Foresting Global Environmental Politics

Abstract: Over the last twenty-five years, global environmental politics has considered forests mostly as resources or carbon sinks (REDD), focusing on private modes of governance or failures of global negotiations and their reconfiguration within the climate arena. However, there is limited critical engagement with forests and even less scholarship that recognizes forests as entanglements between human and nonhuman. For several Indigenous peoples and traditional populations, forests and other ecosystems represent more than resources or carbon sinks; they are living beings, sacred spaces, or relational entities. This article presents foresting—an ontological turn toward alternative ways of knowing and being. This piece is a provocation inspired by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists who live with, know, and write about forests differently. Through teasers from different parts of the globe, the article highlights entangled lifeways to inspire us to forest our thinking and practices, opening the field to unconventional epistemologies and ontologies and enriching it with more nuanced understandings of relationships with the more-than-human.

Duke Scholars

Author Kimberly Marion Suiseeya Environmental Social Systems