Our Futures as Guided by the Embodied History of Trees Claire Waddell-Wood

Can you see that tree outside your window?
Can you sense it breathing alongside you?
Grasp the soil, trace the leaves, scale the bark,
Can you feel the cool foliage shadows tickle your skin?

Set at a curious axis, the trunk takes a diagonal lean that sets it apart from the vertical rigidity of its neighbours. Beside it sits a stump, a greying and decaying marker from which the adjacent tree slants away. For when this tree was a sapling, it took root beneath the sprawling canopy of the stump’s past life. A passage from its shaded birthplace towards sunlight was compelled, and the tree’s tilted trunk alludes to this slow journey of growth.

The stump’s body also holds a story of life. Etchings of tree rings, an indication of so many seasons persevered, are still perceptible despite decay. Moss had been the first to climb the executed remains, now home to flowering fungal bodies and miniscule insects that veil themselves beneath mossy fronds. The stump’s former body had been cut away years ago, a point from which the neighbouring tree began a path of growth skywards, no longer requiring its ever-slow crusade out of the shade. A unique shape for a unique history.

Textural engravings and delicate dottings, a leaf tumbles and spirals past,
Whisperings from the leaves of past generations.
Deep, deep, deep, familial evolution in each cell,
It settles on moist soil, to melt and nourish the next birth.

Both the tree and the stump hold a vast evolutionary past within the present, an expansive ancestral lineage existing beside you. Their individual placement within a landscape shaped their bodily existence and growth, on an atmospheric, climatic, geological, and geomorphological scale. Dalia Nassar and Margaret Barbour call this the “embodied history of trees”, the manifestation of temporal and geographic histories within tree’s physical bodies.^{^[1]} In a similar sense, Jared Farmer refers to trees as “multitemporal beings”, representing short, long, and deep time all together.^{^[2]}

Simultaneously, the tree and the stump themselves become influential actors in this scene. Their presence alters abiotic (non-living) conditions, like the chemical makeup of soil and air, which in turn shapes their micro-environment. Microbial communities are fostered, mycelial networks extend, lichen bodies expand, while insects, birds, mammals, and reptiles venture amongst on their respective paths. In this sense, Nassar and Barbour state that “any particular tree expresses its environment, and its environment is, in turn, an expression of the tree”.^{^[3]} Self-sustaining ecological networks are visible here, at this highly localised level, and watching their activity is to at once gaze upon their deep histories, current bodily presence, and future ecosystemic iterations.^{^[4]} Every being, including you, is a bodily confluence of immense pasts and impending influence over current and future surroundings. Trees’ bodies offer us a constant reminder of this fact.^{^[5]}

In a time where the language of climate crisis and catastrophe insists upon urgency, our thoughts and actions are often very future-oriented—and fairly so. However, we exist within ecological systems and networks that operate on temporalities vastly different to that of the human. Major extinction events, as examples of ecological collapse, sometimes occurred over thousands of years—not merely a pinpointed moment on a geological timeline.^{^[6]} While we understand that certain anthropogenic actions have significantly increased the rate of ecological disturbance in our recent past and present, it is important to remember that ‘collapse’ is not necessarily an instantaneous point that will be plainly obvious as it occurs. It is a longer and more inconspicuous process—and one that is already happening. Colonial processes have enacted ‘collapse’ conditions across the globe, not only physically, upon ecological networks, landscapes, and bodies, but also non-physically, upon Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems. We could also see this as a temporal collapse, with the non-linear Indigenous sense of time forced into a modernist worldview, multi-temporality flattened into a linear and progressive narrative.

The embodied history of trees, as a glimpse into slower, longer, and wholly interconnected lives, offers us valuable guidance about the ways in which humans can move forward as beings integrated within the landscapes that hold us. Trees encourage us to pause from the unrelenting rush of the present to fix our futures. They show us ways we can reflect on the expansive histories that have made us what we are. And importantly, trees express how individual beings, as part of highly interconnected communities, can hold immense influence over the future of both their micro-environment and planet.

There is an issue with the temporality of collapse as we so often currently perceive it. Collapse is not simply an external future to mitigate, avoid, or fix; it is all tenses simultaneously. Immeasurable histories of interconnection, reciprocity, and mutualism surround us, veiled by the recent ecological and ontological implications of colonialism. We can not quickly rush towards creating futures without a deep recognition of how the past is carried within the present. Otherwise we risk losing touch with humans’ ancient place within ecological communities. In the midst of collapse, it is vital to consider our futures within a more expansive ecological (multi)temporality if they are to be truly ecologically integrated.

