In 2011, the IUCNFootnote 1 partnered with the German government to launch one of the largest tree-planting campaigns in modern history: The Bonn Challenge. The Bonn Challenge is a global initiative aiming to restore 150 million hectares of deforested land by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030 (“About the Challenge,” 2020a). The challenge began as a response to global ecological crises: the website tells us that 30% of Earth’s arable land is degraded, affecting approximately 3 billion people (“About the Challenge,” 2020a). Upon first visit to the official website, a hopeful tone is conveyed. The homepage is bright, colourful, simple; illustrations of farmland, gardens and grazing livestock are nestled between expanses of trees stretching across rolling hills. The imagery evokes a children’s storybook. The challenge’s slogan declares itself in all caps in the lefthand corner: “RESTORE OURFootnote 2 FUTURE” (“About the Challenge,” 2020a). The headline text of the website proudly declares that the challenge “surpassed the 150-million-hectare milestone for pledges in 2017” (“About the Challenge,” 2020a; italics added). The challenge boasts 74 unique pledges, spanning across 61 countries. They declare that these pledges (ranging from national governments to bird conservancy organisations) are currently restoring “210 million hectares of degraded and deforested lands” (“Why is the Challenge Important,” 2020c). Between the United States and Canada alone, 34,100,000 hectares have been pledged for planting (“Current Pledges,” 2020b). Bianca Jagger is the official ambassador. With partnerships spanning the globe, The Bonn Challenge offers many reasons for hope, promising a “nature-based solution” that will transform “landscapes and the lives of people worldwide” (“About the Challenge,” 2020a). Global tree-planting efforts are well underway!
Introduction: Where are all the trees?
The Bonn Challenge, and many similar initiatives, make clear that mainstream environmental movements — typically spearheaded by international and intergovernmental organisations — and the public education campaigns that accompany them, are insolubly attached to tree-planting efforts. They loom large in ourFootnote 3 eco-social imagination as a solution for climate crises. Within mainstream environmental movements and eco-imaginaries, the weight of the tree cannot be overstated. As Fred Pearce (Reference Pearce2022) outlined in his investigation into the popularity of tree-planting initiatives, “Everybody likes trees. There is no anti-tree lobby” (Pearce, Reference Pearce2022). Mobilised to signify progress and hope for the future, it is difficult to be in opposition to mass tree-planting initiatives, which harness the full emotional and cultural significance of the tree. In recent decades, mass tree-planting campaigns continuously appeared as a salve for woes and worries associated with climate change. These initiatives tend to be simplistically framed as reliably straight forward “win-win–win” scenarios because, as journalist Benji Jones (Reference Jones2021) argues, “what’s not to like about trees?” (Jones, Reference Jones2021). These initiatives perpetuate an alluring fantasy that we can “plant our way out of climate change” rather than engage with more challenging questions of global multispecies precarity born from the ecological violence of colonialism, or even doing the work of slashing greenhouse emissions.
Since The Bonn Challenge began, other contemporary initiatives continue to be spearheaded by international and intergovernmental organisations. In 2020, the World Economic Forum launched the One Trillion Trees Initiative, which gained widespread support, including a pledge from Donald Trump in 2020 to plant a billion trees across the U.S. (Pearce, Reference Pearce2022). In 2021, under Biden, the U.S. provided funding to the Forest Service to plant more than one billion trees over the next nine years (Noor, Reference Noor2023). These massive initiatives continue to gain popularity as the effects of climate change become more palpable across the United States. The government of Phoenix, Arizona — a city infamous for heat waves — announced that it “intends to plant 200 trees a mile in select areas, and has invested $1.5 million into the plan” (Noor, Reference Noor2023). Longevity of success is yet to be seen. As these pledges continue, Peter Clark et al. (Reference Clark, D’Amato, Palik, Woodall, Dubuque, Edge, Hartman, Fitts, Janowiak, Harris, Montgomery, Reinikainen and Zimmerman2023) found that as recently as 2023, most nurseries where seedlings would be purchased for these initiatives had no stock available that were adapted to survive harsh local conditions. The researchers also found an extreme lack of “future-climate-suitable” seedling varieties, indicating that the long-lasting health of trees is not necessarily prioritised (Clark et al., Reference Clark, D’Amato, Palik, Woodall, Dubuque, Edge, Hartman, Fitts, Janowiak, Harris, Montgomery, Reinikainen and Zimmerman2023, p. 576).
