Introduction
Critical Forest Studies is a growing body of scholarship concerned with how relational practices and understandings can be developed through critical, creative, and pedagogical engagements with forests. The co-editors of this Special Issue are members and conveners of the Critical Forest Studies Collaboratory, an international collective of researchers, artists, educators, and practitioners. Founded in 2024, the Collaboratory hosts ongoing “wild seeding” events, in-person and hybrid workshops, seminars and symposia, and curates a “digital planting” webspace which gathers relational practices with forests from many different parts of the world (www.criticalforestlab.com). This Special Issue grows from the work of the Collaboratory and extends its call for work that engages with forest communities and ecosystems in relational, reciprocal, and holistic ways.
As the first Special Issue to establish a global field for critical forest studies, we called for worldwide contributions with the shared aims of:
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1. Gathering the multiplicity of CFS approaches emerging across cultural, geographic, and onto-epistemological contexts;
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2. Opening new questions and problematics calling for transdisciplinary studies of forest sentience, sovereignty, and relationality; and
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3. Introducing new theories and techniques for mobilising CFS as a field that connects Indigenous and decolonial studies, environmental education, ecological philosophy, critical plant and animal studies, regenerative arts and design, more-than-human anthropologies and geographies, life sciences, new animisms and materialisms, histories, critical posthumanities, and more.
The call was circulated globally through the Australian Journal of Environmental Education and the Collaboratory’s extended networks both within and beyond academic institutions. We received approximately 80 expressions of interest from over 20 countries across the Asia Pacific, Latin America, Africa, North America, and Europe. From there, the editorial team established a Māori-influenced collaborative peer review process led by co-editor Mark Harvey. The aim of this collaborative review process was to ensure that authors had the opportunity to actively engage in relationships of critical dialogue, mentorship, and support for each other’s writing and revision process, and give space for supporting Indigenous values and academic processes. This reflected concerns from members of the editorial team that typical blind peer review processes can reinforce power hierarchies, damage relationships, and hold back opportunities for community building through relational exchange, particularly for Indigenous researchers. In the end, 25 full papers went through the collaborative peer review process. Each paper was read and discussed in writing groups of 3–4 authors facilitated by the co-editors, in many cases bringing authors together across multiple time zones to provide deep critical feedback on each other’s work. We are grateful to all our colleagues who participated in this process as authors, editors, and reviewers. While our approach extended the length and complexity of the peer review process, we are confident that both the resulting publications and our communities of practice are critically stronger as a result.
From underground to overstory
This Special Issue facilitates the confluence of Critical Forest Studies (CFS) and Environmental Education (EE) as a nexus where theoretical and methodological approaches take on the elemental milieus of the forest as primordial gathering places for learning and inquiry. Soil and sky, wet and dry, root and shoot, shadow and light, microbiota and mycelia become relational entry points for exploring histories of place-relation (Collard, Wooltorton & Stredwick, Reference Collard, Wooltorton and Stredwick2026 – this issue), human-plant communication (Ryan & Joy, Reference Ryan and Joy2025 – this issue), ecolinguistics (Antang, Rousell, van Eeden & Grover, Reference Antang, Rousell, van Eeden and Grover2026 – this issue), learning (Muller et al., Reference Müller, Pierobon, Stock, Kemmer and Baxter2026 – this issue), environmental art (Armstrong et al., Reference Armstrong, Velasquez, Tucker, Leimbach, Palmer and Yates2026 – this issue; Courcot & Trudel, Reference Courcot and Trudel2026 – this issue), forest health (Harvey et al., Reference Harvey, McEntee and Mullen2025 – this issue), eco-criticism (Roy, Reference Roy2026; Dutta, Reference Dutta2025 – this issue), onto-politics (Jeffries & Esperon-Rodriguez, Reference Jeffries and Esperon-Rodriguez2026 – this issue), and more. These different yet conjoined dimensions of forest relationality do not wait for humans to walk in and start categorising them. CFS acknowledges that the forest holds a plethora of teachers who are already living, thinking, inquiring, and communicating in their own ways, on their own terms, through a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and ways of coming to know.
In bringing CFS and EE into critical conversation, this special issue involves the stitching together of cosmologies, knowledges, and lifeways already in various stages of germination, cultivation, and flourishing across different strata and milieus of the forest. From the subterranean depths of root, soil and water through to the soaring heights of canopy and sky, CFS begins in the midst of vegetal, fungal, animal, mineral, linguistic, historical, spiritual, and technological assemblages that populate forests, in many cases inhabiting entirely different climates, weather systems, and societies of creatures even within the very same forest. While underground and overstory cannot exist without each other, they nonetheless produce milieus which may be unfamiliar and opaque to one another in terms of their evolutionary processes, historical inheritances, transmaterial compositions, and regenerative cycles of life and death. CFS aims to investigate the twisting lines of connection and (un)intelligibility across these dispersed yet connected strata in proposing new and different possibilities for EE.
