The Forest Multiple: Composing and digitalizing wooded worlds

Abstract

Designations of forests take hold in policy definitions, land use practices, community initiatives, scientific research, and entrepreneurial endeavors. These multiple forests form as distinct and often competing realities enacted through environmental practices, knowledges, and cosmologies. “The Forest Multiple” special issue explores the question of “what is a forest” to examine the diverse ways that forests materialize and are operationalized in a time of planetary upheaval. With ongoing deforestation and degradation, together with calls for restoration and replanting, forests are positioned as key ecosystems for addressing climate change and biodiversity collapse. Technologies, especially digital tools, are often central to forest restoration and conservation projects, further entrenching distinct logics of datafication, optimization, and efficiency typically oriented toward market objectives, which can collide with diversely inhabited forest forests. In this sense, conserved, cultivated, and expanded forests can vary in composition, purpose, interconnections, and social–cultural value. This special issue revisits and extends key work on multiplicity and pluralism within science and technology studies, geography, and aligned fields to analyze how forests as ecosystems and entities are made, what the consequences of these practices are, how forest worlds come into conflict, and how it could be possible to work toward more just, convivial, and pluralistic environmental relations.

Composing forest worlds

What is a forest? This question runs through numerous environmental research and policy discussions. Planetary crises and environmental change are contributing to the degradation and loss of forests, while in other areas, forests are expanding due to climate change. Land uses that include old-growth ecosystems and carbon plantations can fall under a forest designation. From international guidelines (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 2020) to morphological classifications of tree density and height, as well as species variation, spatial extent, and carbon-storage capacity, many definitions of forests refer to their role as resources (Chazdon et al., 2016; Turnhout et al., 2017). While some forest research scans global, historical and policy-oriented “concepts and definitions of forests,” especially about “when” a forest can be identified through “forest loss and forest gain” (Chazdon et al., 2016: 538), other research and initiatives focus on practices and livelihoods that activate forest relations. Multiple other forests also materialize through cultural, social, ecological, more-than-human, and cosmological connections, which further complicate the question of what a forest is—or how it is composed (Devine and Baca, 2020; Gabrys et al., 2022; Kohn, 2013; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2020).

“The Forest Multiple” is a special issue that generates and focuses on theoretical and empirical research to consider how forests are pluralistically constituted and mobilized in a time of planetary crises. The focus here is less definitional—or on arriving at an ultimate answer to the question of what a forest is—and more practical, in that the texts gathered here consider how forest worlds are made and sustained in practice. The collection grew out of a workshop and symposium hosted by the Smart Forests research group at the University of Cambridge in October 2022. ¹ During this 2-day event, we discussed how forests circulate as carbon sinks, sources of profit, resources, objects of sustainable consumption, quantitative entities, matters of dispute, livelihoods, ecological relations, cyborgs, multi-scalar zones of governance, networks, sites of exclusion and abandonment, places of refuge and marronage, commons, temporal landscapes, and much more. The working texts and public presentations covered a range of forest issues, from the dominance of carbon in conceptualizing forests to the role of communities in implementing REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), along with the centrality of technologies in undertaking field measurements and verifying carbon stores.

Also emerging in the conversations and presentations was work focused on peatlands and wildfires, remote sensing technologies and community use of drones for conservation, together with explorations of the data frontiers of environmental science and intimate data relations within open forests, as well as cosmopolitical forests and digital infrastructures. These discussions were informed by and connected to research and fieldwork in a wide range of locations that spanned Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Finland, Gabon, Guatemala, Jamaica, India, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States, among others.

