A sociology of vegetal life: rethinking ‘harmony’ and ‘nativism’ in Miyawaki forests

Abstract

In this essay, I trace the genealogy of the “Miyawaki forest” or “Tiny Forest” concept by unpacking Akira Miyawaki’s treatises on natural vegetation and situating it within Zürich-Montpellier school of phytosociology. Drawing from impulses in more-than-human geography, I study Miyawaki projects that vouch to create fast, ‘self-sustaining’, close-range forests of native tree species in urban lands. By examining the maxims and techniques adopted in the Germanic study of plant communities, I showcase how such conservation ecologies align with functionalist-organicist traditions of the early 20th century. I pay particularly attention to the ecological concept of ‘potential natural vegetation’ (PNV) based on which species selection is carried out in the Miyawaki forest model. By tracing the notion of PNV – from its origin as an empirical phytosociological construct to providing ecological reinforcements of constructing a pure German vegetation during the Nazi regime – the article explains how right-wing ideologies were fueled by organicism in plant thinking. I showcase how such provincial epistemologies continue to pose reverberations onto the ‘nativist’ ethos of greening programs and urban forests today.

Introduction

In this paper, I trace the genealogy of the Miyawaki forest method which is an increasingly popular method of afforestation around the world. Many Miyawaki practitioners pride on the use of autochthonous plants (belonging to the same place) in their afforestation practices. In outlining the provincial histories of these ecological paradigms, I show how allochthonous epistemologies weld with forests growing on public lands in today’s cities. Miyawaki afforestation emphasize the use of native trees planted densely in small urban public spaces to create a quick and ‘self-sustaining’ forest. They are perceived as a global sensation and a ‘best practice’ by greening practitioners who have scaled the model from Kent to Bangkok. ¹ I was interested to unpack the knowledge grounds of the traveling Miyawaki forest model, its emphasis on species nativism, and assumptions of natural harmony. In probing this line of enquiry, my attention was particularly directed to the notion of nature developed in middle European tradition of phytosociology in the early 20th century.

Akira Miyawaki (1928–2021), the founder of the Miyawaki method, was a renowned ecologist, Professor Emeritus at Yokohama National University, and director of the Japanese Center for International Studies in Ecology. As a young researcher interested in weeds, Miyawaki spent a significant time as a guest researcher in Germany where he was inducted into the world of central European phytosociology. At the vegetation institute in Stolzenau (Germany), Prof. Dr.Reinhold Tüxen played a major role in shaping Miyawaki’s ideas of restoration in Japan, and in inventing and popularizing the notion of the potential natural vegetation (hereafter PNV). Tüxen’s phytosociology delimited the boundaries of and relations between vegetation and prescribed ways of identifying and creating ‘balance of nature’ in the face of ever-growing anthropogenic influences on the environment.

Just as scholars in many disciplines are engaged with the question of understanding or locating nature, phytosociologists too found ways of re-constructing a nature to fight for, in the face of landscapes transformed by persistent ‘human disturbance’. This essay lays out the maxims and techniques adopted in the Germanic study of plant communities, which not only melded with traditions and undercurrents of biogeographical thinking of early 20th century but also the socio-political context of imperialism and post-war reconstruction of Germany and Japan. I am particularly attentive to the concept of PNV, which is the imagined natural vegetation (free of human and climatic interference) constructed for a site based on observations of its present vegetation, soil, anthropic, and climatic conditions. The notion of PNV governs the selection of tree species in a Miyawaki forest. In this paper, I will detail the ecological concepts and laws underpinning PNV in the subsequent sections, but also highlight the contradictions and assumptions inherent in this way of mapping nature. Even as these influential paradigms have now departed to the margins of ecological thought, they continue to pose reverberations in the ethos of greening programs, be it Miyawaki or otherwise.

To trace the times crumpled up, or the pasts within these presents, I analyzed Akira Miyawaki’s treatises on vegetation and situated it within the broader set of literature on vegetation in the field of ecology. Archival materials such as reports, summaries, reviews, and obituaries, are the primary sources of information used in the paper. Most of the archives, such as reports of symposium and field excursions, were in German language or scribed in a mix of German and Japanese. In addition, I peruse published literature from the fields of ecology, environmental sciences, history of science, and biogeography. Digital archives pertinent to the subject were also referred to. The article scantly draws on primary materials – however, this paper forms a part of and is informed by my doctoral research on urban forests in the Indian city of Coimbatore. In Coimbatore alone, I visited nearly twenty-five forests projects inaugurated by different organizations over the course of my fieldwork and conducted in-depth qualitative data collection for a period of nine months from 2022 to 2025. Here, my interlocutors included government officials, non-governmental organizations, ecologists, and residents living near the forest patches.