A wander through the deep histories that encompass us reminds us of the immense power and agency that all beings hold.

Take, for instance, the deep history of Eucalyptus regnans, the Mountain Ash. A remnant of Gondwanan ecosystems, the cool temperate rainforests of Victoria and Tasmania that Mountain Ash reside in today date back 60 million years. As tectonic plates began shifting northwards 45 million years ago, this continent broke away from Antarctica and slowly edged into hotter and drier climates. The Mountain Ash we see today adapted to this change, becoming both resistant to and reliant on fire. In particular, burning became a catalyst for the renewal and regeneration of Mountain Ash, spurring their seeding and germination process.^{^[7]} The history of the Mountain Ash is a story of agency beyond how we traditionally conceive of it—a story of reaction, adaptation, and flowing with change.

It is also a narrative on the enmeshment of individuals within diverse ecosystems. As Mountain Ash adapted to rely on other beings and processes to live, others grew reliant upon it. Owls dwell in hollows, moths curl in whorls of draping bark, ferns thrive under the damp protection of the canopy.^{^[8]} Communities of trees influence hydrological cycles that shape the very course of water cycling through those ecosystems.^{^[9]} Beings are interconnected and interdependent, rather than individuals in competition with one another; trees care for each other and the broader ecological community.^{^[10]} The interconnection of living beings in self-sustaining networks is not simply a random happening, but can be seen as an agentic process of those species’ and individuals’ adaptation.

First Nations knowledges across this continent and the planet involve deep understandings of this enmeshment amongst physical, ancestral, and spiritual realms.^{^[11]} Joshua Trey Barnett describes a “relational web strengthened by reciprocal responsibilities”, with Indigenous cultures often recognising and acting within cycles of care that flow through all beings—including humans—in ecological communities.^{^[12]} The abrupt violence of European invasion on this continent provides an incredibly stark image of how colonial systems destroyed, erased, and supplanted First Nations cultures, collapsing immeasurably old ways of life.^{^[13]} Harking from the perceived separation of humans from their ecological communities, colonial powers imposed this anthropocentric worldview upon landscapes across the planet through invasion.^{^[14]} Relational networks across this continent that had been fostered over millenia were disrupted by colonial ways of knowing Nature that deemed it a ‘resource’ to extract, fuel for the unrelenting progress of ‘civilisation’. Ecological collapse followed. Those Mountain Ash stands were cut to ‘improve’ landscapes—to clear land with productive European crops and manicured gardens as the envisioned ideal; to fuel the mining boom, reducing forests to debris and dry, eroded soil; and, for timber, extracted according to the market’s demands which grew incessantly over time.^{^[15]}

Historically, colonial thinking so often declares Nature as an object being acted upon – but this could not be more wrong.

Mountain Ash trees and their forest communities pushed back against their relegation to colonial ‘resource’, influencing the course of settler-colonialism in these regions. Queer and trans ecologies highlight the ungovernability, dynamism, and diversity of all beings and bodies, leading to the argument that other-than-human beings themselves can resist the harm inflicted by colonialist ‘resource’ relations.^{^[16]} For example, the forest clearing burns employed by early settlers in Gippsland interacted with the evolutionary forest/fire relationship. As months’ worth of cut and dried plant matter left on the forest floor was set to flame on the hottest and driest days of summer, the various fire-encouraging adaptations of trees supercharged the settler’s fire into massively catastrophic conflagrations. Afterwards, scrub, bracken, and young trees grew back in force as these fires of colonial proportions inadvertently recreated their regeneration processes. In some cases, the enormous cost and labour associated with the relentless post-burn clearing of forest grow-back rendered early land selections abandoned by settlers.^{^[17]} The forest’s ecological processes constituted a form of agency, not passively giving way to the demands of colonialism, but interacting as a conflicting force.

Mountain Ash of the present hold and display their pasts of colonial interactions. Primarily, there is a major and growing deficit in old growth forests. While old and large trees are vital actors in forest ecosystems,^{^[18]} throughout the history of logging and sawmilling in these regions, they have been seen as impediments to timber extraction. The warping, hollowing, decaying, and dying that occurs as a Mountain Ash ages reduces the quality of the timber, and old individuals take up valuable ground that young timber can be grown and harvested on.^{^[19]} Species that rely on old growth forest habitat gradually disappear, sometimes creating eerily empty and silent stands of young, tall Mountain Ash.^{^[20]} The stories held within the trees we gaze upon tell us that current dominant power systems have resulted in vast ecological damage.