Beyond the U.S., international investment in tree-planting initiatives remains enormous. Still, most initiatives lack comprehensive follow up, revealing an assumption that planting trees is always net-positive. A consequence of cultural popularity is thus a paradoxical lack of inquiry (Pearce, Reference Pearce2022). Therefore, every year, due to a lack of comprehensive auditing, “millions of dollars” are spent on reforesting landscapes, even though typically “only a minority of seedlings survive” leading to a “great deal of wasted effort — and money” (Pearce, Reference Pearce2022). Lalisa Duguma of World Agroforestry (Reference Duguma, Minang, Aynekulu, Carsan, Nzyoka, Bah and Jamnadass2020) asserts that mass tree planting persists despite a paucity of evidence for success because “performance indicators are often the number of trees planted or area planted” rather than long-term survival rate, because most projects last three years or less (Duguma et al., Reference Duguma, Minang, Aynekulu, Carsan, Nzyoka, Bah and Jamnadass2020, p. 5). This standard timeline for study defies the fact that, typically, carbon retention and sequestration on re-forested sites does not begin for “at least 10 years after they’re planted” with some estimating that “forests need to have a permanence of 100 years to be effective carbon stores” (Fairs, Reference Fairs2021). Duguma, like others, argues that rather than an effective strategy to combat climate change, tree-planting schemes are often examples of “greenwashing” that function to promote “an image of governments or corporations as environmentally friendly” (Duguma et al., Reference Duguma, Minang, Aynekulu, Carsan, Nzyoka, Bah and Jamnadass2020, p. 16).
Rejecting that greenwashing by corporations and governments is the complete answer to the question of the persistence of these initiatives, this article draws from affect theory to examine what affective attachments remain fastened to the act of planting trees that function to keep up a public’s faith in the success of these initiatives, despite overwhelming evidence of their failures. The aim of this article, rather than providing an analysis of why mass tree-plantings fail, is to examine the “affective atmospheres” that surround such initiatives in order to understand how these initiatives can continue to be felt as successful despite persistent failures (Rousell et al., Reference Rousell, Mayes, Verlie, Wyn, Cahill and Cuervo2024, p. 6; Simmons, Reference Simmons2017). While it might be easy to attribute this persistence to the greenwashing, I suspect that the fact of their persistence is more nuanced, and that to fully understand the continuance of mass tree-planting initiatives, we must examine them, not just for the PR they generate for governments and corporations, but as an eco-cultural strategy that generates a hopeful, yet norm-adhering and non-disruptive affect(s) for a (settler) public, allowing us to engage in well-intentioned environmentalism without questioning our place in the world of environmental crises (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017). Therefore, through this article I aim to make clear that the framing of mass tree-planting as always a worthwhile and successful endeavour is, in fact, a site of eco-cultural education that serves to extend the power of settler-colonial regimes. By intervening, I demonstrate both why mass tree-plantings are alluring, and to what ends they contribute. Critically examining these affective attachments may be an effective first step in shifting mainstream environmental movements, and popular education in a more nuanced direction, one that is shaped by Indigenous onto-epistemologies that already recognise the complex relationality inherent in instances of restoration (Salmón, Reference Salmón2000; Simmons, Reference Simmons2017; Williams, Reference Williams2023). I ask: if not the establishment of forests, what is achieved that keeps us returning to tree-planting initiatives? What is the promise that we are attached to and invested in, and how does it allow for the act of planting trees to become more important than their longevity?
Analytical framework and structure
This article questions how mass tree-planting initiatives are able to continue despite their overwhelming failures, through an examination of the affects attached to them within eco-cultural atmospheres dominated by Western settler-colonial nations. This affective eco-cultural atmosphere teaches (an often well-meaning settler) public how to think about climate crises, where to invest their labour in order to generate a hopeful affect regarding the possibility of solutions and provides a logical structure through which tree planting becomes intelligible as the most effective, or best form of action. Bringing together decolonial scholarship and affect theory, this paper contends that the trend of mass tree-planting is an explicit instance of “cruel optimism” (Berlant, Reference Berlant2011).
Throughout this piece, I re-assert the ongoingness of the settler-colonial project, upholding Patrick Woolf’s (Reference Woolf2006) claim that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. As a structure, settler colonialism must be analysed for its continuity, and how it remains culturally embedded enough to be rendered invisible, as invisibilityFootnote 4 enables its persistence. This article does not accept that settler colonialism is merely an historical element of emergence of what is typically referred to as the Western world, but contends that it is alive and well, existing as an ongoing framework and strategy required for the continuation of the Western world itself.
As an analytical framework, cruel optimism offers a mechanism for understanding a type of relation wherein a desired object is impossible to obtain because of what results from the attachment to the object and the desire for it (Berlant, Reference Berlant2011). In instances of cruel optimism, the object desired is rarely a concrete, singular thing, but an atmosphere attached to normative and dominant ways of being in and knowing the world. By mobilising the concept of cruel optimism, I plumb what is affectively at work within the attachment between mainstream environmental movements and tree-planting initiatives that works to ensure their continuance despite overwhelming and well-documented failures.