Fostering the recognition of forests as sentient, interspecies learning communities is therefore a key aim of this special issue’s contribution to EE (Rousell & Tran, Reference Rousell and Tran2024). Knowledge of the sentient dimensions of forests and how they co-compose with human feeling and thought is shared and practiced intergenerationally by First Peoples on sovereign and displaced homelands across the Earth (Harrison & McConchie, Reference Harrison and McConchie2009; Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Kohn, Reference Kohn2013; Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Blaise, Aniere, Horwitz, White and Muecke2022). These knowledge practices have developed over millennia in direct and consequential relationship with the forests they inhabit and from which they speak (Arnold et al., Reference Arnold, Atchison and McKnight2021). Indigenous scholarship has been crucial to increasing public awareness and understanding of forest sentience and relationality in recent years (Styres, Reference Styres, Smith, Tuck and Yang2018), as has the work of scholars working in close reciprocal relationship with First Nations elders and cultural custodians (Antang et al., Reference Antang, Rousell, van Eeden and Grover2026 – this issue; Collard et al., Reference Collard, Wooltorton and Stredwick2026 – this issue; Hill et al., Reference Hill, Whintors and Bailey2023). CFS recognises that the ongoing settler colonial project of clearing lands also entails a “genocide of relations” (Manning, Reference Manning2023, p. 8). This genocide fractures and displaces regenerative understandings of forest life cultivated and honed over millennia through knowledges which recognise forest communities as sentient kin (Bawaka Country, Reference Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr, Maymuru and Daley2022; Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Paradies, Wooltorton, Guimond, Jackson-Barrett and Blaise2023; Simpson, Reference Simpson2017; Slater, Reference Slater2021). While settler colonialism promotes the separation of culture and ethics from forests to rationalise the dispossession of land from First Peoples (Morton-Robinson, Reference Moreton-Robinson2015; Rowe & Tuck, Reference Rowe and Tuck2017), Indigenous cosmologies hold forest cultures together in oneness as a practice of belonging to land, place, and Country without need or desire to separate (Arnold et al., Reference Arnold, Atchison and McKnight2021; Reference Arnold, Atchison and McKnight2023).
The complex political ecology that emerges at the nexus of these differential cosmologies is central to CFS and its engagement with related areas of EE. The rapid uptake of critical plant studies and the plant humanities over the past decade have opened new possibilities for critical, historical, artistic, performative, poetic, and philosophical modes of inquiry into human-plant relations (Di Paola, Reference Di Paola2024; Driver & Cornish, Reference Driver and Cornish2021; Marder, Reference Marder2013; Ryan, Reference Ryan, Osterhoudt and Sivaramakrishnan2023; Stark, Reference Stark2015). Central concerns animating the plant humanities include the ethical implications of agency, altruism, kinship, language, narrativity, and sentience in the botanical world (Karpouzou & Zampaki, Reference Karpouzou and Zampaki2024; Lawrence, Reference Lawrence2022; Ryan & Joy, Reference Ryan and Joy2025 – this issue). The turn to plants aims to unsettle deep-seated biases towards vegetal beings as insentient, immobile, and inconsequential non-animals (Amprazis & Papadopoulou, Reference Amprazis and Papadopoulou2024; Lee, Reference Lee2024; Myers, Reference Myers2015; Reference Myers2020). Plant humanities scholars critique dominant cultural narratives of flora as passive, promote consciousness of botanical diversity, and innovate methods of countering “plant disparity awareness” (Parsley et al., Reference Parsley, Daigle, Sabel and Nehm2022).
More recently, proponents of interdisciplinary studies of mycelial models of sentience have called for a “fungal turn” (Mackey & Sendur, Reference Mackey and Sendur2024), noting tendencies to background the complex role of fungal and bacterial life while projecting humanistic ideals of altruism and beneficence onto plants (Sheldrake, Reference Sheldrake2021). This corresponds with resounding calls within the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity for funga to be formally recognised and protected alongside flora and fauna within global biodiversity frameworks.
Hydrofeminism (Neimanis, Reference Neimanis2017, Shefer et al., Reference Shefer, Bozalek, Romano and Neimanis2024), alongside broader movements associated with the “blue humanities” (Alaimo, Reference Alaimo2019; Mentz, Reference Mentz2023), has also brought awareness to how water circulates through forests as planetary weathermakers and climate stabilisers. Bozalek and Romano (Reference Bozalek and Romano2026, this issue) describe how swimming with/in the Great African Seaforest “helps us understand the relationship between emplacement and resilience differently… Although attached to a substrate, kelp’s supple configuration withstands and moves in response to the watery rhythms of the ocean” (pp. 10–11). By refocusing attention on the transmaterial, rhythmic circulation of water through forest ecosystems, turns to the hydrological trouble categorical distinctions between oceanic, terrestrial, and meteorological phenomena which have framed previous studies of forests in the sciences and humanities alike.