Even as I chiefly draw inspiration from impulses in the domain of more-than-human geography and history of science, the article aims to provides insights on the concept of nature itself and on debates surrounding nativism in landscape architecture, environmental humanities, and cognate fields. The use of ‘native’ species is a hallmark of Miyawaki projects – in Coimbatore, this included varieties such as Neem, Mango, Jamun, Badam, and Pongamia, to name a few. Such ideas of nativism subsist between “biological and cultural belonging” (p. 312), as pointed out by Münster in his work on organic farming in the context of increasing sectarian politics in India. ² Further, they simplify ecological relations as good versus bad and natural versus unnatural, as seen in the case of invasive species research and removal campaigns in South Africa. ³ In the case of Miyawaki forests, native trees are used and positioned as having a greater chance of survival and of being more climate-resilient by practitioners. By tracing the notion of PNV – from its origin as an empirical phytosociological construct to providing organic reinforcements of a pure German vegetation in the Nazi regime – the article explains how right-wing ideologies were fueled by organicism in plant thinking. By examining the imperial geographies of knowledge production, cartographic histories and spatial representations of the more-than-human, we simultaneously learn about contemporary knowledge controversies surrounding species nativism and ecologies of conservation.

Middle European plant sociology

The Miyawaki method prescribes close-range afforestation of native trees in small urban pockets of lands, with an aim to create natural forests that can sustain themselves after two years. This paper concerns itself with the very first step in the method – which is, according to Miyawaki, the understanding of the potential natural vegetation of the site, ⁴ followed by soil preparation for planting, dense planting, and maintenance. For Miyawaki, planting trees without an understanding of the natural vegetation was futile. Even as urban beautification projects and monoculture plantations proliferated for necessary means, it is restoration “of native forests by native trees” ⁵ that was essential for disaster prevention and natural restoration. According to the ecologist, native forests are “unyielding” and offer protection against natural disasters nearly thirty times when compared to non-natives. ⁶ He inherited the methods and prescriptions for delineating the present and potential vegetation, in order to create the said native forests, from his mentor and phytosociologist, Reinhold Tüxen (1899–1980). Tüxen invited Miyawaki to visit Germany after reading his dissertation on the weed ecologies in Japan. Japan and Germany enjoyed a close diplomatic relationship since the Meiji era, which led to knowledge and cultural diffusions both before the war and during post-war reconstructions of the defeated economies. ⁷

Tüxen was a widely influential ecologist, credited for laying the foundations of German phytosociology. He majored in organic chemistry and wrote his dissertation on the vegetation mapping of Northwest Germany. First appointed as the Director of Nature Conservation in Hanover, he later became the head of the first vegetation mapping institute ‘Zentralstelle für Vegetationskartierung des Reiches (ZVR)’ in Europe in 1939. His institute found credence in landscape and regional planning in projects during the Nazi era such as through projects in drawing vegetation maps for the motorway project of the Third Reich, the Reichsautobahn, or in the Nazi grounds for congresses in Nuremberg or the Auschwitz camp. ⁸ His unit held excursions and mapmaking units in Eastern European territories such as in Poland. ⁹ The center eventually had to move to Stolzenau, Weser due to fire threats from the world war in 1943 and he remained the director of the institute after the war, renamed as Bundesanhalt für Vegetationskartierung.

Tüxen was deeply influenced in turn by Dr. Josias Braun-Blanquet with whom he would closely collaborate to become the leading phytosociologists of the Zürich-Montpellier school. ¹⁰ The school’s anthem owed its solemn allegiance to plant associations in MittelEuropa: ‘O Fagetum, O Querceto-Carpinetum . . .’. ¹¹ Tüxen founded and organized the activities of the working group, ‘Arbeitsstelle für Theoretische und Angewandte Pflanzensoziologie’ in Rinteln, organizing many symposia of the ‘International Association for Vegetation Science’ since 1955. Many of the distinguished European ecologists (chairs in Uppasala, Wien, Napoli, and Karlsruhe) and foresters met in these events and held regular excursions in different parts of Europe. Miyawaki was hosted in Tüxen’s institute from 1958 to 1960 and from 1963 to 1964. He himself wrote many of the workshop reports and records the discussions taking place between the best of minds with a sense of awe. The cutting-edge developments which took place in these symposia – such as discussions on plant communities and its relationships to vegetation mapping and statistics, taxonomy, and its applications in commercial forestry, agriculture, soil science, landscape ecology, palynology, biosociology, and so on ¹² – were of keen interest to plant ecologists elsewhere. ¹³

The intensive fieldwork that was required for vegetation mapping was not easy for Miyawaki in the cold winds of north-western Germany. When Miyawaki won the Blue Planet prize for his contributions in creating and planting tiny forests around the world, he reflects on these formative moments in Germany and how his mentor had shaped his fieldwork-centered research and practice. ¹⁴ Despite its staunch empiricism, the school’s axioms mended together (a) a functionalist sociological paradigm with (b) an organicist theory of plant succession, undergirded by (c) an imperialist fervor for mapping and productivity, and thereafter, (d) advancing a prescriptive construct of ‘potential vegetation’ that orders the future based on the past and present. Each of these ontic threads require a gentle extrication of their genealogies and are outlined in the four subsequent sub-sections in this order.

