, a real metropolis.

AR: Now, the metropolis of Sebastião's childhood isn’t here anymore. In fact, it had disappeared two years ago, destroyed by erosion. Salgado realised this when he came back after years abroad to discover a barren landscape. The forest we’re talking about is the entirely new one that he replanted from scratch to restore the one that he had lost.

Sebastião Salgado: I came back to this land and it was a huge shock for me. The paradise that I grew up in was no longer there. To build this modern Brazil that is now more than 90 per cent urban, we left an ecological desert. Half the farm of my parents was a desert – eroded, land destroyed. The small rivers in the farm that made the nice small lakes with a lot of fish, the birds, were no more. They were completely full of sand provoked by erosion, all was destroyed. Not only the farm of my parents – all my region, all my state. All the Atlantic Forest. When I was a child, we had more than 70 per cent of Atlantic Forest and now in this moment that I speak to you, we have about 7 per cent.

AR: The couple founded Instituto Terra in 1998, dedicated to restoring the forest in their region of Vale de Rio Doce, which used to be entirely covered by the Atlantic Forest. Sebastião describes a region home to over four million people. It faces deforestation, soil erosion, water scarcity and eviction. Planting and afforesting in this case were a design solution to restore and heal what was lost. But how do you afforest responsibly to restore the level of biodiversity needed in a way that is meaningful and authentic? How many trees did Sebastião have to plant?

Sebastião Salgado: To rebuild our land it was necessary to plant 2,500,000 trees to bring back the forest. I went around with this plan and we applied for money, for aid, and we got aid, and we started to plant. And I must tell you, Sabrina, today, the forest is there: not a complete the forest, because you see when you do a rehabilitation of a forest, you cannot plant all the species at the same time.

AR: Planting with the aim of restoring an ecosystem is not the same as planting for the sake of timber or planting for the sake of crops, a space that trees can often fall into. But in this context, Sebastião actually had to design something that could live beyond him and sustain itself for the rest of its own life, something that could actually turn into an old growth forest. But when it comes to the actual architecture of planting, the plantation itself is a built environment.

Suzanne Simard: So if the plantation is like a built environment, in a sense, it’s like a building in that you take this this natural ecosystem and make a square clear cut and then plant rows of trees. But in nature, these disturbances are complex and there's old trees left behind and plants and they're not in lines: they follow the contours of the land.

AR: This analogy of the plantation is something scientists and forest ecologist Suzanne Simard brought up in conversation when explaining patterns and planting. She’s the author of the famous 1997 paper that coined the term ‘The Wood Wide Web’, proving how trees establish networks of connection via fungi underground.

Suzanne Simard: There’s a stream and you have different species and there’s a pattern and and yet we come in and we impose this geometric pattern that doesn’t work in the landscape that it funnels, propagates disturbances. It creates problems like wildfires, and it creates more problems than it's trying to solve, really. So I don’t think they’re that different.

AR: Planting done wrong, planting done with the idea of trees just as a product, as a resource to be extracted, is a very Western colonial construct to begin with.

Sebastião Salgado: When you look at these countries here, they are very beautiful because we are very rich. We make money, we make small forests here, small forests there. But these forests are not real forests. They are monocultures of trees. They are not from this region. They are exotic trees that you put there because they grow faster. We can have wood, but they are silent forests – there is no biodiversity inside. To have biodiversity you must have native trees – native trees from this region.

AR: So that’s exactly what Sebastião, Lélia, and everyone who joined them in this project did.

Sebastião Salgado: We were not specialists in the rehabilitation of the forest. We were not ‘ecologists’. We just wished to rebuild the forest. Today, I consider us as ecologists because to rebuild nature, we became so close to nature. But I think in that moment, our wish was just to plant the forest.

AR: This wish led to an enormous knowledge spike of understanding the sequence it took to plant a forest and plant one for the long term.

Sebastião Salgado: The trees, when you plant them, there is a sequence. When we started our soil was desperate, destroyed – it was dead soil, it was dry as stone. It was necessary to select the best of trees that could grow in this soil. We call these trees ‘pioneers’. They are like soldiers going into a fight; they live for 10, 15 years and after they go, they come just to guarantee the beginning of the forest. After that, it was necessary to plant the Secondary Trees.