Forests are not singular or self-evident objects. Instead, they are composed of many mutually constituted relations. Far from being merely a collection of trees, many different life forms, ecosystems, and other entities interrelate and grow together into what people differently recognize as a forest. This special issue engages with the “forest multiple” to consider the pluralistic mobilizations and inhabitations of forests in locations worldwide. The title of this collection, “The Forest Multiple,” is a deliberate reference to Annemarie Mol’s (2002) pivotal text, The Body Multiple, and its commitment to grappling with how different practices can enact different objects. Mol’s text has been a key reference for research engaged with practices and multiplicity, whereby social objects and events are multiplied and differently composed. Mol focuses on practices rather than representations and definitions, making an avowedly ontological rather than epistemological move to study how the reality of the (diseased) body is made. What materializes through Mol’s study is an engagement with multiplicity that extends beyond a collection of “perspectives” focused on a singular object and instead demonstrates how practices of research, medical review, technical scans, daily maintenance, and ongoing inhabitations enact different reality objects. Reality is made rather than represented within Mol’s assessment. However, it is made multiply through practices composing different material-object-events that can resonate with and/or exclude each other.

Drawing on Mol’s approach, this collection revisits and re-examines the longer trajectory of multiplicity and pluralism within science and technology studies, geography and aligned fields. There continues to be a proliferation of research focused on pluralisms, showing how central these concerns have become for identifying diverse values, grappling with power dynamics, addressing inequities, and working toward more livable environments not by eliding different but rather by finding ways to create more convivial and just environmental relations. At the same time, not all engagements with multiplicity follow the same theoretical itinerary. Research in this collection engages with Mol, in addition to the studies of de la Cadena and Blaser (2018), Escobar (2018), and Tsing (2005, 2015), as well as numerous empirical forest studies, to tease out the implications of diverse, colliding, and at times converging forest conditions. The longer histories of multiplicity and pluralism also signal toward James (1996[1909]), whose A Pluralistic Universe makes the case for a “plurality of reals” (p. 75) that are distributed and in process. Writing in a register that resonates with contemporary scholarship, James notes, “What really exists is not things made but things in the making” (p. 263). We extend this focus to the “forest multiple” to consider how a plurality of forest realities is in the making, what the consequences of these undertakings are, and how such a focus on plurality and practice can inform more just approaches to forest world-making projects (cf. Longdon et al., 2024).

This collection highlights different approaches to and engagements with multiplicity and pluralism, and it also proposes updates and transformations to the practices and theories of multiplicity through different forest engagements. In contrast to the body of the “body multiple” (Mol, 2002), forests are differently identified, made, and inhabited in ways that challenge how or whether pluralism converges and diverges into shared engagements or contestations (Agrawal, 1995; Forsyth, 2020; Marijnen and Verweijen, 2018). The forest is a less neatly delineated entity than the body, since it is composed through ecological and spatial-temporal relations that extend the concern with how “reality is made” to more-than-human entities, wider milieus, and co-inhabitations. The texts in this collection also do not create sharp exclusions across epistemic, ontological and cosmological practices of making forests, since definitions and policies can mobilize material practices, while cultural values can influence a technical engagement. Moreover, environmental change and changing technologies contribute to shape-shifting forest worlds where power differentials can contribute to struggles over which realities have more significance than others. Some forest forms, such as plantations, can be sites of ecological and social destruction (Davis et al., 2019) or of epistemic closure when confronting the conversion of forests to plantations (Astuti and Fatimah, 2024). Because of their multiplicity, lived forest worlds thus pose a challenge both to the processes for identifying and navigating pluralistic inhabitations, and to the care and governance of these environments (Asiyanbi et al., 2019; Latulippe and Klenk, 2020; Moulton, 2022; Undurraga and Aguirre, 2023).

As the texts in this special issue demonstrate, power and inequality can become especially evident in the frictions that materialize across different forest worlds. Forest practices can signal different cosmologies that can be incommensurable with prevailing ways of addressing environments. As Anishinaabe environmental legal scholar Deborah McGregor (2018: 12) writes, “The current dominant paradigm of ‘environment’, as codified in environmental protection laws, does not capture what is meant by ‘all our relations’ or ‘a peopled cosmos.’” Indigenous research, practice and activism have drawn attention to “buen vivir” and ways of “living well with Earth” that involve close observation of and reciprocal relations with multiple organisms and entities, who are the many “peoples” and “relatives” that make the Earth and its ecosystems possible (McGregor, 2018; Merino, 2021; Nenquimo and Anderson, 2024; Westerlaken et al., 2023 see also Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 2022).