Origins and functionalist orientations of phytosociology

I use the terms phyto, pflanzen, plant, and vegetal in this article interchangeably to denote vegetation, but the disciplinary timbres of early 20th century Pflanzensociologie require further explication. The rise of phytosociology and other fields of ecology echoed with wider shifts in natural history, as biological explanations were found in relationships outside of the organ or species scale. For instance, by observing flowers in its habitat rather than categorizing and slicing it onto its constituent parts unlike his predecessors in natural history, Sprengel was able to postulate that flowers are designed for pollination by external ecological elements such as insects or wind. ¹⁵ There were contemporaneous efforts alongside plant sociology in understanding plants on a wider scale, including phytogeography and plant ecology. But whereas phytosociology focused primary on associations between plants, phytogeography was dedicated to the study of distribution of plants across different regions ¹⁶ or ‘in relation to the earth’, ¹⁷ and ecology concerned itself with the relationship of plants to its environment ¹⁸ or ‘the study of habitat’. ¹⁹

Phytosociology focused on the dynamics of plant ‘communities’ or ‘formations’, rather than individuals, as: (a) plant societies were constantly in change even if they were slow to be observed in human timescales; these changes expressed itself in the gradual replacement of one community by another, ²⁰ and (b) nature left to itself unperturbed by mankind was a ‘harmonious unity’. By observing nature as it unravels itself, society could find solutions for its problems. Both axioms will be unpacked in greater detail in the subsequent section on organicism, as the scientific assumptions and sociopolitical undercurrents undergirding these would be disputed in domains of thought and practice. For now, let us examine the functionalist elements of phytosociology which derives from the study of human societies in sociology. Zeller ²¹ notes how both plant and human’ sociology focused on the creation of healthy communities and had a functionalist outlook to the study of communities, where each component served a particular purpose toward the creation of the whole. On a closer look, deeper parallels abound. Braun-Blanquet’s advisor and botanist, Charles Flauhalt shared a deep friendship with the sociologist Patrick Geddes and this resulted in the founding of the Scots college at Montpellier. Such points of contact reflected in the discipline’s primary tenets: Whereas Geddes likened the city to an organism, Braun-Blanquet emphasized the use of ‘sociology’ to distinguish the emerging field from the work of ecologists. Tüxen writes how the units of a plant community are sociological units, “just like a village (ein Dort), a city (eine Stadt), a people (ein Volk)”. ²² These units are species admixtures created by man and nature. Even as plants change with external environmental factors, the nature of society follows its own sociological rules: “They function in a society-specific way!”. ²³

The work of classification and division, on the basis of occupation and qualification, was the central labor of human and plant sociology. In one of the earliest Anglophone briefs on this emergent science, American ecologist Roland Harper, who closely followed developments in Europe, writes: “A pioneer human society is chiefly made up of hunters, prospectors, cowboys, lumbermen and other resourceful but not highly educated people, while urban society is much more complex, and contains many notables and nobodies, specialists, dependents, idlers and parasites. Likewise a pioneer plant society may consist largely of lichens, mosses, and other hardy forms, while in a dense “climax” forest there are tall trees and low herbs; vines and epiphytes, which depend on the trees for support; saprophytes or humus plants, which live on decayed leaves furnished; by other plants; and often many parasites as well”. ²⁴ Here, Harper’s anthropomorphism should be read as ‘ethnomorphism’ ²⁵ which denotes the racial difference indexed by classifications in settler colonialist projects. Ecology grew hand in hand with imperialism that favored settler agriculture over native uses of land, ²⁶ as seen in terms such as ‘pioneer species’ that denotes the first tree species to ‘colonize’ a ‘barren’ stretch of land.

It is salient here to note that phytosociology also emerged in close relation to the practice of scientific forestry, as forests were considered to be the highest and most complex form of plant social life, and showcased many important aspects of plant life, especially their “gregariousness”. ²⁷ Just as foresters had estimated the annual production of timber, a need was echoed by ecologists to quantitatively estimate the volume or weight of non-economic vegetation in a given area. ²⁸ Estimating this annual growth could augment empirical knowledge of pioneer farmers regarding soil fertility, so that new settlers can clear “new lands for the plow”. ²⁹ Through these parallelisms, phytosociologists too partook in the imperialist worldmaking project with the suit of botanists and geographers. The subject had much to offer for Harper, as conservation projects and transportation lines made ‘remote’ areas accessible for ‘civilization’ to creep in. In Germany, the political implications of these sociological parallelisms across plant and human kingdoms would also fuel necropolitical empire-building projects during the late 19th to early 20th century, which is explored in the next section.