AR: The sequence of events that Sebastião is describing is called the sequence of forest succession to establish a full ecosystem that self-sufficient and permanent, and that can last in perpetuity you have to plant primary trees that sacrifice themselves for re-establishing nutrients back into the ground and secondary trees. And then finally, the equivalent of old growth forests, ‘climax trees’.

Sebastião Salgado: And just this year, just now in the last rainy season in October, we started to plant the ‘climax trees’.

AR: The type of forest that Sebastião has reached is the type of plantation that can sustain itself now over time. Finally, they’ve been able to reach the design stage of something that can grow into a long-term primary forest again.

Suzanne Simard: These are natural primary forests where you have big old trees that provide seed for the regeneration of the next generations of trees. This continual process is called the ‘climax forest’ in that it regenerates under its own canopy in perpetuity in theory

Sebastião Salgado: The ‘climax forest’ are trees that grow only in good soil. They grow only with shadow – the ‘climax trees’ are the trees that will stay there for 1,000 years, for 2,000 years. They are trees that will be huge trees, that grew 50 metres high – they grow only when we have perfect conditions. When you plant a rainforest, you must bring a big diversity of species. At Instituto Terra we have about 303 different species that we planted. And it is a young forest, but we have jaguars that came back, we have more than 173 species of birds. The life came back.

AR: The achievement of successfully planting and establishing a biodiverse forest is an enormous feat, especially because Sebastião and his team did not set out as experts the way that Suzanne is. As much as people talk about the value of planting, it’s biodiversity that nails the success here. Another aspect of design, which people don't talk about enough when it comes to planting trees is the actual success rate. A lot of language in architectural discourse talks about the number of trees they can potentially plant and achieve. What people fail to really mention is how hard it is. And it wasn't easy.

Sebastião Salgado: Some trees grow, but we lose more than 50 per cent, probably 60 per cent of the plantation the first year. And with Lélia we were desperate because we saw the small trees come up. But suddenly, in a month they started to die.

AR: Dealing with losses of numbers that are ridiculously high, especially after investing, researching, and devoting so much time to the project comes with the territory – and no one really talks about that. Another discovery that Sebastião told me about was making the holes that those saplings went into a lot deeper and wider.

Sebastião Salgado: To plant a small tree we needed a much more generous hole of 30 by 40 centimetres, at least 40 centimetres deep. Why? Because when you do this, we have soft soil.

AR: And of course, there’s also the weather to account for.

Sebastião Salgado: We could plant only on the days that were raining. When you have this big hole, we had this soil that was humid, that was wet. And we put plants inside, we closed it and knew if we didn’t get one week, ten days without rain, the plant would still have humidity inside.

AR: That year they only lost five to 10 per cent.

Sebastião Salgado: They were producing leaves, they were producing flowers. Some were producing fruit – and they started to be home to species of insects, and the birds came. There was a coming back, not only of the trees, but the coming back of the full life around the small trees.

AR: Sebastião is quick to credit this project, the rebuilding of his forest and founding Instituto Terra with his wife Lélia, as the project of his lifetime. If restoring ecosystems and planting more trees at such an enormous scale was possible, especially after speaking just on the experience level with someone who had done it, why can't we design for more forests?

Science tells us this there’s an enormous potential to restore so much land with trees. There can be countless planting projects happening right now. But in reality, there’s no way to fully discern the proportion of public or private land that’s up for planting in the first place. Even agricultural land is on a spectrum, as there’s a huge difference between corporate actors and the livelihoods of local families who both approach land to develop. Sebastião had his own land, the ranch where he grew up, which is critical. It allowed him to share his knowledge, grow in a place that he already owned within the wider region. But land is almost always contested, whether it’s by private or government interests. The giant tree planting experiment and the restoration of his own ecosystem was immensely profound as an example that worked. But what would have happened if he didn’t own that land?