The emergence of “smart forests” adds further complexity to this mix through the introduction of remote sensing technologies, automated decision-making, and robotics into sentient forest ecologies (Gabrys, Reference Gabrys2020; Reference Gabrys2022). These developments radically increase the physical and conceptual contact points between forests and emerging forms of digital sentience, interface design, and algorithmic experience (Colombo & Gray, Reference Colombo and Gray2024; Gray, Reference Gray2020), raising questions about the future of forest conservation and regeneration practices in an age of AI (Prebble et al., Reference Prebble, McLean and Houston2021). Indigenous scholarship offers crucial guidance in navigating critical questions relating to the initiation of digital sentient agents into more-than-human kinship circles associated with forest ecologies (Lewis et al., Reference Lewis, Philip, Arista, Pechawis, Kite and Ahearn2018). Research into the rich possibilities of natural intelligences offer further departures from the socially and environmentally destructive aspects of AI and associated technologies. The “Forest Art Intelligence” project led by contemporary artist Keith Armstrong and colleagues (Reference Armstrong, Velasquez, Tucker, Leimbach, Palmer and Yates2026, this issue) highlights how a regenerating forest can offer a dynamic exemplification of “slow, place-based intelligences based upon repair, reciprocity and moderation” (p. 4). CFS embraces these perspectives which grapple with the contrasts between new forms of digital sentience in relation to far more ancient traditions of metaphysical kinship with natural intelligences, disrupting techno-solutionist takes on smart forest imaginaries and foregrounding place-based, regenerative alternatives.
Importance of critical forest studies for EE
Throughout this special issue, we aim to identify areas of inquiry which put emerging theories and practices of CFS into consequential relationship with EE. As a field that has embraced transdisciplinarity and more-than-human relationality since its inception in the early 1970s, EE’s current directions provide lively gathering places for the cultivation and dispersal of CFS as an emerging area of inquiry and creative practice. This is particularly evident in the robust development of critical posthumanist and post-anthropocentric approaches which have flourished in the intersections between EE and Indigenous studies (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Paradies, Wooltorton, Guimond, Jackson-Barrett and Blaise2023; Somerville, Reference Somerville2020), ecofeminism (Gough & Whitehouse, Reference Gough and Whitehouse2018), decolonial studies (Nxumalo, Reference Nxumalo2019), outdoor education (Jukes, Reference Jukes, Stewart and Morse2023), childhood studies (Ambreen, Badwan, & Pahl, Reference Ambreen, Badwan and Pahl2025; Kraftl et al., Reference Kraftl, Ambreen, Armson, Badwan, Curtis, Pahl and Schofield2024), multispecies inquiry (Rautio, Tammi, & Hohti, Reference Rautio, Tammi and Hohti2021; Vladimirova & Rautio, Reference Vladimirova and Rautio2020), queer studies (Russell, Reference Russell2021) and disability studies (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2023), amongst numerous other critical fields. We see CFS already agitating and growing in the touchpoints between EE and other critical environmental studies (Hart & White, Reference Hart and White2022), particularly in spaces where the polyphonous qualities of forest sense and sensation are actively acknowledged and investigated (cf Parmar et al., Reference Parmar, Malone and Young2024). The Australian Journal of Environmental Education provides an ideal seed bed for this special issue as a journal dedicated to the ongoing expansion of EE through new transdisciplinary configurations.
CFS underscores the potential of transdisciplinary perspectives to transform EE in response to planetary deforestation and arboreal diversity loss (Pahl et al., Reference Pahl, Ambreen, Badwan, Carr, Cooper, Curtis, Davenport, Hackett, Kraftl, Lawrence, Lines, Nguyễn, Nunn, Pool, Rowntree, Schofield, Siebers and Vergunst2025; Stroud et al., Reference Stroud, Fennell, Mitchley, Lydon, Peacock and Bacon2022). Approaching EE through CFS perspectives can mitigate destructive environmental practices and paradigms while reframing forests as polymorphic, sentient societies with whom humankind can interrelate, communicate and collaborate. In identifying particular focus areas for this special issue, we have drawn from the Collaboratory’s “wild seeding” events and Digital Planting (www.criticalforestlab.com) as an initial mapping of CFS as an emerging field that is already transforming understandings and practices of EE. Our three angles into identifying these focus areas are nested within principles of regeneration, reciprocity, and care for forest ecosystems, communities, and knowledges (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Paradies, Wooltorton, Guimond, Jackson-Barrett and Blaise2023).
Growth. This special issue witnesses CFS contributing fresh, transdisciplinary perspectives to EE through an extraordinary range of social, scientific, artistic, humanities, design, and community-based research projects with forests. We are thrilled that this special issue welcomes contributions from practising contemporary artists, designers, poets, scientists, literary scholars, educators, community organisers, historians, and independent writers. The relational exchange of knowledges is key to how CFS negotiates participation in areas of growth for EE and AJEE, both in terms of primary research and translational work which engages forest communities in reciprocal, dynamic, and responsible ways.