Organicism and the harmony of nature

Tüxen in 1965 published a report on the law of co-existence of species ‘Biosoziologie’, in which he outlines the laws governing ‘biocenosis’ ³⁰ or ‘community of the living’. I recount his seven laws of co-existence, for it highlights the fusing together of a functionalist sociological account of plant society as described in the previous section, together with the organismic accounts of a harmonious nature around which this section is encircled.

The laws are: First, each individual and species can live in a community only as long as its connection to the community is maintained in its formation, consolidation, and decay. Second, due to exogenous factors related to the location of the plant community, only a few species will be tolerated. Third, the species in each location of biocenosis belongs to a specific spatial order. Fourth, the biocenosis also follows a temporal order. Expression of life changes through the rhythm of the day, the seasons, and life courses. However, an equilibrium is attained where there is a pause in the breath of nature (Atempause). ³¹ In final life courses, the number of species is lesser than the beginning. The sixth law speaks to the endogenous order of biocenosis, where only few clans of species can live well together. There is a division of labor within the society between individuals that produces a labor output (Arbeitsleistung), the ones that replenishes the community and the soil, and ones that produce the organic mass. Finally, nature strives to establish a state of balance between all factors present in the location. Humans consider nature to be harmonious when the plant society is healthy, but the disturbances showcase the regenerative power of (plant) society. Even if human disturbances are present, it would build a new society with the inclusion of these ‘economic’ elements. ³²

Tüxen’s biosociology was a functionalist and organicist theory of a course of action in plant society – one in which every factor affects the society, but the functions of each of its parts is distributed such that the balance in nature will ultimately prevail. There is an inherent self-regulation in his plant communities. Further, each unit in nature is non-reducible and constitutive of its organic whole. It may take either a split second or decades for the structural state of an organic community to establish itself, but the natural order will always play its course when nature is left to itself. Even post-disturbance, nature has the capacity to regenerate itself and become whole.

The self-organization of nature, as applied in Tüxen’s laws, hinges on a central topic of debate in biology between the neo-mechanists and the organicists, or previously between mechanists and vitalists. Organicism emerged as a paradigmatic alternative in early 19th century embryonic biology to contest the reductionist, mechanistic paradigm which deprived beings of agency. Organicism in Germany, emerging from the Romantic period, led both liberal ³³ and conservative intellectuals to search for biological justifications for their ideological standpoints. ³⁴ Feudalism was replaced by laissez-faire in economic policy and individual competition by group competition in geopolitics. Even as organicists repudiated Darwin’s external selection, a biological determinism – with war as a biological necessity due to intra-specific competition for resources and a competition which would ultimately help nature along its course of progressive evolution – infused organicism with social Darwinism and Malthusian thought. ³⁵ Friedrich Ratzel, who was notorious for his involvement in the German colonial movement and for the extension of the concept of Lebensraum (living space) in 1901 that would be incorporated into Nazi dogmatic schemes, was also partly organicist. ³⁶ Life wound up inextricably with inorganic matter that it was difficult to separate into components. This life expresses itself through movement and spread, but the finitude of space on earth leads to a struggle for life. Thus, all spatial expansion were the result of tensions between the bio and the geo. ³⁷

Set against these developments, organicism was further extended to articulate the workings of plant communities with ecological climax described as a complex, super-organism by Frederic Clements. ³⁸ Borrowing from Henry Cowles, his theory of successional stages referred to long-term changes in the composition of plant communities resulting in the replacement of one group of organisms by another through organic interactions in the community. These stages eventually lead to the formation of a stable community. In the state of climax, all vegetation attains stabilization or a steady state that can last from decades up to a millennium; any minor changes in its expression are fleeting. It was assumed that this terminal stage of succession is in equilibrium with nature, even if markedly different from the ‘original’ vegetation. ³⁹ Like an organism, the Clementsian climax has its own ontogeny (embryonic development) and phylogeny (evolutionary change). ⁴⁰

However, not all ecologists agreed upon the organicist theory of succession and believed that the development of plant societies was akin to an organism. For empiricists such as Henry Gleason, vegetation was always in a mode of flux, the plant community was a co-incidence and thus any attempts in prediction was futile. ⁴¹ The British ecologist Arthur Tansley (1871–1955) was vehemently opposed to the Clementsian dogmatism in asserting the determinism of the biotic community as an organism and his characterization of vegetation growth (succession) as progressive development; “the march of vegetation from diverse beginnings to a common end”. ⁴² He wrote against incorporating philosophical aspects into modern biological understandings of the organism, as then it would be justified to call “the universe an organism, and the solar system, and the sugar molecule and the ion or free atom”. ⁴³ At most, plant communities could be called as quasi-organisms, as the development of vegetation does not resemble ontogeny of plants and animals. Communities can develop into poly-climaxes based on biotic and abiotic factors and should be studied as ‘ecosystems’. ⁴⁴ Even if ignored by Clements and his disciples for decades, the poly-climax, ecosystem paradigm now dominates ecological mode of knowledge production. ⁴⁵

