Beauty in destruction (it’s a settler thing): Sadie Couture, ‘Melodies of the toppling trees: the tree farm pastoral, extractivism, and attachment in British Columbia, Canada’, Cultural Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Beauty in destruction (it’s a settler thing): Sadie Couture, ‘Melodies of the toppling trees: the tree farm pastoral, extractivism, and attachment in British Columbia, Canada’, Cultural Studies, 2025

31Oct25

Abstract: This paper develops a concept, ‘the tree farm pastoral,’ that describes the ability to perceive beauty in the midst of destruction and dispossession through a particular framing of the extraction of wood and the cultivation of crops. The tree farm pastoral is an affective orientation marked by a series of profound transformations in the management of forests – the development of ‘sustained yield forestry’ – which occurred around the middle of the twentieth century and that fundamentally shifted the relationship between settlers and trees in British Columbia, Canada. Emerging from an analysis of forest management documents as well as the life and work of Robert Swanson – a poet, logger, engineer, railway inspector and whistle inventor – this paper argues that this transformation was also discursive and perceptual, occurring on the level of language and sound. Bringing insights from cultural studies, sound studies, settler-colonial, and Indigenous studies into conversation with primary sources about forestry from the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that the tree farm pastoral – as constructed materially, discursively, and perceptually – serves to help settlers affectively navigate the tension between loving and caring for, while disrespecting and destroying, the forests of British Columbia. The tree farm pastoral names a particular entanglement between the material and discursive forms of extraction and dispossession – the concrete and physical versus the ideological and affective – that can be hard to parse when theorized in general or out of context. This paper offers the tree farm pastoral as a tool we can use to describe a way of being oriented towards the world that fuels and enables settler-colonialism, to complicate our understanding of the affective dimensions of extractivism, and to add to discussions about metaphor, language, and sound as they relate to techno-utopian discourses in media studies and beyond.

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