In order to engage in an analysis of the affective and cultural politicsFootnote 5 surrounding tree-planting initiatives, it is necessary to understand how mass tree-planting initiatives serve to extend and re-invest subjects in the promises offered by hegemonic settler-colonial land logics, more than they serve to combat climate change. It is necessary to analyse their popularity not because of their ability to deliver results, but because of the affects generated through them, how they create an atmosphere of hope and renewed faith — for the individuals and institutions occupying the white, masterful, subject position — in the settler-colonial regime. This subject position is foreclosed to most, yet simultaneously constructed as the primary subjectivity of those engaged in ecological restoration (Baldwin, Reference Baldwin2009, Curnow & Helferty, Reference Curnow, Helferty and Dhillon2022, Erikson, Reference Erickson2020).
To begin I will flesh out a phrase used repeatedly throughout this article: settler-colonial land logics. Doing so will make clear how this specific prescriptive system for relating to land, though born in early-modern colonial pursuits, remains at the core of the settler-colonial nations’ approach to climate crises. Then, I will return to the concept of cruel optimism, and The Bonn Challenge more closely, illustrating that attachments to mass tree-planting reflects an unwillingness to address ecological realities, revealing the fundamental incongruency between the affects produced through tree-planting initiatives and the material effects of these initiatives. This cruel optimistic attachment keeps populations invested in the continuation of settler-colonial regimes and faithful to settler-colonial land logics as they persist even (and especially) within mainstream environmental movements — movements that function primarily as “moves towards innocence” for those who partake in them (Tuck & Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012, p. 1). I remain curious as to how a cruel optimistic attachment ensures that mainstream tree-planting initiatives do not challenge the logics that permit mass ecological degradation, but in fact reinforce faith in these logics, and thus advance a fiction that settler-colonial regimes may be able to find a solution to climate crises that does not require the destruction of the regime itself (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017).
Settler-colonial land logics
The ecological effects of colonisation throughout what has come to be called Canada and the United States are thoroughly documented (Bacon, Reference Bacon2018; Churchill, Reference Churchill2002; Curley & Smith, Reference Curley and Smith2024; Lightfoot et al., Reference Lightfoot, Panich, Schneider and Gonzalez2013). Historically, colonisation throughout the Americas brought on declines in biomass and biodiversity “on a level never previously encountered” (Lightfoot et al., Reference Lightfoot, Panich, Schneider and Gonzalez2013, p. E4). As important as the material changes experienced by pre-existing ecological worlds, are the ontological, epistemological and cosmological land related logics that were developed in the laboratory of these violent ventures, logics that still shape the contemporary possibilities for eco-social relations in settler-colonial contexts (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Paradies, Wooltorton, Guimond, Jackson-Barrett and Blaise2023).
The logic of land relations originating in historic settler-colonial pursuits were shaped largely by the imposition of hierarchical dualisms, dualisms that remain indispensable to the continuation of settler-colonial regimes (Plumwood, Reference Plumwood2003; Williams, Reference Williams2023).Footnote 6 These dualisms create relationships of “domination wherein one term is privileged, becoming the hegemonic ‘master subject’ while the other is denied autonomy and value in a variety of ways” (Morgan, Reference Morgan2025, p. 16). Re-constructing the ecological world through dualisms invisibilizes the particularities of each element co-constituting the ecological world, and instead offers a vision of the environment as “a homogenous entity available for instrumental use” (Morgan, Reference Morgan2025, p. 17).
Dualistic thinking establishes settler-colonial regimes as the “master” entitled to control all, making the dispossession of Land — the most important aspect of a settler-colonial venture — unquestionable (Plumwood, Reference Plumwood2003, p. 190; Tuck, McKenzie & McCoy Reference Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy2014). This dispossession is materially achieved through the violent removal of Indigenous peoples from their Lands, and their (attempted) extermination, establishing the possibility for the ontological severing of Land from its pre-existing web of human and more-than-human relations, rendering Land into inert field for resource extraction (Tuck et al., Reference Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy2014; Simmons, Reference Simmons2017)Footnote 7 . In settler-colonial regimes, Indigenous peoples, at best, are “in the way” and thus, “over time and through law and policy” Indigenous peoples, communities, and their claims to land must be destroyed so that Land can be “recast as property and resource” (Tuck & Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012, p. 6). As opposed to Land, property is that which can be settled, extracted from, and owned; the colonial venture works to reframe all humanFootnote 8 relations to Land as “the relationship of the owner to his property” (Tuck & Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012 p. 5). The ontological move that renders Land into property is a process of deadening (an enforcement of the subject/object dualism), which reinforces the supremacy of the masterful position, as he (an individual or institution) who acts upon inert land (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017; Simpson, Reference Simpson2016). As Audra Simpson (Reference Simpson2016) puts it, in settler colonial regimes, land is treated “like a dead body to be extracted from” (p. 6) rather than an agential player within a system of relations. Tuck and Yang (Reference Tuck and Yang2012) make clear that “Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth…Land is what is most valuable, contested, required…This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation” (p. 5). Contemporary tree-planting initiatives reassert exactly this domination, acting upon land as its master, ensuring that it lacks unique features other than that of being owned.