Complexity. This special issue demonstrates how CFS can identify complex problems which may have eluded or exhausted earlier approaches to EE and threads together transdisciplinary alternatives. We see this threading together happening in a variety of ways across the special issue, including through new articulations of history-geography-culture-pedagogy (Collard et al., Reference Collard, Wooltorton and Stredwick2026 – this issue), art-science-literacy (Courcot & Trudel, Reference Courcot and Trudel2026 – this issue), animism-politics-ecology-linguistics (Antang et al., Reference Antang, Rousell, van Eeden and Grover2026 – this issue), environmental humanities-marine science (Bozalek & Romano, Reference Bozalek and Romano2026 – this issue), environmental health-art-culture-science (Harvey et al., Reference Harvey, McEntee and Mullen2025 – this issue), storytelling-therapy-education (Fundalinski & Kingston, Reference Fundalinski and Kingston2026 – this issue), and design-data-science-literacy (Carpendale, Reference Carpendale2026 – this issue).
Problematisation. The special issue works to identify well-formulated and generative problems in EE as it brings fields into new forms of contact. The coherent identification of a complex and novel problem across local and planetary scales of urgency is perhaps the best contribution CFS can make at this early stage of its emergence and development. Rather than looking to provide answers or solutions, the special issue orients CFS toward the scoping of complex problems and the production of novel frameworks for better understanding those problems in reciprocal partnership with forest communities and ecosystems. This plays out in myriad manuscripts across the special issue, including through the critical problematisation of caste and social hierarchies (Dutta, Reference Dutta2025 – this issue), unpacking the cruelties of mass tree-planting initiatives (Berke, Reference Berke2026 – this issue), and the co-witnessing of forests as sites of colonial trauma and loss (Vasko, Reference Vasko2026 – this issue).
These three angles of growth, complexity, and problematisation provided inflections for identifying the four thematic focus areas which comprise the special issue: Forest Sentience, Forest Imaginaries, Forest Regeneration, and Forest Pedagogies. We discuss each of these in turn with reference to each of the articles collected in the special issue.
Forest sentience
The special issue opens with a thematic section on Forest Sentience and an article co-authored by Len Collard, Sandra Wooltorton, and Louise Stredwick titled “Karlup Bidi, Pathways Home.” The article offers an immersive history and contemporary re-mapping of Whadjak Noongar Country through a series of bidi (“pathways” in Noongar language) that travel through Kaart Gennunginyup Bo in Boorloo, a place colonially known as King’s Park in Perth, Australia. “Karlup Bidi, Pathways Home” draws on Len Collard’s long-term project of mapping histories of place-family relations as a Noongar elder. The article invites readers into a pedagogical relationship with Whadjak Noongar Country through the sharing of language, stories, and mappings of Karlup Bidi.
In Australia, when the word Country is capitalised, it refers to a more complex notion than the standard English usage of the word. Country is Boodja, which includes spirituality, social systems, well-being, kinship, laws and obligations to care for karlup, or home place. To apply this thinking, imagine that a beautiful tree in your neighbourhood is a kin relation that recognises you and cares for you, and for which you care in return. How does this change the way you move through your neighbourhood? (Collard et al., Reference Collard, Wooltorton and Stredwick2026, p. 8, this issue)
This short excerpt offers a beautiful example of how understandings of forest sentience are always already part of Country as lived and experienced by Noongar people. The invitation for the reader to approach a local tree as “a kin relation that recognises you and cares for you” (p. 8) brings this understanding of forest sentience to life, showing how the recognition of trees as family makes a difference in how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. This direct invitation for readers to engage in a process of “re-indigenisation” with/in their own places is brought further to life through the sharing of walking maps which readers can use to walk the Karlup Bidi (pathways home) described in the article. This offers a place-based opportunity for readers to engage directly if you are living or visiting near the Kaart Gennunginyup Bo area.
Further articles collected in this section build from this place-based grounding, demonstrating how understandings of forest sentience are not singular or universal but emerge through diversely situated cosmologies, cultures, languages, and knowledge systems. Through an Indigenous-led (auto)ethnography of animistic practices and language use in Central Kalimantan, Antang et al. (Reference Antang, Rousell, van Eeden and Grover2026) show how the Dayak Ngaju language “contains within it the knowledge of how to listen carefully and respond appropriately to the forest as it speaks through the language of dreams” (p. 12). This article offers new insights into the significance of animist perspectives for forest regeneration and language use in Central Kalimantan, while advancing relational practices in PhD supervision teams supporting Indigenous candidates within the settler colonial academy.
