« Global networks of anticolonial resistance: Bronwyn Carlson, Tristan Kennedy, Madi Day (eds), Global networks of Indigeneity: Peoples, sovereignty and futures, Manchester University Press, 2026

The root cause of settler colonialism: Moss M. R. Berke, ‘The Cruel Optimism of Mass Tree-Planting Initiatives: Settler-Colonial Environmentalism and the Affective Allure of Tree Planting’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2026

07Mar26

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.


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