Brazil is one of the top six countries where more than 50 per cent of restoration potential can be reached, but its forests, especially the Amazon, come into direct conflict between those who seek to exploit it and communities who have been living on that soil for centuries. The tension of who owns land and how land is managed is integral to the giant planting experiment of this decade – of this century. There’s no straightforward solution with planting, though it’s often presented as one especially in design. In order to understand how complicated land is, we need to confront the colonial project that underpins it in the first place.

Fiona Watson: I think the first point to make about land in the Amazon is that it's interesting to look at the archaeological information and studies that are coming out, because what it's showing is that it's the Amazon has, in a sense, always been managed as long as there have been human beings living there.

AR: The voice you just heard is that of Fiona Watson, director of research and advocacy at Survival International Survival, which works in partnership with tribal and Indigenous communities to share information, campaign, lobby, advocate, and protest for their land rights across the world.

Fiona Watson: They call it ‘terra preta’, this ‘dark soil’. Archaeologists are showing how this landscape is not a pristine environment where people didn't live. There’s always been people there, for thousands of years, and they have shaped the landscape and nurtured it.

AR: This concept of shaping and nurturing the landscape as if it’s a piece of architecture that's already there isn't new.

Paulo Tavares: What is very interesting about this archaeological site, these ancient villages, is that if you look at them today, they are really old, some of them probably from late 18th century, early 19th century.

AR: Paulo Tavares, an architect, researcher, and writer based in South America, is taking me through one of his projects. The example he’s describing right now research that he’s been working on about the Xavante tribe, a tribe that lives in a region in Brazil called Mato Grosso, a densely forested, biodiverse region that's also under constant threat from forest fires. Paulo's research revolves around advocating for and understanding the architectural heritage that these sites represent…

Paulo Tavares: And we are searching for these archaeological vestiges, these archaeological remains. We produced a kind of massive investigation I would say – a very large investigation about those sites, a kind of archaeological research on this complex of various villages, which today manifest themselves as forests.

Fiona Watson: I think that's very important because not only is that showing this longevity and how Indigenous peoples were the first peoples there, but they were also the first stewards or the first users of the land. So regarding how the land is used, you could take an example, the Yanomami people who I've worked a lot with, who live in north Brazil and southern Venezuela in that border region. The Yanomami live very much as part of that environment because everything has a spirit, what they call the shamanic spirits that inhabit all these regions. They are very important to their way of seeing the world and their own healing processes. So, it's very much managed collectively – you’ve got small forest gardens, you use those gardens, you grow your fruits and vegetables, and then the Earth has to rest

AR: These small forest gardens, this way of managing the forest as a house, a home and a giant cosmological space that's not separate from who you are as a human, expands way beyond this geography. Suzanne Simard talked about visiting a Musqueam garden in Canada and the Indigenous practices that were completely different to Western ideas of managing a forest, which is more geometric. All this conversation ties in to how you design a forest. And that's exactly how she described it to me: through design, planning and geometry.

Suzanne Simard: This garden is designed around Indigenous worldviews: it's not rows of crops, which is the Western way of doing things. Essentially, it’s like a medicine wheel and at each spoke of the medicine wheel there are groups of plants that are companion plants, and they work in our different systems as human beings, like there’s the medicine plants, there’s the ceremonial tobacco and those other ceremonial plants, there’s the food plants. And so it’s all designed to fit with nature and the needs of of people and the plants as well as the soil, and which is completely integral and what's needed in the ecosystem and as us as part of the ecosystem. Western science imposes this sort of geometric pattern that they think is efficient. And yet it's not because it doesn’t match with the ecology of the system.

Fiona Watson: You let that go fallow and then you move and you cut other garden, so you’re constantly rotating, letting the earth rest, building new gardens. And it’s very often a collective activity, but you’re also hunting and fishing and gathering. And so going into the forest. For example, the Yanomami use over 500 species of plant. That’s a huge amount. And there are many other peoples and they use it for all sorts of things. So this incredible sort of invention of understanding the properties of nature, particularly plants around you, and they’ve developed plants. It’s a continual process. It's just every single part of the forest and all the birds and the animals and fish they know about and they use.