Considering that settler colonialism is an ongoing force, continual assertion of the ownership of land — physically, legally, discursively and culturally — by settler institutions must be understood as a requirement for regime continuation. Invisibilized settler-colonial land logics make this possible through ongoing “simplification, dehumanization and domination” (Aung, Reference Aung2025, 1). The contemporary possibilities for eco-social relations within settler regimes, including relations aimed at combatting climate change, thus remain defined through these logics, built through dualisms and based on principles of ownership, occupation, and appropriation of resources (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017). This emerges as a denial of the inherent, particular and unique liveliness of land, which comes with a wholesale denial of the existence of alternative cosmologies (Salmón, Reference Salmón2000). The continuation of this logic is evident in the affective atmosphere surrounding mass tree-planting efforts, as these efforts demonstrate a level of ownership over land wherein the particular needs of the land are often backgrounded by the impulse to signal oneself as master of the environment. The ability to quickly flood the zone with trees thus stands to represent man’s power and dominance over the land, rather than interdependence with it.
Beyond being understood structurally, settler colonialism deserves to be understood as an “ecological regime” (Erikson, Reference Erickson2020, p. 114) giving rise to a “coerced formation of specific, possessive structures of socio-ecological relations” (Morgan, Reference Morgan2025, p. 28, italics original). By “regime” here, I implicate not only the political and governmental structures of the settler-colonial nation, but also acknowledge that the regime extends into the structuring of language, thought, and therefore, what is able to be imagined as a solution for climate crises (Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987). It is clear that settler-colonial land logics not only created the possibility for the present climate crises, but also structure the field of ecological imagination offered to address these crises. That is, these logics permit not only what is clearly extractive behaviour, such as deforestation, but also structure “well meaning” hegemonic approaches to climate crises. What is able to be imagined, and therefore what is offered as viable solutions, is shaped by a politics of nature that is tethered to social power (Baldwin, Reference Baldwin2009, p. 428).
Furthermore, Tuck and Yang (Reference Tuck and Yang2012) contend that we must become aware of how “…settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these perspectives — repackaged as data and findings — are activated in order to rationalise and maintain unfair social structures” (Tuck & Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012, p. 2). With this in mind, in the case of scientific and discursive approaches to ecological crises, only certain perspectives are understood as data; workable, applicable knowledge. These certain perspectives are the ones that reproduce settler-colonial land relations, while going unnamed as functioning towards this end. Avoiding the naming of settler-colonial structures ensures that what is considered “data” and “findings” can also take on an air of neutrality and objectivity, rather than be revealed as a specific set of logistical constraints (Bohensky & Maru, Reference Bohensky and Maru2011; Tuck & Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012). As Tuck and Yang (Reference Tuck and Yang2012) continue, “One of the notable characteristics of settler-colonial states is the refusal to recognize themselves as such… Settler colonialism is made invisible within settler societies, and uses institutional apparatuses to ‘cover its tracks’” (p. 7). The ongoing refusal for self-recognition within settler-colonial regimes requires the participation of institutional apparatuses, from courts of law to mainstream environmental movements. Approaches to climate crises that do not combat settler-colonial continuation must be recognised as tools for reinforcing the regime not just by ecological force, but also by the creation of public affective attachments, in the form of renewed faith in the regime as saviour.
Settler-colonial land logics are not only onto-epistemological systems for permitting destruction and degradation; they also provided the original framework from which conservation movements throughout the United States and Canada arose (Curnow & Helferty, Reference Curnow, Helferty and Dhillon2022; Morales et al., Reference Morales, Lee, Newberry and Bailey2023; Taylor, Reference Taylor2016; Taylor, Reference Taylor2017, p. 1453). As Erikson argues in his study of conservation attempts within the Canadian boreal forest, “Ecological protection has come to shape the political life of colonialism” (Erikson, Reference Erickson2020, p. 112). As ecological crises escalate, settler-colonial regimes justify their continued existence through executing forms of environmental protection that enable settler futures. As Erikson (Reference Erickson2020) continues,
The environmental crisis (as defined by the discourse of the Anthropocene) serves as an impetus for the settler colonial state to look to the future, a future in which the crisis has been mitigated or transformed, as a form of justification for colonial dispossession. This becomes part of the broad structure of colonialism, in which the state, environmental groups, and corporations are bent on approving settler jurisdiction in the interests of (supposedly) greener future. (p. 113)
By engaging in ecological discourses which frame the future as a site of victory over climate collapse, settler-colonial regimes justify their past existence and simultaneously provide proof for the necessity of their continuance. In framing the ecological world in general, or the reforested zone, as a site where we “RESTORE OUR FUTURE” (“About the Challenge,” 2020a) rather than disrupt the historical and inherent violence that gave rise to a specific future considered worthy of restoration, we perpetuate an environmentalism shaped through settler-colonial land logics that justifies its own structure in the past, present, and future. We engage in the reproduction of normative, settler claims on futurity, taking actions that do not promote equitable sustainability, but “settler sustainability” (Tuck et al., Reference Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy2014, p. 5).
