Abstract Critical Forest Studies is a rapidly growing field that takes multispecies relationships with/in forests as the starting point for critical and creative inquiry. Shaped by the contested political ecologies that emerge where different forest cosmologies, languages, histories, and ecologies meet, the field builds on related developments in the environmental humanities which explore multispecies relations through artistic, historical, philosophical, poetic, literary, and performative approaches. As the first special issue dedicated to Critical Forest Studies, this collection brings the field into direct dialogue with the theories, methodologies, and practices of environmental education. Environmental education has a rich and generative history of relational engagement with forests — from place-based and outdoor learning traditions to more-than-human and posthumanist approaches — and this collection builds on and extends that history. Indigenous and place-based perspectives are foregrounded throughout, bringing together diverse interdisciplinary understandings across four key areas: forest sentience, forest imaginaries, forest regeneration, and forest pedagogies. The collection bridges conceptual, artistic, empirical, methodological, and educational practices across these four themes, opening new possibilities for how environmental education might think, feel, and act with forests in times of ecological urgency.
Rousell et al. (Wed,) studied this question.