Vasko (Reference Vasko2026, this issue) explores related questions through the witnessing and drawing of dead and decaying trees in a Canadian forest, engaging with local Haudenosaunee Indigenous perspectives to think through “what is being lost in us through the loss of our arboreous community members, and further, what capacities we may be losing when we no longer even notice” (p. 2). Bozalek and Romano (Reference Bozalek and Romano2026, this issue) also take a highly immersive approach to exploring the co-affective resonances and rhythms of the Great African Seaforest. Bringing free swimming and free writing practices together into a powerful method, Bozalek and Romano develop living connections and attunements across species and knowledge systems by recentring awareness on the flux of sentient feeling that animates the Great African Seaforest as a place of fluid encounter and co-witnessing.
The possibilities of human-plant communication are further explored in Ryan and Joy’s (Reference Ryan and Joy2025, this issue) accounts of arboreal sentience and tree–human communication in Northern Finland. Examining how sensing, speaking, and remembering unfold as relational practices that challenge anthropocentric models of language, memory, and learning, Ryan and Joy offer novel insights into the intersections of human-plant studies and CFS as an expanded field. The contribution from Holmes (Reference Holmes2026, this issue) further extends the section’s focus on forest sentience and interspecies communication through the study of what she terms “lucky aesthetics” as a mode of “divinatory semiosis” across species boundaries. Holmes brings post-structuralist and multi-naturalist perspectives together to develop a philosophical reading of the role of chance, exploring the rich possibilities for learning through aleatory exchanges across different modalities of forest intelligence. These articles also carry radical methodological implications, as they ask us to consider what it might mean to collaborate with forests as sentient research and learning partners (Hill et al., Reference Hill, McKay, Aleksic and Rousell2026 this issue; Hughes & Barlo, Reference Hughes and Barlo2021; Reason, Reference Reason2024). Overall, the perspectives on forest sentience shared through this special issue equip EE with new frameworks for understanding forests as animate, complex, and polyphonous orchestrations of sentient feeling that shape the pasts, presents, and futures of our material and metaphysical relationships with place.
Forest imaginaries
This special issue highlights how contemporary artists, creative writers, and designers are often leading the translation of insights from Critical Forest Studies into actionable forms of public learning and engagement. Forest Imaginaries emerge as an area of critical investigation for EE which brings creative methods into contact with a range of social, scientific, philosophical, and community-based practices. Many artists and researchers in art-based practices are interested in enhancing the ecological sensibility of forests (Kravtsov & Höckert, Reference Kravtsov and Höckert2022), including the diverse ways that publics come to sense and value the relational dynamics of forest sentience, communication, and care (Hay Reference Hay2024; Rousell & Williams, Reference Rousell and Williams2018).
In “Climate Modelling, the Possible, and the Data-Image” (Reference Courcot and Trudel2026 this issue), Blandine Courcot and Gisèle Trudel offer compelling examples of public engagements with contemporary art in Trudel’s (Reference Trudel2023) “Mediane” project. Engaging with forest ecosystems through research-creation methodologies, Courcot and Trudel employ Bergson’s theories of the image, time, and possibility to analyse immersive encounters between people, forests, climate data, and creative technologies such as sensors and large-scale data mappings. These approaches provide an interesting contrast with the work of Keith Armstrong and colleagues on the Forest Art Intelligence project (Reference Armstrong, Velasquez, Tucker, Leimbach, Palmer and Yates2026 this issue). While Trudel employs digital technologies to activate and intensify public encounters with forest intelligences, Armstrong works with the forest itself as a regenerative work of art while integrating quantitative measurement techniques from the ecological sciences to demonstrate how the forest renews itself through time. Designer and researcher Hannah Carpandale’s (Reference Carpendale2026 this issue) article contributes a further series of techniques for translating deforestation and extinction data into public engagements that build critical data literacies through design-based installations and circus performances.
Hill and colleagues (Reference Hill, McKay, Aleksic and Rousell2026 this issue) extend the discussion of forest imaginaries in their contribution to the special issue, focusing on the use of drones and thermal imaging as technologies that can potentially be recuperated and turned against the structures of coloniality they were produced to enforce. By considering images generated by these technologies alongside Indigenous paintings and storytelling shared by co-author Carmen McKay, Hill and colleagues theorise research images and modes of perception that enhance multispecies knowing, sensing, imagining, and becoming with forests. In undertaking a process of ecologising the research image beyond the “hungry” and extractive modes of settler colonial perception (Robinson, Reference Robinson2020), they endeavour to cultivate and express the hidden and imperceptible ecological processes at work within forests.
These research-creation practices not only foster deeper understandings of sentient forest ecosystems, but also critically challenge anthropocentric perspectives, encouraging people to consider forests and their wider social milieus as collaborative partners in the construction of alternative forest imaginaries. This sentiment is extended in Ritam Dutta’s (2026 this issue) exploration of what he terms “Dalit vegetal poetics” in the fictional work of Indian writer Shyamal Kumar Pramanik. Dutta argues that vegetal life is intrinsically marked by caste divisions. Yet forests and other plant systems shape narrative forms as stories incorporate the rhythms of the botanical world. The idea of Dalit botanics, therefore, signifies an understanding of the plant world as an ethical domain in which trees are vessels of epistemic insight. Advancing these points, Dutta applies the lens of Dalit botanics to a close reading of Dalit writer Shyamal Kumar Pramanik’s short stories.