Digitalizing forest worlds

While focusing on pluralism and forests, this collection especially engages with the forest epistemologies and ontologies that are reproduced and amplified within the increasing digitalization of forests. This collection analyzes a range of digital techniques, technologies, and concepts that span from remote sensing to in situ sensors, Lidar measurements and drone observations, bioeconomy innovation labs and blockchain carbon offsets, digital mapping and camera traps, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analysis. Even more than an assortment of devices, digital technologies activate and become enrolled within different socio-technical practices for monitoring, managing and transforming environments (cf. Luque-Ayala et al., 2024; Nitoslawski et al., 2021; Nost and Goldstein, 2022; Sarkar and Chapman, 2021; Turnbull et al., 2023). Whether through monitoring technologies, precision forestry, or supply-chain tracking (Gabrys, 2020; Goldstein and Faxon, 2020; Howson et al., 2019; Millner, 2020; Romero Dianderas, 2024), digital technologies are involved in reworking forest measurements, values, markets, temporalities, and political possibilities (Lewis Hood and Gabrys, 2024; Stanley, 2024; Urzedo et al., 2023; Vurdubakis and Rajão, 2022; Walford, 2015).

In the search for optimization and interoperability, digital technologies can often reduce and foreclose multiplicities into more limited forms, raising the question of which forest processes and worlds are prioritized, and which are excluded or eliminated. Engaging especially with how digital technologies can transform, multiply, and/or reduce forests, this collection draws out specific ways that technologies and forests can be differently mobilized, whether through counter-actions, refusals to participate or creative realignments (Dolejsova et al., 2022; Paneque-Gálvez et al., 2017), as well as proposals for more responsible engagements with these technologies (Kloppenburg et al., 2022; Mahony, 2023; Pritchard et al., 2022; Sandbrook, 2015).

This special issue is unique as a collection that develops a sustained engagement with forests and digital technologies, especially through the theoretical and empirical lens of pluralism. There are arguably no forests are not under the sway of digital technologies, whether from the satellite view to the AI-informed reforestation model, or more directly through apps triggering deforestation alerts of drones informing land management practices. Environment and Planning F’s focus on “people, technology and environment” makes this an especially ideal venue for this special collection that examines how digital technologies and forest environments give rise to issues of environmental and social justice, political organization and social movements, and transnational governance and transdisciplinary engagements.

Forest multiple contributions

Consisting of six articles and one perspective, as well as this editorial introduction, “The Forest Multiple” special issue texts engage with how forests are multiply composed, inhabited, digitalized, mobilized, and sustained within diverse contexts, which are often responding to international environmental agendas through situated practices and differing interpretations of environmental objectives. Organized into three cross-cutting thematic areas—including carbonizing, surveilling, and speculating—the articles and perspectives show how forest pluralisms generate interconnected if often inequitable dynamics, where livelihoods, markets, cosmologies, more-than-human relations, epistemologies, and policy agendas materialize in response to different forest worlds.

The first thematic area of the collection focuses on the increasing carbonization of forests, which play a central role in storing carbon. With the broader context of planetary climate change, forests are often emphasized as carbon sinks meant to offset the many carbon-emitting activities (COP26, 2021; Dalsgaard, 2022; Ehrenstein, 2018; Nel, 2017), which can also reinforce the ongoing use of fossil-fuel energy sources. However, many other forest practices, relations, values, and cosmologies are typically excised from the carbon-focused forest. At the same time, the ability to develop a clear account of forest-carbon exchanges is more elusive than is often admitted.