Vegetation mapping as an imperialist cartography

Working on the basis of the laws of plant co-habitation, the goal for phytosociologists was to draw up vegetation maps based on field observations. The Zürich-Montpellier vegetation maps were made with small and bounded plant communities as the units of coverage, containing few or several plant species. For preparing a vegetation map, the field scientist must choose a few sample plots which are homogenous in terms of their plant distribution. The size of the plot must not be too much above the prescribed minimum size, as it hinders the mapping clarity. An intensive field identification of each and every plant stock is then carried out. This is carried out from the upper classes (trees) to lower vegetation classes (shrubs, high perennials, lower herbs, grasses, mosses). Depending on the community to be examined, the size of the plot can differ between few square centimeters to several hundred square meters. The distribution of different plants in accordance with their relative occurrence is established, and thus their real organization, co-occurrence, and hierarchy ‘in nature’. Braun-Blanquet authoritatively laid out the protocols and guidelines on plot sampling, vegetation sorting, and ordering. ⁴⁶ Clements wrote: “Though the mosaic of vegetation may appear to be a veritable kaleidoscope in countries long occupied by man, the changes wrought upon it are readily intelligible in terms of the processes concerned”. ⁴⁷ Miyawaki and Tüxen sought to establish standardized methods of community measurements, even if there were many problems in doing so. ⁴⁸ The units of measurement differed between sociologists and foresters, and between sociologists themselves.

Even as the association table is the touchstone of a plant sociologist according to Braun-Blanquet (1951, S.130; as cited in page 161 of Tüxen, 1965b), these skills cannot all be written out and explained but only can be gained through personal instruction. ⁴⁹ It requires years of training, craftsmanship, and acquaintance to the landscape. Only after several such recordings are taken, the plant associations can be understood through statistical analysis and are then synthesized in a table format through signatures and summaries. Even water and nutrient profiles of the locations were marked. ⁵⁰ Therefore, for Tüxen, “each vegetation map is therefore to be regarded as a real research achievement and not to be equated with a cadastral map or a forest map as has occasionally happened in complete ignorance of scientific work”. ⁵¹ These can then be compared to past and future maps and help in planning any technical interventions in the location. The exercise of vegetation mapping was not only a matter of scientific expertise, but one with serious economic consequences for the country. The climate, soil, water, animals, humans, or other effects that the location has on the vegetation growth would be economically useful either as a “pointer or as a living building material”. ⁵² Not surprisingly, Braun-Blanquet applauded Tüxen for being one of the first scientists to have grasped the importance and self-sufficiency of the science of phytosociology. ⁵³

I solicit the reader’s attention to the practice of phytosociological mapping in this section for a few reasons. First, as mentioned earlier, the study of ‘nature in nature’ was an important means of boundary marking with ecological practice: the Zürich-Montpellier school believed that the “concentration of interest (from ecologists) on habitat diverts attention from the objective study of vegetation as it actually exists; and may lead to an unreal interpretation of plant communities in terms of habitat”. ⁵⁴ Vegetation mapping involved making recordings of present condition of vegetation in a plot and creating tables to represent species interactions and community characteristics. ⁵⁵ Vegetation mapping as an epistemological tool also fortified expert demonstration of mastery over nature ‘out there’ to codify its presence into units and associations in space, and its functions into divisions of labor. Second, Zürich-Montpellier vegetation mapping took a regionalistic turn, aiming to understand the native vegetation that belonged in a particular region. Toward late 18th and through the 19th century, cartography flourished along with the expanding German empire, mapping acquired colonies and eastern Europe for further Germanization. ⁵⁶ By early 19th century, phytogeographers created ‘natural regions’ for regional distribution of taxa based on different laws of distribution such as climate or dominant vegetation types. ⁵⁷

Even as nature conservation remained an important topic during earlier regimes such as in the Weimar Republic, the management of open spaces of the National Socialist regime through creation of purely German landscapes using native trees was a starkly different enterprise. In a Nazi Landespflege (land management strategy), idealized landscapes were created from trees appearing in German songs and books, where the Volk can feel a sense of utmost belonging and patriotism for the fatherland. ⁵⁸ In addition, biological education became a tool for conveying social Darwinist doctrines from 1933 to 1945. The expansion of Deutsches Lebensraum into the Eastern territories due to the struggle for existence was justified through the naturally occurring competition of resources between plants and animals. At first, Tüxen’s extent of involvement with Nazi rule was difficult to ascertain as his earlier publications slipped from view after the war, ⁵⁹ but he benefited from successive career advancements during the Third Reich with his brand of phytosociology well-received by landscape architects involved in Landespflege at this time. ⁶⁰ From 1937 to 1938, Tüxen was promoted from the Hanover Provincial Office for Nature Conservation to the Department of Sociological Mapping under the Provincial Administration at Hannover, followed by a leadership position at the newly found Working Unit for Theoretical and Applied Plant Sociology. ⁶¹