Karrow and Harvey (Reference Karrow and Harvey2026 this issue) also work with the “poetism” of intergenerational relationships with forests in the Canadian context and how this gives shape to relational imaginaries of land and place. Invoking the framework of eco-phenomenology to reveal relational engagement with forests and inspire poetism, they offer a novel imaginary of forest poetics and/as education founded on a commitment to mystery. By thinking, sensing, and engaging with forests through immersive experiences, the special issue highlights how artists, writers, designers, educators, and philosophers are experimenting with creative ways of understanding and relating with sentient forest environments, while engaging publics in the cultivation of more caring perceptions and imaginaries of human-forest relationships.
Forest regeneration
This special issue also contributes significant new knowledge to understandings of how forest regeneration, rewilding, and conservation are both theorised and practiced. While theories and practices of rewilding have gained traction since the late 1990s, they also raise onto-political complexities regarding the nature of “nature” and what counts as “wild” from differing cultural and historical perspectives (Steele, Reference Steele2020). Wynne et al. (Reference Wynne-Jones, Clancy, Holmes, O’Mahony and Ward2020) describe rewilding as a framework aligned with “restorative practices promoting landscape fluidity, connectivity and non-equilibrium ecologies,” arguing that this constitutes a radical break from Euro-Western conservation practices predicated on standardisation, management, and control (p. 71). Rewilding practices such as the Miyawaki “tiny forest” method have been internationalised in recent years, creating new opportunities for communities to regrow local forests relatively quickly using evidence-based principles based on endemic biodiversity coefficients and soil conditioning (Miyawaki, Reference Miyawaki2004). Questions remain as to how rewilding can engender “a more substantive reworking of how we think and live with others,” while accounting for “diverging views of wildness, naturalness and place” and associated “ethical and justice implications for both human-human and human-nonhuman relations” (Wynne et al., Reference Wynne-Jones, Clancy, Holmes, O’Mahony and Ward2020, p. 71).
This thematic section focuses on the development of justice-oriented frameworks for investigating the complexities of rewilding, regenerative design, and associated practices of reforestation and afforestation in diverse community settings. As noted in previous sections, the practicalities of forest conservation, regeneration, and care are inseparable from the cosmologies and lifeways of First Peoples as custodians of much of the Earth’s remaining forest regions (Garnett et al., Reference Garnett, Burgess, Fa, Fernández-Llamazares, Molnár, Robinson, Watson, Zander, Austin, Brondizio, Collier, Duncan, Ellis, Geyle, Jackson, Jonas, Malmer, McGowan, Sivongxay and Leiper2018). Several articles in the special issue highlight Indigenous-led regenerative action, advocacy, and activism as an important nexus of CFS and EE. “Te Waka Houora o te Ngahere: Mobilising for Action for forest health in Aotearoa, New Zealand” (Harvey et al., Reference Harvey, McEntee and Mullen2025, this issue) reports on the culmination of a highly creative, collaborative, and impactful multi-faceted four-year project addressing forest health and regeneration through both Māori and Pākeha perspectives. Through their scholarship, Mark Harvey and colleagues catalysed and empowered community members to improve forest health and wellbeing through enhanced embodied and spiritual interconnectedness, Māori self-determination and autonomy, and advanced interspecies epistemic justice. Major contributions of this scholarship to EE include the development of novel methods involving storytelling and creative-arts-based approaches, as well as sharing diverse exemplars of the waka hourua methodology, where Māori and Pākeha work in respectful and responsible collaboration. Mobilising for Action provides a beautiful vision of what it means to care for forests, as well as one another.
In “Beyond Bunya Dieback” by Fox et al. (Reference Fox, Shaw, Shaw, Murphy, Harris, Loiseau, Sanderson and Bateman2026, this issue), an author team including First Nations Rangers, scientists, land managers, artists, educators, and business leaders explicate and examine their regenerative community-led praxis to address the dieback of bunya trees through a composite approach. They create a powerful model for the responsible, impactful, and sustainable care of forests. This trans-systemic method highlights the importance of being guided by the teachings of the care-takers of these lands since time immemorial, cultivating a hopeful mindset informed by scientific research, engaging community members through arts-based practices, and catalysing awareness into action. Here EE exceeds the transmission of information to individuals and involves developing community capacities through emotional and embodied connection that is situated within responsibility and hope.
Müller et al. (Reference Müller, Pierobon, Stock, Kemmer and Baxter2026, this issue) provide an important contribution by including mangroves in the special issue, as regenerative ecosystems that unsettle binary distinctions between land and sea, forest and estuary. Through a case study in Magé, within the Guanabara Bay region of Rio de Janeiro, they demonstrate how film-making practices support community-based initiatives with contaminated ecologies and circulate tactics of mangrove struggles across different educational public spheres. Ultimately, they propose mangroves as more-than-human classrooms where practices of habitability with toxicity can be cultivated, unsettling dominant paradigms of ecological purity and expanding forest regeneration initiatives.