While it is not my aim to wholesale advocate against conservation or restoration, it is necessary to make clear that even conservation, mass tree-planting, or “sustainability education” more broadly often maintains fundamental dualistic and hierarchic divides between human and environment, uplifting humans as master stewards of the passive environment (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017; Stein, Reference Stein2019). These strategies are then useful not solely for the environmental protection they may accomplish, but for how they justify and re-impose “settler-colonial vision” (Erikson, Reference Erickson2020, p. 112), encouraging renewed faith in the regime from environmentalists while providing a “move towards innocence” for both institutions and invested individuals (Tuck & Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012, 1).
Restoring hope: The Bonn challenge, cruel optimism, and the allure of mass tree-planting
Berlant (Reference Berlant2011) states that an optimistic attachment becomes cruel when “the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.” (Berlant, Reference Berlant2011, 1). Within these pervasive, yet difficult to identify attachments, the object of desire is “an obstacle to your flourishing” though it often cannot be felt as such, because of the promise it holds (Berlant, Reference Berlant2011, p. 1). Bringing the analytical lens of cruel optimism to the paradoxical persistence of mass tree-plantings allows us to ask the question: how does the object — tree-planting initiatives — that draws our attachment, work to impede the aim — combatting climate change — that brought us towards the object initially?
There is not one singular reason why tree-planting initiatives overwhelmingly fail. But, looking at the most prevalent reasons for their failure: (1) establishment of monoculture plantations rather than restoring biodiversity; (2) ignoring local land use and community needs; and (3) lack of aftercare (Duguma et al., Reference Duguma, Minang, Aynekulu, Carsan, Nzyoka, Bah and Jamnadass2020), reminds us that the desire to provide quick visual indications of solution and progress without systemic disruption of the status quo will always impede the aim that brought us to tree-planting initially.
Conversely, Dr Jennifer Grenz, an Indigenous scientist specialising in invasive species management and ecological restoration, explains that an Indigenous worldview that sees the “world as a series of relationships” is better suited to face the complex challenges of ecosystem restoration (Grenz, Reference Grenz2020, iv). This is because, within an Indigenous worldview humans cannot understand themselves as outside of the ecosystems they work with, or as overseers of the natural world (Grenz, Reference Grenz2020). From an Indigenous worldview, ecological restoration is understood as ecological “reconciliation” requiring care, long-term commitment, and an understanding that humans act “inside the ecosystem as an equal relation” rather than as masters presiding over ecological problems (Grenz, Reference Grenz2020, 10). Furthermore, “indigenous research methods” are starkly differentiated from the “western scientific method” for how they allow us to “depart from research confined by the guise of objectivity” (Grenz, Reference Grenz2020, p. 3–15) encouraging practitioners instead to remain grounded in the core tenets of “respect, relationality and reciprocity” (Grenz, Reference Grenz2020, Wilson, Reference Wilson2008). Indigenous, place-based knowledge is the necessary foundation from which to engage in reforestation (or forest education) unless we are to repeat and re-impose coloniality (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Paradies, Wooltorton, Guimond, Jackson-Barrett and Blaise2023, 269–271; Pacini-Ketchabaw, Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw2013, 357). An approach to reforestation or ecological restoration that foregrounds Indigenous research methods and is born from an Indigenous world view would make it impossible to imagine planting monocultures, not having integrated care strategies, and ignoring local land use, the three most common reasons that tree plantings tend to fail. Yet, because this approach to research and restoration works against the colonial regime, it remains scarcely integrated into tree-planting programmes.Footnote 9
It is notable that “nearly 80% of commitments to the Bonn Challenge involve planting monoculture tree plantations or a limited mix of trees that produce products such as fruit and rubber rather than restoring natural forests” (Jordan, Reference Jordan2020). Because of classification regulations — for example within the UN FAO, which classifies “plantations” as “forests” — large stands of monocultures that do not increase biodiversity, or provide adequate ecosystem services are formally considered forests and can be used as evidence for the success of these initiatives (Forsyth, Reference Forsyth2021). Strategies geared towards reinvesting faith in institutional apparatuses and maintaining their power, rather than restoring biodiverse and healthy forests ensure that the promise of tree-planting initiatives is never met, while creating a positive feedback loop reassuring the public that these initiatives are the best hope to achieve the desires that these very initiatives make impossible to achieve. In fact, many failed tree-planting campaigns, rather than simply stalling, end up contributing to regional heat increases, as mismanaged land lowers the albedo effect (Buis, Reference Buis2019).