Inherent within that process of ecological collapse is the collapse of Indigenous knowledges and cultures, enmeshed with Country. Their persistence despite this environmental and social collapse exhibits the incredible power and agency of ecological communities and First Nations peoples, continuing to support each other through deep time. On the other hand, it hints to us that systems which deny this power and agency, conceptualising non-humans as objects or resources for humans’ benefit, have roots in the recent colonial past.

At a juncture where total collapse and destruction is imminent, these ancient and unique forests will not be able to recover if they are lost. A direct causation can be drawn between colonial worldviews and current ecological damage; “in assuming a natural prioritisation of humans and human interests over those of other species on earth, we are both generating and repeating the racist ideologies of imperialism on a planetary scale”.^{^[21]} A deep investigation into how colonial structures historically have pervaded the ways we now think about and interact with Nature is warranted, necessitating outlooks that encompass thinking on geological and evolutionary timescales. Any discussion of ecologically integrated futures must not forget how the past is innately held within the present, so aptly demonstrated by the multitemporal embodied history of Mountain Ash.

The embodied history of trees also provides a more practical guide to humans journeying toward embracing their enmeshed place in ecological communities.

Just as we can see how trees hold their total pasts within their present selves, we can conceive of humans, on both individual and collective levels, as the manifestation of our deep pasts. This sheds light on how dominant power systems—colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, etc.—have constructed and altered human ways of living in a relatively short time compared to the expansive pasts we are visualising. These oppressive power systems have worked to normalise and naturalise certain human activity to benefit those in power and ensure the continuation of those systems.^{^[22]} The multitemporality of trees offers a viewpoint that merges past, present, and future selves and communities. Ecological integration exists engrained in our lineage, often erased at some past point in time, but ready to be once again unveiled against a background of past and present collapse.

We are already living in a time where First Nations cultures have begun to be duly recognised, after being silenced, inferiorised, and after their attempted eradication post-invasion. Any recognition of Indigenous rights to land at invasion would have undermined the colonial mission, and therefore, colonising and civilising narratives sought to materially and culturally remove First Nations people from the landscapes.^{^[23]} The work of historians especially has sought to unravel colonial narratives from the stories of this continent, revealing the immensity and complexity of Indigenous histories. This continent has a vast human history, with First Nations people living here even beyond the Holocene, in the Pleistocene. Large climatic changes have occurred over this time period, which exhibits the huge cultural resilience and environmental adaptiveness of First Nations peoples. This makes the rupture of invasion, as Tom Griffiths calls it, even more shocking.^{^[24]} Australia’s colonial history is such a tiny part of the continent’s history, let alone its human history, yet it has wreaked such devastating effects on ecological communities during that time.

The process of looking to the deep past to guide futures is clear here; settlers might grow a greater understanding of how to live respectfully on this continent if we look to First Nations cultures and knowledges as proof of the success of ecologically self-sustaining networks throughout deep time.^{^[25]} Recognition and reverence for these vast histories puts pressure on colonial narratives that have historically erased Indigenous stories and pushed our gaze away from ecological enmeshment. The entirety of Australia is an Aboriginal artefact, as Fabienne Bayet explains; we live on the lands of those relational networks, and it is critical to recognise that as a basis for ecologically integrated futures.^{^[26]}

The physical individual tree is a confluence of temporal, geographic, and ancestral influences. A physical individual human is the same, just on a different timescale.

Thinking of trees as a bridge between temporalities, as Farmer explains, allows humans not only to think of, but to feel timefulness—the diversity of rhythms, processes, and rates of change of planetary history.^{^[27]} This is echoed in Deborah Bird Rose’s reflections on Yarralin people’s ecological philosophy at Yinawurru, bringing to light “The flux and the stability, the brief and vivid transience of individuals, and the enduring relationships that sustain life”.^{^[28]} These concepts pose important challenges to colonial temporal collapse. In many of our individual lineages there exists a point at which ecological communities were erased from the human ‘norm’. This idea that humans are separate from the sphere of Nature is ‘normal’ to many contemporary humans, but is actually a construction reflecting the historical interests of oppressive power systems.^{^[29]} These ways of living were imposed upon human societies over the globe; even emotional expression becoming dictated by constructed social and behavioural norms.^{^[30]} Looking into our deep pasts as living beings uncovers which of our perceived natural traits as humans actually originate from colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal narratives and constructions. A rich history of ecologically integrated ways of human life emerges, from peoples and cultures across the planet.^{^[31]} To want to move forward in this era of collapse, we do not have to invent new ways of living—they already exist in our pasts. These behaviours, thoughts, and emotions will probably feel unnatural, weird, and unfamiliar, but that would indicate that we are persevering in the right direction, moving beyond constructed and socialised norms that box us into oppressive systems.^{^[32]}