Guerra and colleagues (Reference Guerra, Ferguson, da Silva Faustino, Heyns, Chin, Ochona and Cooke2026, this issue) further define regenerative action as the processes of care by which humans and other creatures give back to the places they live in and work to repair, restore, and renew beings and relationships that have been broken or lost. They go on to address the concept of circularity, seeking to expand the notion of material and social (re)circulation beyond what’s narrowly considered in a “Circular Economy” (e.g., better waste management) to include community practices and ethics of sharing, repairing, and waste avoidance.
Taking up this section’s call to examine the ethical and affective dimensions of ecological restoration, Berke (Reference Berke2026, this issue) critically interrogates the dominant restoration narrative of mass tree planting. Extending Berlant’s (Reference Berlant, Gregg and Seigworth2010) concept of cruel optimism, Berke explores how modern narratives generate affective attachments to tree-planting initiatives which serve to reinforce settler colonial perspectives on land management and environmental responsibility. The paper investigates the links between these public affects and the persistence of Western environmentalist logics, revealing how such attachments create conditions for extraction by ultimately obstructing the very ecological regeneration these initiatives claim to achieve.
Forest pedagogies
Pedagogically, the emerging field of CFS is deeply indebted to Indigenous histories and knowledge systems which come from the land and cannot be separated from place (Harrison & McConchie, Reference Harrison and McConchie2009; Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Styres, Reference Styres, Smith, Tuck and Yang2018). Forests house songs, stories, theories, histories, and languages. The aliveness of the land is understood as the foundation of human knowing (Donald, Reference Donald2021; Watts, Reference Watts2013) and more-than-human kin are recognised as critical teachers (Arrows et al., Reference Arrows, London Jacobs and Sage2010). These approaches to learning in, with, and from forests involves inquiring within multispecies collectives that ask something different from us. As we communicate with a 300-year-old eucalyptus tree, for example, humancentric understandings of time, scales, rhythms, communication, and ethics are unsettled (De La Bellacasa, Reference De La Bellacasa2012).
Critical forest-based pedagogies are also informed by many other theoretical foundations, including (but not limited to) place-based learning (Vladimirova, Reference Vladimirova2023), decolonial and anticolonial pedagogies (Nxumalo, Reference Nxumalo2019), posthuman imaginaries (Jukes et al., Reference Jukes, Stewart and Morse2022), plant humanities (Parmar et al., Reference Parmar, Malone and Young2024), and process philosophy (Rousell, Reference Rousell2022, Reference Rousell2023; Rousell & Caicedo-Penaloza, Reference Rousell and Penaloza-Caicedo2022). These varied educative frameworks and practices invite learners into different yet connected ways of knowing, doing, being, and becoming with forests. As demonstrated through this special issue, critical forest pedagogies engage learners in issues of planetary wellness, histories of peoples and movements, complexities of sentient life in forests, and the anthropocentric origins and perpetuation of the climate and biodiversity crises.
Critical forest-based pedagogies invite us to learn from forests who are flourishing, as well as from forests that are regenerating, disappeared, scorched, and flooded out (Vasko, Reference Vasko2026 this issue; Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025), attending to the sedimented layers of colonial relations on these lands (Donald, Reference Donald and Abdi2012). In their contribution to this special issue, Fundalinski and Kingston (Reference Fundalinski and Kingston2026) argue that forest therapy offers ecological modes of perceiving the world, expanding definitions of learning in community and embracing embodied learning with an emphasis on humility and vulnerability. Charlie Kwan Ng’s (Reference Ng2026) contribution explores entangled literacies as forests and humans collaboratively engage in meaning-making, moving our understandings beyond symbolic or scientific reading of forests. Through nonfiction forest writings, she examines the semiotic agency of forests and how interspecies conversations have been translated into human texts.
Chartrand (Reference Chartrand2026) further engages pluriversal pedagogies and forests as teachers within an inter-generational learning community in the country colonially known as Canada. Through a situated forest inquiry, the author reads reflections of her experience as a mother in a forest-based pre-school through Indigenous and decolonial, ecofeminist, and posthuman perspectives. These readings highlight forests as sentient pedagogical communities and demonstrate how care and learning are ecologically distributed rather than individually grasped. This work establishes how relational forest pedagogies are not only envisioned but also lived through “moments of care, interdependence, kin-making, and land-based ethical awareness” (p. 3).