Berlant reminds us that the object of desire is never really a static thing (Berlant, Reference Berlant2011, p. 16). They contend that the object of desire is better understood as “a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us” where “proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises” (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Gregg and Seigworth2010, p. 93). So the object is never just the object; tree-planting is never just tree-planting, but is the cluster of promises and possibilities that surround and are associated with the object. In this case, the cluster of promises we want tree-planting to make possible could be proof that global ecological crises can be addressed without societal disruption; that all along solving climate change has been as simple as planting trees wherever they fit. The cluster of promises could be the idea that the powers that be know how, and are willing to combat climate collapse, rather than simply reassert their power through popular ecological events that do nothing to change climatic realities. The promise could be that settler-colonial land logics are equipped to dismantle the systems they originated and still function through. There are many possible promises within the cluster that keep us tethered to the object, while ensuring an inability for its aims to be realised (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Gregg and Seigworth2010, p. 93). Above all else, the cluster of promises attached to tree-planting tells us that there is nothing wrong with the onto-epistemology offered by settler colonialism for relating to the ecological, more-than-human world, and that this system can solve our present, inequitably distributed crises.
It is interesting to note that this “cluster of promises” is typically found in association with prevailing norms, ideas and institutions, what Berlant refers to as “the good life” (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Gregg and Seigworth2010, p. 93, 97). As they explain, the utility of cruel optimism resides in how it prompts us to “track the affective attachment to what we call “the good life,” which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it” (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Gregg and Seigworth2010, p. 97, italics added). Attachment to these clusters of promises both wears out subjects materially, while also being the site from which we find our conditions of possibility: the scaffolding that dictates the contours of what it is possible to imagine. This attachment to the good life is exactly what we face when looking critically at mass tree-planting initiatives. The promise — that settler-colonial nations and their preferred environmental strategies are equipped to solve climate change by straightforward addition of trees — wears out subjects by forcing us to remain in continuous and unresolved ecological crises, as it simultaneously offers a narrow vision of what is imaginable as a viable solution to climate catastrophe. Furthermore, subjects that are otherwise motivated to contribute solutions to the climate crises are worn out, not only by being forced to remain in a world defined by ecological collapse, but also by being constricted in their imagination and strategy by the structures imposed on them through coloniality. This is evident in well-documented experiences of Indigenous and climate activists of colour who continually fight within and against colonial, white supremacist cultures even within youth climate movements (Abhayawickrama et al., Reference Abhayawickrama, Mayes, Villafaña, Lobo, Mayes and Bedford2024). By structuring what is im/possible to imagine, we remain tethered to a certain vision of a good life, in this case, one that is promised to us by re-investment in the settler-colonial regime, which excludes the very possibility of achieving the “good life” from the majority of subjects. It is the attachment to what tree-planting initiatives promise that will both keep masses invested in these initiatives, while also allowing the material failure of these initiatives to go either unnoticed, or to become less important than the affect generated through the attachment to the cluster of promises.
Tree-planting initiatives promise that climate change can be addressed without fundamentally disrupting the power of the settler-colonial nation state. Tree-planting promises that centuries of biodiversity wrecked through colonial ventures, private ownership, and capital flows can be replaced through means of substitution. Tree-planting promises that there is always more to be extracted from the land, whether that be in the form of timber, or hope. It promises that settler-colonial land logics — which refuse intimacy with the web of relations that co-constitute the ecological world — are capable of solving the crises that arise from this original refusal (Grenz, Reference Grenz2020; Bohensky & Maru, Reference Bohensky and Maru2011; Ford & Martinez, Reference Ford and Martinez2000). The solution now must be to turn to logic systems which stand in defiance of settler-colonial land logics, such as those offered by Indigenous ecological knowledge (commonly referred to as TEK, or traditional ecological knowledge) which emphasises connectedness and relatedness between human and more-than-human components of ecological systems (Pierotti & Wildcat, Reference Pierotti and Wildcat2000; Taylor, Reference Taylor2017; Williams, Reference Williams2023; Martin, Reference Martin2017). In this “kincentric ecology” humans are understood as members of an extended ecological family or kinship network, rather than masters of any ecology (Salmón, Reference Salmón2000, 1327). TEK and its worldview is necessary not only as a guide for restoration and reforestation, but as an onto-epistemology that stands in generative opposition to settler-colonial methods for ecological interaction (Pierotti & Wildcat, Reference Pierotti and Wildcat2000; Salmón, Reference Salmón2000).
