Critical Forest Studies is a rapidly growing field that takes multispecies relationships with/in forests as the starting point for critical and creative inquiry. Shaped by the contested political ecologies that emerge where different forest cosmologies, languages, histories, and ecologies meet, the field builds on related developments in the environmental humanities which explore multispecies relations through artistic, historical, philosophical, poetic, literary, and performative approaches. As the first special issue dedicated to Critical Forest Studies, this collection brings the field into direct dialogue with the theories, methodologies, and practices of environmental education. Environmental education has a rich and generative history of relational engagement with forests — from place-based and outdoor learning traditions to more-than-human and posthumanist approaches — and this collection builds on and extends that history. Indigenous and place-based perspectives are foregrounded throughout, bringing together diverse interdisciplinary understandings across four key areas: forest sentience, forest imaginaries, forest regeneration, and forest pedagogies. The collection bridges conceptual, artistic, empirical, methodological, and educational practices across these four themes, opening new possibilities for how environmental education might think, feel, and act with forests in times of ecological urgency.

This paper uses karlup bidi (pathway home) as a metaphor to show and explain the cultural landscape of a significant central Perth locality: Kaart Gennunginyup Bo, or Karrgatup, or Kaarta Koomba, also known as King’s Park. Drawing on oral histories, cultural narratives and contemporary reflections, the study uses Noongar understandings of Country, family, time and relationship to challenge and decolonise Western paradigms of land use and identity. The intent is to narrate Noongar Boodja (Country) as it was, remains and always will be – as Noongar heartland. Central to this paper is the trilogy of boodja, moort, kaartdijin (Country, family, knowledge), a framework for relating with Noongar boodja in caring, animate, thriving and responsive ways.

In Northern Finland, including sparsely populated Finnish Lapland and the small city of Rovaniemi, the widespread clearing of old trees has degraded the boreal environment. Disrupting the diverse relationships between people and trees, climate change will continue to alter the country’s northernmost forests, as is widely known. In this urgent context, we propose that the collaborative project Gifts from the Sentient Forest (GSF) has developed new modes of interacting with Northern Finland’s trees and appreciating their biocultural legacies. At the project’s core is arboreal sentience, a concept illuminating the capacities of trees to sense, communicate, behave, learn and remember. In the project, other-than-human sentience provides a basis for cultivating tree-human communication while expanding Lapland residents’ awareness of sylvan communities through painting, photography, film, music, poetry and performance. In this article, we present an account of three methods leveraged in the GSF programme to facilitate experiences of tree sentience in Northern Finland: sensing, interviewing (speaking) and remembering.

For many First Peoples, language is indissociable from living relationships within interspecies communities where humans are not the only ones who feel, think, listen and speak. Words not only carry meanings attributable to human language but also carry the spirit of a place, as both a material and metaphysical transmission of sentience across species and generations. This article draws on ecolinguistic research into the Indigenous language of the Dayak Ngaju people and its role in regenerating peatland forests in Central Kalimantan. The study employs an Indigenous research methodology led by the first author, who is a PhD student and member of the Dayak Ngaju community. This methodology situates Dayak Ngaju language within an animistic reality inclusive of nonhuman creatures, objects and spiritual beings. Attending to the complexities of Indigenous PhD studies, the article proposes the cultivation of “new animisms,” which recognise the future-making pedagogies of Indigenous ontologies and ecolinguistic systems.

This essay will describe the critical importance of developing a posthuman aesthetic pedagogy capable of integrating what Eduardo Kohn (2013) has described as multinatural perspectivalism in How Forests Think. Multinatural perspectivalism describes the multiplicity of beyond-human perspectives staked on an event. An aesthetic system capable of integrating this beyond-human multiplicity poses the problem of forms of signification and semiosis which transcend the socialised register constructed by anthropocentric experience and should define signs which can be meaningful across the diverse levels of consciousness associated with more-than-human subjectivity. In this essay, I will describe this as a lucky aesthetic, capable of producing lucky signs. I will associate lucky signs with ecological practices oriented around stewardship such as regenerative farming and forestry, whereby the steward is tasked to identify and interpret lucky signs expressive of beyond-human experience. I argue this postulates an aesthetic pedagogy derived from our relationship with nature and is modelled by animist ritual practices like Capoeira Angola. I thereby conclude by arguing that animist ritual models forms of environmental education expressive of a beyond-human view of art practice.