The broad context of Animesh Roy’s (Reference Roy2026) article is mainstream EE’s tendency to reinscribe anthropocentric assumptions based on Western conservation paradigms. As a viable response to biospheric crisis, decolonial EE promotes pedagogical engagement with Indigenous knowledge, recognises the historical violence of land dispossession, and exposes the injustices perpetuated against marginalised groups. Towards this aim, Roy focuses on the interconnections between forests and Adivasi communities in India through Malayalam writer Sheela Tomy’s novel Valli (2022) set in the biodiverse Western Ghats. The novel centres on Adivasi people’s perceptions of forests as sentient agents within ancestral homelands while also underscoring the particular effects of land degradation on Indigenous cultures. In Roy’s view, Valli constitutes a lively pedagogical resource offering a counter-narrative to the predominant construction of forests in India and elsewhere as commodities, resources, or properties to be appropriated. Accordingly, Tomy’s fiction unsettles mainstream Western conservation ideologies by advancing a model of EE upholding the significance of Indigenous people’s epistemologies of forest life.
Attending to governance and practice at the macro scale, Jeffries and Esperon-Rodriguez (Reference Jeffries and Esperon-Rodriguez2026) examine the onto-political tensions shaping urban forest governance, arguing that Indigenist Standpoint Pedagogy offers a critical framework for re-centring relational accountability, sovereignty, and more-than-human agency within EcoSocial work and decision-making. Madarwala and Mamashita (Reference Madarwala and Mamashita2026) extend this relational framing through dialogic encounters with forests in Indian and Japanese contexts, demonstrating how EE can cultivate ethical attunement and culturally situated ways of learning with more-than-human worlds. Working with younger learners, Waliszewska (Reference Waliszewska2026) shows how elementary-aged children develop literacies through sustained participation in outdoor learning communities, where reading, writing, and meaning-making emerge relationally through place-based, more-than-human encounters. In his contribution on risk education in Nepal, Switzerland, and Australia, Bardsley (Reference Bardsley2026) explores forest-based education as a site for learning about socio-ecological risk, demonstrating how embodied, place-responsive pedagogies can deepen learners’ understandings of uncertainty, vulnerability, and resilience in a changing climate.
Together, these contributions invite Critical Forest Studies researchers and educators to attend to ethical relationality, critical sensibilities, and attunement to material–semiotic processes, while raising important questions about representation and authorship with more-than-human kin. Collectively, they highlight the significance of entangled forest literacies, ecocriticism, and embodied pedagogies for EE oriented toward socio-ecological flourishing.
Joining the collaboration
This Special Issue illustrates how learning with, through, and from forests can strengthen the existing connections between EE and ancient knowledges and intelligences from underground to overstory, and everything in between. As Kimmerer (Reference Kimmerer2013) shares, Indigenously understood, humans are the “younger brothers of Creation” (p. 347), and as such there is much to learn from plants, animals, and other beings who have thrived in forest ecologies for much longer than humans. Each of the articles collected in this special issue of AJEE demonstrates how relational experiences within forestscapes create openings for multispecies learning, healing, and creating. Please reach out to the co-editors if you are interested to join the Critical Forest Collaboratory and continue this work with us. Come, help us build CFS as a field which thrives in the complexities of sentient difference, ecological rebalancing, and interdependent processes that inspire novel responses to the current environmental emergency.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the First Peoples of the lands on which they are living and working and their ongoing custodianship of forest cultures and ecologies.
Financial support
The authors have no financial support to report for this edited collection.
Competing interests
The authors declare that there are no competing interests regarding the publication of this paper. The authors would like to disclose that Associate Professor David Rousell is an Associate Editor of The Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE). In accordance with AJEE protocols, Dr Rousell was not involved in the editorial process or decision making regarding this manuscript.
Author Biographies
David Rousell is an artist, writer, educator, and researcher living and working on the unceded lands of the Eastern Kulin Nation in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). He is an Associate Professor at RMIT University where he co-directs the newly formed Place, Language, and Culture in Education (PLaCE) Research Group.
Cher Hill is a settler-scholar and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She is deeply invested in researching educative experiences that contribute to more connected, thriving, and just communities.
John Ryan is an international researcher in literary studies, creative writing, and environmental humanities. He serves as Associate Professor and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia.
Mark Harvey is an artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer at University of Aukland focusing on performance art/live art, visual arts and related choreography, in addition to arts with science awareness and social science with ecology, arts advocacy, mātauranga Māori, te Tiriti contexts, curating, collaborating and transdisciplinarity. His research is centralised around connecting with communities and building public awareness around ecological issues, social justice and related general level mātauranga Māori perspectives.
Sarah Barns is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University. A multi-disciplinary scholar–practitioner, Sarah champions the importance of cultural and political imaginaries as they shape emerging digital ecosystems and practices in urban settings, while being committed to industry and community-based collaborations that advance new civic capabilities and literacies.
Jelena Aleksic is a PhD candidate at RMIT University in Melbourne. Her research explores creative and participatory methods in blue humanities and EE as responses to the climate crisis.
Gideon Boadu is a Senior Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy at RMIT University where he co-directs the Place, Language, and Culture in Education (PLaCE) Research Group. His research explores history curricula, public histories, history teacher disciplinary and pedagogical reasoning, and digital histories.
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