Counting trees and carbon: Subsumption, quantification and silvicultural techniques

Studies of forest-based carbon capture and sequestration, such as Bastin et al’.s controversial 2019 study in Science , ask ‘how many trees do we need to plant to save the world?’ This question is about counting. This article traces the techniques by which trees are counted by tree planters and carbon is counted by climate scientists. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in western Canada, I chart how the mud and bug-stained notebooks of piecework organize the subsumption of labour in reforestation and how quantification subsumes nature in the earth system climate models of climate scientists and geographers. Via eco-Marxism, I argue that counting suggests the need to consider the subsumption of labour and nature together, and via science and technology studies (STS), I argue that counting, quantification and numbers are not wholly compromised tools of the state and capital. Taking counting as a ‘cultural technique’, I consider the tools of counting within a context and ground common to Marxist political ecology, STS and media theory: forestry. I ask both ‘how counting happens’ and ‘for what ends’ and I argue that Marxist political ecology needs STS and media theory to reveal the operations of counting, and that STS and media theory need Marxist political ecology to reveal what one counts for. If our current counts of trees and carbon aim to save a certain world of exploitative labour and destructive environmental relations, then we must learn to count differently and for a different world.