This contribution focuses on our co-affective encounters with the Great African Seaforest in Cape Town, South Africa. We use a diffractive methodology to read Blue Humanities and marine biology texts through critical posthumanism and our freewritings and depictions of our embodied co-affective encounters of swimming and diving in the kelp. Swimming diffractively through such texts, our freewritings and images, we consider how the focus areas identified in the call for papers (CFP), namely sentience, imaginaries, regeneration and pedagogies, might be differently configured and understood through the Great African Seaforest. In keeping with the interconnected hydrological cycle of which we are all part, we consider the Great African Seaforest as a Global South “sentient interspecies learning community” (CFP) for broader global politico-ethico-onto-epistemological practices and relations. We argue that such diffractive immersive encounters of transdisciplinary approaches and creative expression can enliven embodied environmental Critical Forest Studies learning in novel ways.

Haudenosaunee Indigenous ontology observes direct connection between the well-being of the land, and the health and authenticity of human minds. In coastal rainforest regions of western Canada, coniferous trees are stressed and dying from the effects of heat and drought. If the well-being of human minds is inextricable from the intactness of the land and aspects of the land are suffering, might human minds, spirits and epistemologies also be affected? What forms of attentiveness and healing are needed to enable us to better “think with and through” local forests rather than merely about them? This exploration begins with artwork depicting dying trees in a spirit of loving elegy, and also the intangible, interconnected webs of life weaving together the pan-sentience of living systems. The argument is made that aesthetic engagement with local land offers needed ways to relearn our receptivity to the companionship and teachings of forest systems. I explore how epistemologies grounded in worldviews of interconnectivity might be nurtured through holistic, affective forms of attention characterised by betweenness. Particular attention is given to Sheridan and Longboat’s notion of minding all things, where human minds are seen as inseparable from the land.

In an era of accelerating ecological degradation, how might experimental art practices help audiences foster deeper, more empathetic engagement with the intelligence of living systems? This paper explores the potential of contemporary art, when aligned with ecological science, to reframe forest regeneration as a site of aesthetic and ethical inquiry — by regarding the forest as a primary composer within artistic and ecological frameworks. It asks: how might this approach underpin a novel form of “Critical Forest Pedagogy” capable of deepening our understanding of the collective natural intelligence of the living world and encouraging long-term conservation?

To test these ideas, a new art-science project, Forest Art Intelligence, was initiated, framing a regenerating forest as an evolving, living artwork. Because forests evolve through stages mediated by life, death, regeneration and human influence, those stages of growth can also be framed as “process art” — a practice that values each stage of an artwork’s transformation. Collectively therefore this approach proposes a form of art-led “Critical Forest Pedagogy” suited to engaging communities traditionally unaligned with conservation, while remaining relevant to ecologically cognate audiences. It further asks whether this framing might promote a rethinking of restrictive, human-centred definitions of intelligence that underpin generative AI.

Climate scenarios are produced through modelling, scientists draw on previously collected data and directions retrieved from governmental reports. In this article, an environmental data scientist and an artist-researcher reflect on their long-term art/science collaboration. They examine how certain models operate in forest ecologies. The concept of the “possible” by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) accompanies them in questioning the idea of a future that would be already predetermined or resolved. This is to offer alternative views of the climate emergency, notwithstanding its unprecedented importance and scale. Climate modelling remains open to change, as does the experience of various types of imagery in art. With the notion of the “data-image”, the authors delve into a local/micro incursion about tree carbon quantification visualisation techniques. This is discussed through an immersive outdoor art installation, according to experiential learning in place-based and arts-based interdisciplinary collaboration with digital media. The process of questioning how these images are produced and disseminated are ways to support visual literacy as it moves towards ecoliteracy. A thematic overview of responses by publics who experienced the art installations is included, to highlight the role of creativity and imagination with art in environmental education.

The emerging field of critical forest studies necessitates more-than-human approaches to knowledge creation with forestscapes that makes their complex and expansive relationships sensible. This calls for a new ecological reading of the research image, and in turn, a new image of research which attends to Indigenous and place-based connections across bodies, geographies and temporalities. This paper explores this new political ontology of the image as a process of ecologisation that works towards decolonising ends. By putting machine imaging technologies such as drone footage, thermal imaging and spectrograms into conversation with Indigenous painting and storytelling practices, we endeavour to express ecological processes which often go unseen within forests. Our speculative analysis of these images disrupts modernist separations of difference from sameness, body from environment, myth from science and imagining from empirical fact, proposing pedagogies which connect material and metaphysical dimensions of sensing and learning with forests.

