What makes forests forests? And what unmakes them[1]? The obvious answer might be ‘trees,’ at a certain density, but anyone who has walked through a monocultural plantation will know that trees are not enough. Plantations, like those of pine and eucalyptus which surround the quinta, are too monotonous, too orderly, too barren, too quiet. These simplified ecologies have alienation writ into their grid-like configuration. The phenomenology of plantations is a lonesome and loveless affair; there simply aren’t enough relations, or enough others with which to relate. The complex multispecies assemblage that is a healthy biodiverse forest is diminished to one vampiric artery draining the vitality and labour of this migrant workforce, into the pits of an ever-thirsty market located elsewhere. Plantations are for The One: one kind of species, one kind of value, one kind of World.
Another answer, then, might be ‘other lifeforms,’ which is what such plantations lack. Forests are gatherings of trees and their nontree kin (and foe) in complex assemblages of diverse and always-diversifying forms of life – and death – from all corners of the kingdoms. Forests are what Donna Haraway might call holoents; neither ones nor manys. One could say that plantations are for the ones, at the manys’ expense.
As “rationalised and simplified ecologies,”1 plantations function as machines for the proliferation of the same. They operate according to a logic of sameness, the aim of which is to churn out as many assets, in the form of raw materials, as possible, in order to meet the demands of a market located elsewhere2. Such a logic both discards non-assets (i.e., other beings) whilst also making the plantation uninhabitable for many, evidenced by the often-barren understories devoid of plant life, or the absence of buzzing insects or calls of birds. It’s tempting to place plantations on one side of a fence, an ontological one that demarcates a supposed boundary between the agency, volition, and control of the human and the otherwise. Wonky, uneven, higgledy-piggledy diversity sits to the left, a Mediterranean party of cork oak and their cousins holm, wild olive and oat, beyond human control (and so ‘in’ Nature). A solemn, planned and monotonous march of eery, spindly clones on the right, set apart evenly in both space and time. One claims to be Natural, the other not; one is exalted for its autonomy, existing beyond human control. But plantations, or at least the plants planted in them, can also escape from human control, thus blurring the ontological social-natural distinctions in strange, and perhaps even monstrous3, ways.
But paying attention to such trees forecloses such simple tales: after all, there are no “virgin” landscapes in Portugal, such has been the long exertion of agriculture and pastoralism on the land4, having disrupted, rearranged or simply destroyed auto- and symchthonous multispecies arrangements5. The arrangement of trees in the cultivated and feral ecologies in central Portugal always falls somewhere in the murky, ambiguous middle; things are never quite as they seem. These ambiguities are simultaneously a resource for the pulp industry to tap, and the reason for the increasing flammability of the landscape.
[1] I follow anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) lead in letting down the anthropocentric drawbridge by extending selfhood to more-than-human selves – beings who represent and are represented in other-than-symbolic (qua linguistic qua exclusively-human) ways.
The Tree with a Thousand Faces 