Beyond understanding what tree-planting promises, what does it allow us to (not) do? Attachments to the promises of tree-plantings and its symbolic significance allows powerful settler-colonial nations/institutions to not do what is necessary to actually address climate crises in a mode that would bring about formidable results. It is the feelings generated from the attachment to the action, rather than what materially results from the action itself, that ensures that mass tree-planting remains uplifted as a popular solution to climate change. Mass tree-planting efforts are part of a menu of “solutions” that perpetuate settler-colonial land logics, rather than disrupt them. Yet, it is the disruption of these logics that would be necessary if we were to actually obtain the object we purport to desire to obtain. Therefore, in an explicit example of cruel optimism, it is the affective attachment to what tree planting promises that interferes with the very possibility of obtaining the object that tree planting will allegedly result in.
This attachment remains so persistent, because as Berlant argues, we cannot risk losing the object and all that it promises, because these promises animate our ways of knowing how to be, and how to be in the world. They state, “the fear is that the loss of the object or scene of promising itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything” (Berlant 2010, p. 94). The widespread affective attachment to the tree as a saviour lightens the emotional load of living through climate change. The promise attached gives us the sensation that we can do something without disrupting the fundamental eco-social fabric of Western life. If we face the fiction and reveal that mass tree-planting does not work, hope is lost. If we lose the tree, what other symbol of hope does mainstream environmentalism have left? Berlant continues, “object loss appears to entail the loss of an entire world and therefore a loss of confidence about how to live on…” (Berlant, Reference Berlant2011, p.16)
The Bonn Challenge asserts that it surpassed its goals for pledges in 2017, yet looking closely, a chasm appears. Focusing on American efforts alone, despite pledges of tens of millions of hectares for reforestation, the reporting is troubling. In the most up to date report, the United States lists that 17 million hectares are under restoration, but also reports that zero tons of carbon dioxide has been sequestered, zero jobs have been created and that there are zero hectares of key biodiversity regions under restoration (“United States of America”). Nevertheless, in its 2020 report, The Bonn Challenge claims a “tremendous success” stating that their efforts have “set such a tremendous ball rolling” (Ivetić et al., Reference Ivetić, Devetaković, Kerkez Janković and Tsoy2021, p. 3). Uplifting pledges while there remains a lack of reported results not only casts doubt on the success of The Bonn Challenge, but invites curiosity regarding what is even able to be considered success. The 2020 report states that they have surpassed the 150 million hectare goal for pledges — but pledges do not reforest or restore land.
So what is at work here? What is the success, if not the long-living tree? How can the challenge claim success while demonstrating failure? Through the lens of cruel optimism it is clear that the promise — the pledge — is counted as success, while the materiality of forests falls to the wayside. Pledges form a commitment to the future, pledges enable settler nations to frame themselves as those who are in control, those who are crafting a future wherein the regime solves the problems born from the logics that made the regime both historically and contemporarily possible. An indispensable element of this claim on the future is ensuring uninterrupted public investment in the competency of the settler nation, in its role as master. A public sense of hope that “we” are doing something, is enough to ensure that these initiatives continue. Yet, the promise that we are doing something ensures that nothing will be done. The Bonn challenge is successful because of the feeling it produces, which stands completely independent from the results it produces. In the words of Berlant, it has misrecognised “promise as an achievement” (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Gregg and Seigworth2010 p. 97). Rather than a forest which may exceed understanding, we are able to remain comfortably within our field of understanding by misrecognising the promise of pledges as achievements. That we understand promise itself as achievement is also what helps ensure that when trees are planted, they aren’t usually taken care of afterwards… Why take care, if we have already achieved?
The cruel optimistic attachment produces the conditions for an extractive relationship, wherein hope and faith in the settler-colonial regime is extracted from the planting site. Mass tree-planting is an extractivist affair, not exploiting reserves of oil or wood, but extracting affect, that all the same functions to reaffirm the masterful subject position of the settler nation. Despite claims of regeneration, mass tree-planting replicates the same “genocide of relations” carried out in mass clearing efforts, degrading the very land that may become the object of reforestation later on (Manning, Reference Manning2013, p. 15). What is produced from the attachment is the fantasy that solutions to climate change do not necessitate the dismantling of settler futurity.
