Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways--as keel, lodgepole, and execution site--and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. Matthew Battles's Tree follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow.
Matthew Battles is Associate Director of the metaLAB and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, USA. His previous publications include Library: an Unquiet History (2004), The Sovereignties of Invention (2012) and Library Beyond the Book (2014)
Part One: Feral Trees The Tree of Heaven In a Dappled World A branching Heuristic Part Two: Garden and Forest In the Tree Museum From Ailanthus to Apple The Charter of the Forests Part Three: A Dark Abundance The Tree and/in History With and Without Us Notes Index
Show moreTree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways--as keel, lodgepole, and execution site--and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. Matthew Battles's Tree follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow.
Matthew Battles is Associate Director of the metaLAB and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, USA. His previous publications include Library: an Unquiet History (2004), The Sovereignties of Invention (2012) and Library Beyond the Book (2014)
Part One: Feral Trees The Tree of Heaven In a Dappled World A branching Heuristic Part Two: Garden and Forest In the Tree Museum From Ailanthus to Apple The Charter of the Forests Part Three: A Dark Abundance The Tree and/in History With and Without Us Notes Index
Show morePart One: Feral Trees
The Tree of Heaven
In a Dappled World
A branching Heuristic
Part Two: Garden and Forest
In the Tree Museum
From Ailanthus to Apple
The Charter of the Forests
Part Three: A Dark Abundance
The Tree and/in History
With and Without Us
Notes
Index
Explores via art and literature our complicated material and economic entanglements with trees and their products.
Matthew Battles is Associate Director of the metaLAB and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, USA. His previous publications include Library: an Unquiet History (2004), The Sovereignties of Invention (2012) and Library Beyond the Book (2014).
What astonishingly good writing! What a joy of a book. What a mind,
this Matthew Battles. As he writes about trees, Battles could as
well be describing his own wild mind: 'uncanny, possessed of depths
and mystery, and feral in ways beyond my ken, . . . overspilling
with dark abundance, . . . richly disruptive to one’s daily
commute.'
*Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity
and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (2016) and Piano
Tide: A Novel (2016)*
Battles … shows how trees--and perhaps more importantly our
relationships with trees--are incredibly complicated. Even
dappling--that wonderful light that comes through a tree’s
leaves--is not as simple as it seems … He makes clear that trees
and their data have important stories to tell. That is if we let
them.
*PopMatters*
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