AR: And this knowledge of planting of managing the land goes beyond geography. It also manifests all the way back in time, back to the projects that Paulo was studying for the Xavante tribe, projects that are essentially looking at them as architectural heritage when in fact they are forests

Paulo Tavares: What is interesting is that those remains – those sites – they manifest themselves now as patches of forests or patches of botanical formations, a collection of trees that have grown on the top of the villages.

AR: This blurring between what is architecture and what is forest can only happen when your understanding and approach of ecology is something that is inherently holistic. And while we are talking about planting and design in the lens of architecture, we need to go one layer deeper and acknowledge the value of the Indigenous knowledge that is fuelling this conversation.

Suzanne Simard: I think of Western science, and it’s relatively so new to Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous science. Western science has been developed over the last few hundred years. Indigenous knowledge is built over thousands of years. It’s based on living at one with the land. It’s being in the land. It’s evolving with all the creatures to survive and to reproduce. And that reproduction is not just like physical or genetic reproduction, it’s social reproduction as well, to carry on our societies in healthy ways. Indigenous science looks at systems where it knows about systems, like the blooming of the salmonberry and how that’s linked to the flies that are emerging from the larvae that are feeding the salmon. These things are all linked together, and people can know when salmonberry flowers this is the when the salmon fry are emerging to eat the flies. They understood these connections so deeply: we’re interdependent with them. Western science comes in and says, ‘OK, we’ve got to take these things apart so we can understand them, make experiments so that we don’t have these outside influences. We isolate things and then we can understand it.’ And we did create a lot of understanding through this reductionist process, but it was just a fragment of what we needed to know about the whole system. So, in this reducing part, we lost sight of the system.

AR: So we’ve done a deep dive into the different systems of how forests are managed by Indigenous communities and the actual value and importance of Indigenous knowledge that underpins these intentions, this way of design. Now let’s look at the way that these forests are managed by other actors, by actors who seek to use it as a resource. What are those ways in which they're managed?

Fiona Watson: The kind of model that's coming from the agribusiness sector – so whether that’s cattle ranching, growing soya or other cash crops, palm oil, the timber trade and the mining sector – all of this is extremely predatory because it’s based on profit, quick profit, often for not very many people. So if you look at these vast cattle ranchers that only be one family owning a huge cattle ranch, all of this is based on consumption and destruction.

AR: Using extracting consuming land, especially with the vocabulary of planting, can also be called the age of the Plantationocene.

Fiona Watson: Somewhere like the Amazon is just seen as a pot of gold. It’s seen as ‘we’ve got to go in and develop it’. So development means roads. And if you look at those classic photographs of the Amazon in the 70s and 80s, it’s what they call the fishbone pattern: huge highways all bulldozed through the Amazon, which was home to Indigenous peoples who were never consulted, let alone gave their free, prior and informed consent. They were simply bulldozed.

AR: Even if things are being planted, there’s a big chance they’re being planted for profit. And then you’ve got the monocultures that Sebastião talked about. Inevitably, all this leads to the destruction of old growth forests and the violence enacted on Indigenous communities who live there and who are stewards to that environment.

Paulo Tavares: It’s not about ‘let’s plant trees’. A forest is not a collection of trees. A forest is much more than a collection of trees: it’s an entire system. So the minute you raze the forest to the ground, there are many species that also become the victims of the type of violence.

Fiona Watson: And now, in the Amazon, we have land grabbing. There’s even a kind of law that they're trying to push through Congress, which would facilitate land grabbing. That’s where people just go in and grab the land, like in the days of the old gold rush. So this is completely out of control. Now you have a government which is actively promoting, not just industrialisation of the Amazon, but industrialisation at whatever cost, even against the law. So where Indigenous territories are being mapped out, ratified under the Brazilian constitution for the exclusive use of the Indigenous people, Bolsonaro and his allies don’t care about this. They’re simply going in there, actively encouraging illegal invasions because they want this land to be used for profit.

AR: Planting, tree plantations, everything surrounding the intent to put more trees in the ground because it’s a land issue, it is a deeply colonial issue. There is no way around it.

Paulo Tavares: If you think about ideas of the Anthropocene, if you think about the ideas of climate change and the ways in which those questions emerged, they were very much being discussed even by cultural institutions.