Tüxen was also highly receptive to commercial applications of his concepts for commercial uses such as in agriculture, silviculture, military use, natural protection, or recreation. ⁶² This not only brought in funding and visibility to his research center, but also led to active land management policies in the Federal Republic. The imperial cadences of vegetation mapping flourished zealously during the Third Reich. The Nazis commissioned ‘die Vegetationskartierung des Reiches’ (the Vegetation Mapping of the Empire) under Tüxen ⁶³ to map the spread and distribution of the plant communities of the Deutschen Lebensraumes ⁶⁴ through multicolored maps. In addition, a phytogeographical unit mapped individual species distributions across the Fatherland. Just as Harper envisioned, phytosociology had a role in imperialist preoccupations of developing arid land productively; settlers were looking to know, ‘once the former German colonies had been reclaimed, how much biological rent could the father extract from their soil’. ⁶⁵ Tüxen’s contemporary and German ecologist, Heinrich Walter, investigated factors relating to the growth of sisal plantations in Eastern Africa, for ecology could both assess the existing state of productivity, and predict conditions for maximized productivity. ⁶⁶ Meanwhile Tüxen’s staff joined the suit of geographers and cartographers in the Forschungstaffel (research unit) providing scientific inputs to the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe and greening bunker roofs. ⁶⁷ The setting up of this unit was referred to by Tüxen as an exciting and unforeseen opportunity. ⁶⁸

Finally, I recall how Tuxen’s sixth law of biocenosis explicitly sought to prevent an arbitrary mixture of species, as plant societies have its regular space and ‘each society does not come into direct contact with just any others, but only with very specific others (contact societies) ⁶⁹ ’. The consanguinity of native afforestation with PNV is not incidental, as Tüxen disliked the use of ‘foreign’ trees for landscape management. He sought to preserve the character of the German landscapes, such as the dominant spruce on Harz mountains, against human intervention. ⁷⁰ Concepts such as PNV in performing ideological reinforcements to the National Socialist party since such concepts of landscape preservation bode well with ideas of an uncontaminated German race and soil. Convinced by Tüxen’s lectures, landscape architects were convinced in the use of native plants for the Reichsautobahn, rural settlement planning, and greening of airfields. ⁷¹ Zeller ⁷² documents how the landscape architect Seifert advocated the use of only native trees for the motorway project of the Third Reich, as they could withstand pollution and dry spells; and for this, he consulted Tüxen regarding the suitable ways of median and avenue planting. However, a stern interpretation of the theory was repudiated by other administrators within the same project. After deforestation of decaying non-native trees in Munich, the Inspector-General of the roadways, Fritz Todt wrote in a circular: ‘A chestnut in bloom delights the eye of many thousands, even if it is in the wrong place in Forstenried Park according to Tüxen’s theory’. ⁷³

PNV: from the actual to the potential

The phytosociologists mapped the extant vegetation in locations; however, this alone does not help one point to predictive interventions for land utilization. This is where Tüxen’s concept of PNV came in handy. PNV was defined by Tüxen ⁷⁴ as an “imagined natural state of vegetation [. . .] that could be outlined for the present time or for a certain earlier period, if human influence on vegetation was removed – the remaining conditions of life presently existing or having existed during those periods still being valid – and the natural vegetation was imagined as switched into the new balance within a split second [. . .] to exclude the possible effects of climatic changes and the consequences thereof”. ⁷⁵ The present climatic and soil conditions and all irreversible changes to the location, even if they were caused by man, are taken into account. ⁷⁶ However, the climate and anthropic factors are considered to be a constant for future potential mapping. This predictive technique can offer a glimpse into a future ‘natural vegetation’ ⁷⁷ that ‘is in harmony with its environment and therefore a precise indicator of prevailing conditions’. ⁷⁸

This conceptual abstraction served to resolve debates in the ecological community regarding the concept of ecological climax developed by Clements. ⁷⁹ The Clementsian ecological climax posed a concept of very high degree of stability in natures that are free from human interference and climatic changes. The phytosociologists – who observed massive industrialization, deforestation, grazing, erosion, groundwater reduction, and other ‘disturbances’ that come with human habitation ⁸⁰ – posited that a lot of vegetation is interfered with, and as a result, a more practical, imagined, and abrupt fitting (‘schlagartig’) construct had to be deduced from remnant forests to estimate the potential capacity of the location. ⁸¹ Tüxen’s laws rendered this natural equilibrium imaginable, as there were also shorter-term stable states or pauses in the breadth of nature. Miyawaki too followed suit, examining remaining natural vegetation and comparing it with other vegetation types to filter out the factors of time, space, and human interference. ⁸² The most structured and competitive vegetation types is chosen by the vegetation scientist as the primary PNV type. ⁸³

