“Growing a Better Future”

Planting trees is a prominent strategy to address myriad environmental crises, including climate change and biodiversity loss. I approach this form of tree planting as a preeminent practice of environmental restoration in the Anthropocene. I focus on temporality, an approach that counters the dominant understanding of tree planting as something that occurs in a specific moment of time—the moment a tree is planted. Yet, I show through my review of diverse scholarship, tree planting is better understood as involving the many moments surrounding the moment in which a tree is planted. In particular, I focus on how past and future ecologies, humans, and nonhuman species—and how they are understood—influence the restorative tree planting that is reshaping many landscapes around the world. Among those landscapes is postindustrial northern England—a case I use to consider how attention to temporality might shape ethnographic research of restoration.