Promoting Eden: tree planting as the environmental panacea

Abstract

This article examines the discursive and practical cooperation between timber industry, governmental and non-profit/conservation tree planting programmes in the United States. It identifies the reciprocal use of an Edenic metaphor that is deployed to depict their environmental management strategies. The radical simplification of nature, use of scientific discourse and fetishization of trees and their power to ‘improve’ the environment bonds groups that often clash over forest issues, collapsing the presumed polarities of the environmental spectrum. Building on the work of Harvey, I show that actors from different economic and political positions derive mutual benefit from contributing to the joint discursive platform, and that capital/institutional interests are well served by their constructing a premise of ‘money, aiding science, yielding nature’.