This mental construct of a PNV was difficult to grasp for ecologists and non-ecologists alike. Criticisms to the construct have poured in based on palynological evidence of historical vegetation, thus debunking notions of a pristine, native vegetation. ⁸⁴ On the other hand, adherers pointed to how there were many instances of misinterpretation of PNV and conflagrations with the natural or pre-anthropic vegetation – this was also partly pertaining to issues with language translation. ⁸⁵ Regardless of ongoing debates and improvements of the concept, Miyawaki practitioners in Coimbatore adopted a list of native vegetation at the provincial level to bypass painstaking measurements of site-specific PNV. The understanding of PNV as native vegetation was not an issue of imperfect translation. Miyawaki remarks: “distinguishing the potential natural vegetation of an area is just like trying to see the body through the clothes it is wearing – you can’t really make it out. It is so difficult that I first thought you needed some special, ninja-type skills”. ⁸⁶ But luckily, sacred groves near shrines came to his help. The old trees in Onzaki Shrine revealed to him as the right kind of PNV for the region. One must look out for remnants of mature forests. The plant communities with natural or near natural characteristics are chosen for plantation. Even if the area was dominated by secondary forests of broad-leaved trees, cedars, and cypress, Quercus acuta and Quercus salicina stood out as primary trees. ⁸⁷ From these relatively undisturbed patches of premodern forests, he diagnosed the potential vegetation which differed from the existing vegetation and went on to create nationwide scenarios for reconstruction of old forests in Japan.

Rots’ instructive work on sacred forests in Japan reveals the work of scientists and religious leaders in stabilizing discourses surrounding ‘chinju no mori’ (sacred forest shrines). Miyawaki and other ecologists underscored the ‘naturalness’ of premodern vegetation in shrines compared to the rest of the vegetation in a rapidly industrializing country. While ecologists emphasized ecological qualities, the emphasis on nativism (furusato) and vegetal continuities in shrine forests, and the denotation of chinju no mori became increasingly divorced from ecology to pertain to cultural significance of these forests. These landscapes were seen as inherently sacred, and this came alongside a turn toward the East for a renewed re-connection with nature. Not unlike Ratzel’s Germany, the cultural inflections of Shintoism revealed a nostalgia of an imaginary and harmonious past in pre-industrial Japan. ⁸⁸ Miyawaki’s ideas thus brought together reverence of nature in Japanese and German cultures – thus the native Miyawaki forest carries traces of the chinju no mori and the heimatwälder. ⁸⁹

Discussion

Even as work in biogeography has highlighted the role of botany and geography ⁹⁰ in furthering imperialist biopolitical projects, the role of phytosociology in restoration practices have been relatively under-studied. Minor schools of thought such as phytosociology contributed to the work of ontic classification, division, and ordering of human and plant societies. Whereas ecologists identified the PNV as a neutral and pragmatic tool to construct nature that is on the verge of destruction, we note how the metric rests on assumptions of a functionalist division of labor in nature and the self-regulation of plant societies. Miyawaki forests, in this light, are assumed to be ‘self-sustainable’ and to be in harmony with nature after two years of planting. Mechanists may have reduced organisms to clockwork; but the functionalist organicists described above vouched for a spatio-social determinism that would play itself out to bring out the natural distribution of beings in nature based on their innate strengths and weaknesses.

I historicize an organicist site of theory-making in the realm of plant thinking, as the camp is increasingly re-invoked in recent post-humanist literatures in a well-meaning attempt to dislocate mechanism. The increasing influence of organicist thinking points to a turn in cultural geography, where ‘livingness’ is conceptualized ‘a modality of connection between bodies (including human bodies) and (geo-physical) worlds’. ⁹¹ In ‘Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that shape embryos’, ⁹² Haraway explained how the metaphors of organicism shaped biology. Carrying wide-ranging implications on how we conceive life, Haraway’s later work also worked with metaphors that alluded to complex wholes and processes such as cyborgs, emphasizing on the connectedness or relationality of things. ⁹³ Paradigms can promiscuously meld with ideologies; mechanistic biology produced ways of knowing nature that renders “organism as an entity” – a “worlding of the Capitalocene at every step of the way”, writes Haraway. ⁹⁴ Against a mechanistic science that divides life into fragments, Puig de la Bellacasa ⁹⁵ in turn aligns with vitalism in her work on soils by calling for a reinvigoration of a vital force for recultivating relations with soil as life and death entangled, “a vital force that is deeply ethico-political” (p. 403).