In her article, “Forests high on CO₂: A glimpse into how scientists study the biochemical machinery of forest ecosystems,” Ehrenstein (2024) considers techniques that attempt to measure whether forests are storing more carbon as a result of rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels. Focusing on experiments in the United States and beyond where forests are deliberately exposed to elevated or “enriched” CO₂ levels, Ehrenstein addresses whether and how forest ecosystems can be understood as predictable “biochemical machinery.” Rather than arrive at a clear model of inputs and outputs, these experiments in carbon measurements demonstrate how forests are heterogeneous and changing ecosystems that require intricate practices for addressing and hedging against the complexities of these systems. With an updated approach to the concept of the “macroscope,” Ehrenstein suggests that a collection of practices is needed to understand complex forest ecosystems, where no single practice can produce a coherent account of forest processes. In this sense, the “forest multiple” materializes as a necessarily collective and ongoing project, but one which primarily remains within the realm of the natural sciences.

In a resonant way, Turnhout and Lynch’s (2024) perspective text, “Raising the Carbonized Forest: Science and technologies of singularization,” demonstrates how scientific practices focus on carbonizing forests to create singular climate mitigation strategies. Forests become valued for their ability to absorb carbon, and policies and projects, such as REDD+ further organize forest communities to fulfill these objectives, which are typically not realized. Moreover, the authors argue that digital technologies are central to realizing this project of carbonization and singularization, where forests become diminished entities aligned with market-based values of optimization and efficiency. Their perspective is then one of working against singularization as it materializes in carbonized and digitalized forest spaces and moving toward more diverse and pluralistic ways of engaging with and valuing forests. In this sense, they propose a project of creating “a forest in which many forests fit,” which would counter the “ideal” if “dysfunctional” forests of optimization, carbonization, and singularization to engage with wider knowledge practices that confront the “political-economic forces contributing to forest destruction.”

Turning from technologies for monitoring carbon and calculating futures, the second thematic area of the special issue considers practices of surveilling forests. While environmental monitoring is a central feature of observing and studying forests, these expert techniques, epistemologies, and devices can also be rerouted and transformed through diverse forest engagements that attempt to counteract or reimagine these prevailing forest practices. Environmental monitoring for international conservation efforts generates a particular set of forest practices that can often collide with—and even be interrupted by—people and organisms who live within and adjacent to forest environments.

In their article contribution, “Between the god-trick and pluriversal potential: Four figures of drone in tropical forest conservation,” Millner and Amador-Jimenez (2024) explore whether and how conservation drones can operate as pluriversal technologies. Drones can establish surveillance infrastructures and propagate militaristic techniques for policing marginalized populations who may depend on forests for livelihoods. However, these same populations can mobilize drones to claim territorial rights, observe forest changes, and care for forest organisms and relations. Analyzing ethnographic research situated across the Maya Biosphere Reserve, and Andean and Amazon Forests in Central and South America, the authors suggest that drones can have “pluriversal potential” when used to enable Indigenous and community-led conservation practices. Scanning drone practices that are variously neoliberal, surveillant, or community-oriented, these authors’ approach to the “forest multiple” is to consider how “incommensurable ways of knowing nature” co-exist, and how forest conservation practices could—provisionally, and through ongoing dialogue—mobilize drones to support projects of ecological and social justice.

Simlai and Sandbrook (2024) extend this examination of conservation surveillance technologies in their article, “The gendered forest: Digital surveillance technologies for conservation and gender-environment relationships.” They consider how the proliferation of camera traps within forest monitoring practices can reinforce or disrupt gender-environment practices and relationships in the Corbett Tiger Reserve in India. In this sense, different forest practices come into direct conflict. Digital technologies, such as camera traps enable surveillance practices in forests not just of organisms but also of people, which can significantly transform forest dwellers’ inhabitations and livelihoods. In their article, Simlai and Sandbrook show how technologized practices of biodiversity conservation collide with women’s forest inhabitations in ways that constrain their culture and livelihoods while amplifying gender-based violence through the extension of the male gaze. While Millner and Amador-Jimenez engage with the “forest multiple” as one of precarious potential, Simlai and Sandbrook’s account of the “forest multiple” emphasizes the distinct power dynamics that generate inequities across different forest practices and in relation to diverse forest inhabitants. The “forest multiple,” in other words, can lead to ongoing frictions and discord—for instance, across conserved and surveilled forests compared to inhabited and intimate forests—that can impede the possibility of some forest practices and livelihoods.

