« Indigenising Argentina’s settler history: Robert Christensen, ‘Ethnohistory and Indigenous People on Argentina’s Southern Frontier: Pampas-Patagonia, 1810-1885’, History Compass, 2025
The climate crisis and the crisis of settler colonialism (with a chapter on the ‘History of Settler Colonialism’): Sarah Haley Knowles, Diminished Prosperity: How a Warming Planet Impedes Healthy Families, Communities, and Economies, Palgrave, 2025 »

An olive grove is not a pine forest: Christopher C. Jadallah, ‘What could be more innocent than planting trees? Thinking with Palestine in land education’, Curriculum Inquiry, 2026

06Jan26

Abstract: Land education, as both theory and pedagogy, works to unsettle the colonial dynamics that continue to pervade both land relations and learning environments. In this article, I turn to the geographies of Palestine to engage in a critical reading of two prominent landscape types in the region—pine forests and olive groves—with the goal of unearthing, and thus confronting, the ways in which settler colonial inheritances manifest across ecologies. From this reading, I call attention to a related phenomenon: how curricular encounters—in this case, activities such as planting pine trees—can serve to reify and reinscribe settler colonial dynamics, despite often being portrayed with a certain innocence. In contrast, curricular encounters grounded in Palestinian lifeways, land relations, and sumud, or steadfastness, present an alternative to settler environmentalism and create openings for education to contribute to decolonial futures. Through these analyses, I reveal how Palestine teaches us to focus not only on place-based ecologies as sites for curricular intervention; it also teaches us to situate such interventions in transnational analyses that build global solidarities.


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