The Sundarbans in the short stories by Dalit writer Shyamal Kumar Pramanik is not some geographical setting but is instead a living environmental being that reinvents the relationship between man and the nonhuman world. Dalit, a word translating to “oppressed” and applied to groups that were traditionally marginalised by the caste system of India, becomes a key category through which Pramanik explores the ethics of survival, belonging and ecological resistance. This paper argues that the mangrove forest in Pramanik’s narratives such as “Life in the Forest” and “In Dakshin Rai’s Land” operates as a responsive vegetal agent that shapes the social, ethical and ontological dynamics of forest life for marginalised communities. Drawing on Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking (2013), J. C. Ryan’s (2018) botanical imagination, Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory (2015) and Matthew Hall’s (2011) articulation of vegetal life as a moral force – this paper develops the concept of “Dalit Botanics” – a term for a theoretical framework that understands forest life as a pedagogical and ethical system in which trees act as epistemic agents, to theorise the Sundarbans as a sentient pedagogical ecology and to examine how caste and plant life co-constitute each other in Dalit experience.

Our collective futures depend on ecological stewardship rooted in both understanding of and care for the complex relationships of forest ecosystems. In particular, nuanced insight into forests’ entwined link with climate change is integral to policies and practices that can mitigate the worst climate impacts and sustain resilient multispecies communities. To this end, we foreground a creative approach to critical data literacies in the context of the biodiversity and climate crises. As part of the project Forest Carbon Futures, we present three explorations into different creative avenues for representing data, which share common aims of exploring the value of storytelling and situatedness in supporting more palpable connections between people, forests, stewardship responsibility, collective agency and more resilient futures. We position this inquiry as a valuable facet within an emerging field of Critical Forest Studies that holds promise in fostering ecologically-attuned understanding and care in relation to forest landscapes. Through interdisciplinary co-inquiry grounded in design and creation methodologies, we offer a constellation of interlinked themes, strategies and insights to inform transformative approaches to environmental education in our current era of ecological disconnect and rampant mis/disinformation.

This inquiry explores how eco-phenomenology reveals our relational engagement with forests inspiring a philosophy of education nurturing an ethos of mystery useful to teacher education, and the unsettling and decolonising of Western settler views of a Canadian forest. Through eco-phenomenological descriptions and interpretations, immediate lived experiences in a forest reveal three concepts: the sylvan fringe, the clearing and the care structure. Respectively, the ontological, epistemological and axiological domains of poetism, as a philosophy of education consist of physis (presencing-absencing), poetic knowledge (known-unknown) and dwelling (care structure). The relationship between Critical Forest Studies (CFS) and teacher environmental education is furthered by considering currents in environmental education and programming. CFS and poetism each resonate with the holistic current of environmental education and are well suited to the systematic programming of environmental education in teacher education.

Native forests in Aotearoa/New Zealand are at significant risk from the plant diseases myrtle rust and kauri dieback. Mobilising for Action (MFA) was a four-year transdisciplinary research project exploring the social dimensions of these pathogens and forest health through social science, humanities, creative arts and mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), with experts, artists, iwi/hapū (tribes/sub-tribes) and communities, empowering and supporting them in their efforts to address forest disease and promote forest health. A waka houora (double-hulled canoe) framework guided MFA to enable Western knowledge systems to operate alongside mātaurangā Māori, allowing for collaboration, cross-cultural learning and Indigenous empowerment through artistic research and related approaches. We propose that through various creative arts approaches, MFA built relationships and partnerships between Māori and other cultures, people and forests and disciplines, in addition to developing novel research methods in forest health through storytelling and narratives, offering new possibilities in critical forest studies and care.

This paper contributes to the emerging field of forest pedagogies by foregrounding mangroves as critical sites for learning with more-than-human entanglements in polluted worlds. Engaging with planetary strategies of corresponding, evidencing and circulating, we approach mangroves as complex, contested and vital ecotones. We explore how mangroves invite pedagogical attention to the lived realities of toxicity, urbanisation and forms of contamination in the emergence of the Anthropocene. We conceptualise mangroves as “unruly edges” that unsettle binary distinctions between forest and estuary, fresh and saline waters and call for an estimation, historisation and analyses of interspecies entanglements. This position grounds a critical pedagogical project of “riparian struggles,” fostering mutual learning among river-zone inhabitants across planetary contexts. Through a case study in the Guanabara Bay region of Rio de Janeiro, we present filmmaking as a threefold tactic that (1) situates mangrove struggles within broader historical geographies, (2) supports community-based and student learning with contaminated ecologies and (3) circulates tactics of mangrove struggles across academic, educational and public spheres. Ultimately, we propose mangroves as more-than-human classrooms where practices of habitability with toxicity can be cultivated, unsettling paradigms of ecological purity and expanding forest imaginaries within the field of Critical Forest Studies.

Placing Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” in conversation with Tuck and Yang’s work, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” this paper examines affective attachments to mass tree-planting efforts, which encourage unquestioned faith in these initiatives, serving to enable their persistence despite their consistent failures. This paper questions how affective attachments to mass tree-plantings teach publics to remain invested in the ability of settler-colonial institutions to solve climate crises, thereby ensuring that climate crises remain meaningfully unaddressed. Drawing together decolonial scholarship, affect theory, Indigenous thought and scholarship on environmental education, I demonstrate that mainstream tree-planting initiatives do not challenge the logics that permit forest and land degradation, but in fact, reproduce these logics. Rejecting a model which considers the act of planting trees as a success in and of itself, I instead ask what is missed when the planting of a tree is more important than the life of the forest.