The third and final thematic area of the special issue investigates in more detail the speculative practices that are remaking forests, whether through attempts to mobilize them as planetary resources, engines of net zero, new bio-economies, or digital milieus. Santos da Costa and Dalsgaard (2024) interrogate attempts across technoscience and conservation to “save” the Amazon rainforest. In their article, “Salvage technoscience: Conserving and extracting the value of the Amazon Rainforest,” they show how particular ways of valuing the Amazon can simultaneously facilitate extraction, whether in the form of eDNA from biodiversity research or tokenized carbon credits from conserved forest areas. While current developments within bioeconomy research and entrepreneurship now attempt to value and extract resources in sustainable ways, these practices of “salvage technoscience” remain caught within capitalist logics that designate forests as assets. These authors describe how often speculative efforts to conserve forests, potentially also in the interests of economic livelihoods, reconfigure forests as information, databases, and credits from which value can be extracted. The “forest multiple,” in this sense, remains an elusive figure when conservation and extraction collapse into a continuum and do not contribute to multiple forest valuations, inhabitations or cosmologies, and when all forest practices must orient toward and pass through markets to be valid.

In their article, “Putting the digit back in digital: Zero as number and concept in the digitalisation of forests,” Gibson and Walford, (2025) analyze how “zero” is a figure within digital-environmental practices that organizes distinct forest engagements, which can be continuous with colonial relations and logics. Rather than offer a transformation or departure from environmental data practices that have been central to colonial conquest, the erasures and accumulations that zero as a number facilitates are central to projects of digitalizing forests. The forest is less “multiple” as rendered through the data practices that these authors discuss based on fieldwork in Brazil and Jamaica, and more a repeated terra nullius that enables ongoing calculation, speculation, and dispossession. In these authors’ analysis, the “digit” in the “digital” then converges upon enduring inequalities and injustices that are the legacy of colonial expansion.

In the final article of the collection, “Actually existing smart forests,” Gabrys et al. (2024) consider which forests are mobilized through the figure of the “smart forest” by building on previous investigations into “actually existing” socio-political worlds and smart environments. Such a re-engagement with the speculative contours of smart environments could draw attention to the pluralistic work of imagining, making, and sustaining digital-environmental practices, thereby creating possibilities for more equitable forest world-building (cf. Gabrys, 2022; Law, 2015). They ask how an engagement with speculative concepts and concrete conditions of smart forests can serve not only as an empirical grounding but also as an invitation to reconsider the potential for expanded environmental praxis. In this sense, as much as asking “what is a forest,” we could ask “how is a forest,” meaning through what practices and conditions are forests made and sustained.

Conclusion

“The Forest Multiple” collection seeks to advance theoretical, empirical, and practical research concerned with forest engagements in a time of rapid environmental degradation and destruction. The texts brought together here engage with forest pluralities especially as they are being shaped and reworked through digital technologies, international governance, data justice movements, and environmental praxis. To this end, the articles and perspectives include research approaches that are site-based and ethnographic, dialogic and participatory, spanning human and nonhuman processes, while reworking and transforming engagements with how forests are identified, made, sustained, and transformed. The special issue contributions analyze how carbon stands in for complex forest relations, which forest inhabitations are enabled or restricted, how forest futures are identified and mobilized, and what consequences these events have for environmental and social justice.

We hope this special issue will be a key resource for researchers and practitioners within geography, science and technology studies, sociology, anthropology, political ecology, media and communication studies, and creative practice; and practitioners in environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and policy-making groups. The emphasis across this transdisciplinary collection is not only on pluralistic engagements with forest research and practice, but also on forest worlds in the making, since these practices are also sites of possibility and transformation. In addition to studying different forest pluralisms, this collection considers how an engagement with, and reconsideration of, forests and pluralism can contribute to more just and equitable environmental research, practice, and policy. Pluralisms here are not merely additive. Instead, they demonstrate the struggles across—and consequences of—different forest practices, values, and worlds.