The power of lament: Reckoning with loss in an urban forest

Abstract

This paper explores the lamenting for a street tree to better understand reactions to ecological loss. It responds to calls for social studies research into how ecological loss is felt and expressed, particularly when that loss and its emotional impact is unrecognised. Drawing on a unique dataset of emails to trees in Melbourne, we consider the most emailed tree, a tree felled despite collective action. Lamenting for this tree is explored as an individual and collective process that includes but extends beyond grief. A lament, we argue, involves shaping and expressing an account of loss that holds others to account. Understood as an embodied and emplaced process, we develop the case for the concept of lament through detailing the feeling, narrating, sharing and placing of loss. We argue that examining lament in this way reveals new insights into lived experiences and expressions related to facing the damage and destruction of nonhuman life and landscapes.

Emotional geographies of an urban forest: Insights from an email‐a‐tree initiative

“…That approach included qualitative coding, sentiment (VADER) analysis, and statistical techniques, including spatial statistics. Our analysis spatialises and expands deep investigations of specific emotions (Phillips, Atchison, & Straughan, 2023; Phillips, Straughan, & Atchison, 2023; Straughan et al, 2022) and continues conversations about how human–plant worlds are shaped (Phillips & Atchison, 2020). Our results and discussion illustrate the value and the limitations of this initiative.…”

“…Concern about removal is illustrated by expressions of anticipated or actual loss, love for the tree, and anger at decisions for its removal (see Table 6). Many emails, such those to a removed lemon‐scented gum (see Phillips, Atchison, & Straughan, 2023), were written during a tree’s period of pending or actual removal. As the excerpts in Table 6 suggest, such emails mark a difference emailers made between natural tree death and a life cut short.…”

“…Emailers sometimes reflected on their own age in relation to a tree’s age, often in association with a personal story or life event. Furthermore, emails to older trees connect senders to wider social and environmental issues and concern for the future (Phillips, Atchison, & Straughan, 2023). For example, beyond the extracts shown in Table 6, concerns over climate change take shape in gratitude for how a tree and a person might both “do their part,” that a tree should “stay strong and suck up that CO 2 ,” or that a tree is part of the “fight.” Likewise, emails reflect people’s relationships to nature through exasperation regarding ecological or habitat loss and reflect feelings about the need for defending and/or expanding the urban forest.…”

“…The tree types and localities that emailers already feel connected to seem to be obscured in planning for biodiverse, native‐preferred, urban forests. Altering species assemblages, for example, must be done with care as significant alterations to local environments bring into sharp relief the emotional and affective spatialities of grief, alongside death (Maddrell, 2016; Phillips, Atchison, & Straughan, 2023). This research provides the impetus for authorities to identify where localised and/or unexpected attachments may occur—such as in CBD—to clarify possible conflicts, or collaborations, in relation to anticipated tree management, removal, or replacement.…”

“…However, as subjective well‐being is reflected through cultural understandings and material interactions, affective sensibilities can be both welcoming and hostile (Waitt & Knobel, 2018). Less pleasant attachments are noted in work exploring greenspaces and crime or oppression (Fleming et al, 2016; Juntti et al, 2019), anger and contestation over tree removal (Rotherham & Flinders, 2019), and trees memorialising or becoming subject to conflicts and loss (Cloke & Pawson, 2008; Heath‐Kelly, 2018; Phillips, Atchison, & Straughan, 2023).…”