Berlant reminds us that “shifts in affective atmosphere are not equal to changing the world. They are, here, only pieces of an argument about the centrality of optimistic fantasy to surviving in zones of compromised ordinariness” (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Gregg and Seigworth2010, p. 116). This ordinariness is the onto-epistemological violence that deadens the ecological world and defines life in the settler-colonial Anthropocene reality. We shift our affective atmosphere through engaging with tree-plantings that do not change the world, but in fact, reaffirm the world as is, and reproduce it into the future. It is this attachment to the optimistic fantasy that ensures that the public is continually reinvested in the settler regime and its logics, rather than demanding an alternative logical structure from which to approach the ecological crises that we reside within and contribute to. In the case of mass tree-planting, what is extracted from the environment is not a material resource, but one that is just as important to maintaining colonial control: it is hope and renewed faith in the possibility that the settler-colonial regime can provide adequate answers to the problems that it itself originated. Environmental education and associated movements that uplift mass tree-planting initiatives thus function to not only perpetuate settler-colonial land logics, but to reproduce an affective attachment to the regime in times of crises, framing it always as the authority that knows best. They produce a feeling of hope that climate change can be solved by faithful adherence to solutions whose main function is not to solve, but to ensure that the regime is not disrupted.
Conclusion
Rampant deforestation deserves serious, and critical attention by environmentalists, educators, governments and intergovernmental organisations. The world’s forests, like many other ecosystems, are vulnerable and at risk. Despite the allure of mass tree-planting initiatives, viable solutions are not as simple as planting trees wherever they may fit. Examined through the lens of cruel optimism, it is clear that while mass tree-planting efforts stand in the way of achieving desires that bring individuals towards them, they are incredibly successful in achieving an alternative set of goals which remain largely unnamed. Mass tree-plantings are part of a crafted fiction of eco-salvation that affectively reinvest populations in the power and authority of settler-colonial institutions (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017, p. 1453). The allure of mass tree-planting is not found in its material success rate, but in its power to placate individuals into seeking climate change solutions from the institutions that are responsible for global climate realities. In calling to RESTORE OUR FUTURE, The Bonn Challenge may be giving up its secret. With the longevity of forests ignored and pledges uplifted as success, The Bonn Challenge does, in fact, RESTORE OUR FUTURE, the future of settler colonialism.
Rather than accepting hope extracted from the moment where root meets dirt, may we learn to turn towards the forest itself, and its traditional kin, for frameworks for learning and restoration (Grenz, Reference Grenz2020; Pacini-Ketchabaw, Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw2013, 356). May we look towards entanglement, complex relationality, and interdependence as guiding principles for forest restoration, and environmental education, rather than the logics of ownership and substitution (Simmons, Reference Simmons2017). Forest restoration cannot be meaningfully achieved through a system that is not willing to learn and operate from Indigenous knowledges, that is not willing to become intimate with the forest as a web of relations, that is not willing to recognise Land as sentient, meaning-making and ungovernable (Williams, Reference Williams2023, p. 323; Salmón, Reference Salmón2000; O’Flaherty, Davidson-Hunt & Manseau Reference O’Flaherty, Davidson-Hunt and Manseau2008). These turns in strategy would undermine the possibility for settler-colonial regimes to continue into the future, and would instead prioritise the realisation of “Indigenous planetary futures” in which “Indigenous knowledge systems, lifeways and laws form the epistemological, ontological, and axiological bedrock of place/s and the human and more-than-human societies that inhabit them” (Williams, Reference Williams2023, p. 323). This, and no less than this, is exactly what our present crises demands. Forest restoration must be guided by Indigenous communities based on their wisdomFootnote 10 , protocols, and relational standpoints (O’Flaherty, Davidson-Hunt & Manseau 2008; Simmons, Reference Simmons2017; Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Paradies, Wooltorton, Guimond, Jackson-Barrett and Blaise2023). Rather than restoring our future, restoration must take on the task of decolonising, of returning the future and the Land on which it will come into being, to those (human and more-than) from whom it was taken.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the generosity of feedback, guidance and accommodations provided by the peer reviewers and editorial team for this special issue of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education. I acknowledge the land I have spent time with, specifically wetlands, bogs, and marshes, for helping me think differently about the role of the tree in my own eco-social imagination. I acknowledge Indigenous and decolonial activists, elders, scholars and thinkers who have helped me to understand other ways of being in and with the world.
Ethical statement
Nothing to note.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors
Author Biography
Moss M.R. Berke is an independent researcher-writer originally from New York and currently living in Palermo, Sicily. An Erasmus Mundus scholarship recipient, she has a master’s degree in Gender Studies from both Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and University of Granada, Spain. Her research interests include feminist and decolonial approaches to contemporary eco-affects, more-than-human conviviality in times of crises, eco-feminism, and the generative troubling of progress. Outside of her research, Moss is a poet, environmental activist, and multidisciplinary artist.
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