Through uncovering what colonialist, capitalist, and patriarchal systems have constructed as human behaviours for their benefit, we can act, think, and emote in the ways our bodies are ecologically geared to. The ecological communities are already there, demonstrated so aptly by our tree companions. The ways that humans have existed within and fostered those ecological communities already exist within our individual lineages and the deep history of the landscapes we inhabit. We just have to look into these pasts to re-find them, to begin to heal the collapse of those cultures. An ecologically integrated future cannot be merely thought about as a repudiation of the wrongs of the present and a clean-slate start, recreating ecological entanglement of humans from scratch. The answers, rather, can be gathered from piecing together the paths that have been lost or destroyed over time. To behold the embodied history of trees, their deep time agency, their multitemporal identity, is to view the past, present, and potential futures simultaneously. When we do the same for our human selves, we may unveil our engrained ecological interconnection and capacity to remedy the collapses occurring in our pasts and presents.

Bio: Claire Waddell-Wood is an environmental historian living on unceded Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. Her work is aimed at uncovering the cultural and material implications of settler-colonial relations with so-called Australian landscapes. Drawing from ecofeminist, queer ecology, and environmental humanities perspectives, Claire hopes to merge spaces of creativity, academia, and activism to guide ecologically integrated futures.

Dalia Nassar and Margaret Barbour, Rooted: What If, Rather than Mere Props in the Background of Our Lives, Trees Embody the History of All Life on Earth? 2019. ↑
Jared Farmer, The Ancient Wisdom Stored in Trees: What Very Old Trees Can Teach us About Life, Death, and Time, 2022. ↑
Rooted. ↑
Deborah Bird Rose, At the Billabong, PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature, 2008. ↑
Rooted. ↑
Timothy Morton, All Art is Ecological, 2018. ↑
Tom Griffiths, Forests of Ash: An Environmental History, 2001; Tom Griffiths, How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates about Vegetation Change in Australia, Australian Journal of Botany, 2002; Stephen Pyne, The Still Burning Bush, 2006. ↑
David Lindenmayer and Esther Beaton, Life in the Tall Eucalypt Forests, 2000. ↑
Rooted. ↑
Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, 2021. ↑
Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, Songlines: The Power and Promise, 2020. ↑
Joshua Trey Barnett, Imagining More-Than-Human Care: From Multispecies Mothering to Caring Relations in Finding the Mother Tree, Journal of Ecohumanism, 2023, p. 11. ↑
Tom Griffiths, The Planet is Alive: Radical Histories for Uncanny Times, Griffith Review, 2019. ↑
Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 1993. ↑
Tony Dingle, The Victorians: Settling, 1984; Forests of Ash; How Many Trees Make a Forest?. ↑
Cleo Wölfle Hazard, Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, 2022. ↑
The Victorians: Settling; Forests of Ash; The Still Burning Bush. ↑
Life in the Tall Eucalypt Forests. ↑
L.T. Carron, A History of Forestry in Australia, 1985. ↑
Life in the Tall Eucalypt Forests. ↑
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, Routledge, 2015, p. 6. ↑
Rob Boddice, History of Emotions, 2018. ↑
How Many Trees Make a Forest? ↑
The Planet is Alive. ↑
Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth, 2012. ↑
Fabienne Bayet, Overturning the doctrine: Indigenous People and Wilderness—Being Aboriginal in the Environmental Movement, Social Alternatives, 1994. ↑
Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, 2018; The Ancient Wisdom Stored in Trees. ↑
At the Billabong. ↑
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. ↑
History of Emotions. ↑
As an example, the area of study within Irish history uncovering Indigenous Irish oral cultures and their deep connections with landscapes pre-invasion. ↑
History of Emotions. ↑

Claire Waddell-Wood is an environmental historian living on unceded Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. Her work is aimed at uncovering the discursive and material implications of settler-colonial understandings of and relations to so-called Australian landscapes. Drawing from ecofeminist, queer ecology, and environmental humanities perspectives, Claire hopes to merge spaces of creativity, academia, and activism to guide ecologically integrated futures.