AR: If you want to plant more trees, afforest land or even restore ecosystems, it’s something that can't be looked at in a vacuum any more. Looking into the way in which all these factors overlap brings with it an understanding that is much deeper, of the ecological, political and social conditions we’re confronted with whenever we consider planting on land. It makes us question our intent as designers to plant in the first place. Is it a noble act or is it being done with an image that could erase more than it adds? Planting is always loaded with meaning.

Paulo Tavares: But with the social movements, with the explosions, the convulsions that happened in recent years, – which are challenging the systems of power, the perpetuation of colonial racism in our cities, in our environment, in our institutions – we got to this moment where we can no longer afford to discuss the ecological without discussing colonialism, racism, environmental racism, environmental injustice. We need to put this at the forefront of the agenda.

Fiona Watson: Ecological justice is sharing the world’s resources equally and sustainably and fundamentally. Ecological justice is respecting human diversity because human diversity, biodiversity, ecological diversity go hand in hand. And that’s our rich tapestry of humanity, I think.

AR: That definition of ecological justice shared by Fiona after Paulo’s explanation on why colonialism is at the forefront of our climate discussion will colour the way we look at trees in all stages of their life from seedling, like this episode all the way to their material role as a product. Planting, has always been overlapped with colonial destruction and stewarding a forest – whether it's shepherding a new one like Sebastião did in his home or preserving what is there is all about acknowledging reciprocity between how we view ourselves and how the environment shapes us in return.

Fiona Watson: I would like to think that architects realised that people are part of forests. So for me, it’s intertwined. When you’re thinking about greening or forests, it’s not just the trees and all that they bring, it’s the people. How do people within architecture bring more green or forest into cities? How is that going to work with people? Because I see the two as being totally interconnected on so many levels, and it’s never been more vital for our future.

AR: This interconnectedness and this intertwining is manifesting itself in a very real project that I spoke about with Maria Smith. Maria is the director of Sustainability at Bureau Happold. Trained as an architect and an engineer they explained to me the constant search for a reciprocal relationship, something that's not removed in a wilderness far away, but something that can be applied to in our actual cities in distinctly urban built conditions – with the themes that we've been talking about in this entire episode

Maria Smith: We're looking at all the land ownership of a local authority. And we're mapping all the habitats that are currently in that local authority, and then with the basis of that knowledge we're looking at opportunities to increase tree planting and for renewable energy generation. I think it's really forward-looking and smart to think of these things together because we need to make sure that we are sort of restoring and certainly not damaging any of those existing habitats which are really, really precious in terms of biodiversity, and that when we introduce more tree planting into this sort of existing landscape, that isn't damaging existing habitats but is creating and improving biodiversity.

AR: Not only is the land assessed in terms of how useful it could be to actually planting trees in the first place, but it’s also assessed on its potential to regenerate energy. In a way, it’s a real reciprocal relationship with land, and it's something not done in the middle of forests, but done in London, done in an area that starkly urban by architects and engineers.

Maria Smith: When we are creating renewable energy, that isn’t having the kind of unintended negative consequence of damaging habitats and so on, and that the lands that might be brilliant for solar farms, for example, may also be much more brilliant for tree planting in that area. So just looking at these things and looking at land management in terms of decarbonisation together: I think that’s brilliant.

AR: Planting carefully with thought, with knowledges that aren’t from one place, means an acknowledgement that the land you choose to plant on isn’t inert, but it’s one loaded with memory, with questions of ownership, often a space that's contested. Designing for reciprocity means planting ecologically and hopefully planting with a view of a lifespan that transcends our plans and is here to stay.

Maria Smith: So when we’re looking at the way that we can incorporate tree planting into this overall land ownership, it’s about thinking about how we’re intertwining two networks. And it is intertwining, rather than just plunking another thing on top or just finding a hatch pattern or just trying to drop seeds in random places. It’s respecting the way that trees work as networks and obviously the way that energy generation works as a network. So you have to intertwine these two things around the existing built environment, around the existing habitats. It’s a really interesting piece of work, and I think it’s a really good example of how we can incorporate that knowledge from how forests work into our own thinking about how we can transition our built environment into being more sustainable.