This paper tells the story of the Kensington Food Forest, an urban ecological oasis where food production, forest growth, and grassroots activism intersect. Set within the Kensington Public Housing estates on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), it stands as a site of local regeneration against and beyond industrialised food and waste systems. Conducted with the Kensington Circular Economy Precinct Community Group, this research foregrounds the often-overlooked impact of grassroots initiatives within circular transitions by co-creating indicators that capture the ecological, social, and pedagogical values these spaces (re)generate. Together, the community and researchers position regenerative circularity not as a technological fix, but as an embodied, relational, and pedagogical praxis. By tracing the social-material flows and knowledge generation within this landscape, we show how communities learn with place, each other, and more-than-human worlds, revealing how Food Forest Pedagogies of Praxis can make circularity truly regenerative through practices of emancipation.

Responding to our shared concern about the plight of the Bunya tree (Araucaria bidwillii) due to dieback caused by soil-borne pathogens, this composite article brings together narrative reflections from eight contributors, who respond to prompts on confronting dieback through their unique lived experiences and professional practices. The responses offer insights for advocating a voice for the Bunya tree whilst safeguarding its cultural and ecological significance through education, advocacy, and agency. This article presents five insights gleaned from our collective responses. These are 1. honour traditional knowledge and custodianship; 2. build collaborative networks and capacity to respond to ecological decline; 3. leverage art for ecological awareness and action. 4. empower community and business leadership; 5. catalyse awareness into action. These insights are offered not as definitive solutions but as a framework for thinking and acting that may support navigating the challenges of tree dieback and regenerative forest practices.

Urban forest planning, conservation, and governance often rely on data generated through positivist research paradigms, producing insights and decisions that are not easily accessible or meaningful to diverse publics. These gaps in understanding emerge across the spectrum of governance – from top-down institutional and political structures to grassroots, community-led practices of care. From a critical forest studies perspective, such tensions are not merely epistemic but also onto-political dilemmas, reflecting conflicting ways of being, knowing, and relating within multispecies urban landscapes. Adopting an EcoSocial work approach within an Indigenist Standpoint Pedagogical framework, this research explores how transdisciplinary, EcoSocial, and de/anti-colonial approaches can reframe urban forest governance as a process of co-creation rather than control. We draw on intersubjective and relational methodologies to surface alternative ways of learning, healing, and co-existing with urban forests. We consider the concept of becoming-intersectional in assemblage to describe the entangled relationships between humans and more-than-human beings, institutions and communities, science and art, settler-colonial systems and de/anti-colonial possibilities. Notions of individual and collective (shared) values in governance, settler colonialism, wilderness and the wild, decoloniality and care, healing, and ferality are considered in the context of our individual and collective belonging on this continent that is now known as Australia. This approach supports the development of collaborative approaches for diverse disciplines in environmental education. We reflect on the pedagogical potential of combining scientific datasets with arts-based storytelling to foster multispecies relationality and environmental education during times of climate, social, political, and economic upheaval. In doing so, this study contributes to an emerging practice of critical urban forest studies, one that foregrounds co-becoming, de/anti-colonial entanglements, and the transformative potential of cross-disciplinary collaboration in environmental education.

The discourse on decolonising environmental education necessitates a critical engagement with Indigenous epistemologies and narratives that challenge dominant, Eurocentric paradigms of ecological knowledge. Sheela Tomy’s Valli (2022) offers a compelling literary intervention in this context, concentrating forest narratives and subverting colonial legacies of environmental exploitation. The analysis positions Valli as a narrative intervention that centres the Adivasi communities of Kerala’s Wayanad district. The fiction portrays the forest as a sentient, sovereign entity, challenging colonial and post-colonial forest policies that commodified nature through timber extraction and plantations, leading to ecological ruin and displacement. Guided by the insights of decolonial theorists such as Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar and Vandana Shiva, the article demonstrates how the fiction leverages folklore and testimony to validate oral histories, presenting them as crucial for understanding ecological crises. Valli enacts a pedagogical project that recentres Indigenous knowledge, aligning with environmental justice movements. The article concludes that decolonising environmental education requires fundamental ontological shift from human domination to coexistence. It advocates for a pedagogical model, exemplified by the fictional Kadoram school, which integrates Indigenous knowledge, advances multispecies empathy and recognises the land as a co-instructor. This approach thereby fosters pluriversality and a sustainable environmental ethic.