This essay shows how biological worldviews such as organicism have engaged in a worlding of the Plantationocene – a racialized assemblage of extractive relations to land, labor, and life. ⁹⁶ Phytosociology produced ways of knowing nature with delimitations on the unit of nature and a valuation of specific natural societies that merits conservation. Organicism embroiled itself with the status quo of totalitarian geopolitics and imperialist productivisms – thus, not only functioning as a ‘metaphor’ for complexity, but also as a ‘transferred epithet’ for ‘weaker’ societies. Here I share Giraud’s unease with over-emphasizing connectedness: she argues how in addition to understanding and responding to complexity (which is at the heart of new organicist thinking), we must bear in mind to also be obligated to the exclusions that are inevitably created by and constitutive of relationality. ⁹⁷ Instead of seeking ideological reinforcements from biological worldviews, socio-vegetal relations and politics can be postulated in a nuanced manner by cautiously learning from histories of thought.

Phytosociologists endeavored to remain intellectually and socio-politically relevant: they emphasized the scientific nature of vegetation mapping by studying nature in nature, carried out mapping activities to delineate a specifically ‘German’ vegetation type, assessed conversion of inferior people’s lands for expanding lebensraum, and mobilized productivist terminologies such as ‘produktionpotential’ and ‘arbeitsleistung’ as ways of normalizing functions, hierarchies, and valuations of nature. Not only did phytosociology reinforce German imperialism, but also legitimized ways of shaping specific pathways toward the future based on the past and present. Tüxen’s PNV further solidifies this line of argumentation. Today, Shubendru Sharma, a key player in advocating the Miyawaki model and the founder of Afforest ⁹⁸ devotes a YouTube video in his tiny forest tutorial series to mapping plant associations. A lot of Miyawaki forest practitioners in India venerate the use of native species and name projects after ‘forgotten’ native trees. Understanding histories of thought help situating the persistence of species nativism and bio-cultural longing that continue to pose reverberations in conservation practices and thought.

Conclusion

In this essay, I traced the extra-logical notes in phytosociological traditions in Germany, detailing a functionalist-organicist lens in understanding plant societies in Zürich-Montpellier pflanzensociologie. Phytosociology empirically relied on a sampling of homogenous plots and identification of repetitive plant associations and ordering to make sense of a functionally harmonious nature. Organicism congealed with imperialist desires of Nazi Germany and furthered a social Darwinist cadence of inter-specific competition. A Ratzellian search for lebensraum and a nativist affinity within plant societies preoccupied traditions of thought and practice. Vegetation mapping transpired to form a prescriptive course of action – here, the vision of these mappers was never to return to a pristine past but to function in and work with an economically and ideologically compromised present.

Around the same time, the study of vegetation took mottled turns in different national or regional contexts – including European phytosociology, community ecology in the United States, and geobotany in Russia ⁹⁹ – developments from which influenced the positioning and propositioning of the Stolzenau school. ¹⁰⁰ In fact, the very term phytosociology (fitosocjologja) was coined in Polish by Jozef Paczoski. ¹⁰¹ This paper limits its scope to historicize and explicate the workings of Zürich-Montpellier school, by virtue of its lineage in the native tree selection in the Miyawaki method of afforestation. In effect, the essay aims to assert how lineages of thought matters in unpacking ongoing natural-cultural controversies.

This specific strand of an ontic vegetal classificatory scheme, emerging from a particular point of history in western European, continues to shape an internationally celebrated approach of greening retaining its touch of nativism. Through this essay, I elucidate how some of the contradictions in visions of contemporary greening projects are not a result of translation mismatch from science to practice, but rather emerge through historical chains of meaning functioning through tacit associations and dissociations that were ingrained and lived out through traditions and controversies in the construction of expert knowledges. Various applications of the ‘balance of nature’ thesis fed and continues to feed well into the popularity of the ‘wilderness’ idea as a variety of environmentalism, ¹⁰² where nature preservation can only march forward without the human as an interactor, by cordoning off natural reserves, national parks, and Miyawaki forests. Ecological constructions of ‘pristine nature’ were constructed through assumptions on the boundaries of nature, the ways of functioning of plant societies, layered with socio-political currents and scientific paradigms.

But trajectories of greening ‘best practices’ are both sticky and malleable: Scientific authorities are contested through modes of reasoning both within and outside science. For as long as scientific techniques in knowing the past and predicting the future develop, controversies on the meanings and values of ‘nature’ will also remain. Probing the historical contingencies in ecological knowledge production, one may be left with despair for the stickiness and authority of assumptions. But there is also hope, through the increased acknowledgment of uncertainty and curiosity in urban ecological practices today.