The Cruel Optimism of Mass Tree-Planting Initiatives: Settler-Colonial Environmentalism and the Affective Allure of Tree Planting

Abstract Placing Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” in conversation with Tuck and Yang’s work, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” this paper examines affective attachments to mass tree-planting efforts, which encourage unquestioned faith in these initiatives, serving to enable their persistence despite their consistent failures. This paper questions how affective attachments to mass tree-plantings teach publics to remain invested in the ability of settler-colonial institutions to solve climate crises, thereby ensuring that climate crises remain meaningfully unaddressed. Drawing together decolonial scholarship, affect theory, Indigenous thought and scholarship on environmental education, I demonstrate that mainstream tree-planting initiatives do not challenge the logics that permit forest and land degradation, but in fact, reproduce these logics. Rejecting a model which considers the act of planting trees as a success in and of itself, I instead ask what is missed when the planting of a tree is more important than the life of the forest.