Risk and the Arborist in the Remaking of the Australian Urban Forest

The emerging profession of arboriculture has influenced Australian urban landscapes over the past decade. Arborists manage the urban forest as a core component of urban sustainability. We analyse qualitative interviews with 53 professionals involved in tree management in six eastern Australian cities to determine the ways in which a concern with risk management has shaped both the urban forest and the professional status and role of arborists. We found tree‐related risk has, in part, worked against urban greening by reducing tree size. However, an emerging risk culture has encouraged the development of the profession of arboriculture, which, in turn, has pioneered sophisticated ways, familiar to neither engineers nor ecologists, of ensuring the cohabitation of people and trees.     

Beyond the Mirrored Horizon: Modern Ontology and Amodern Possibilities in the Anthropocene

Early talk of the Anthropocene has been prompted by material evidence of the incoherence of ontological divisions between humanity and the rest of Earth. Yet, ironically, it has also been dominated by modern narratives about human distinction, autonomy, and dominion. Along with recrimination about the death of nature, the modern Anthropocene carries hope of human redemption through natural evolution or technological progress. The resulting narratives of enlightened planetary stewardship reduce earthly multitudes to a common denominator, shoring up the mirrored horizons within which modern humans encounter only themselves. In response, I explore amodern possibilities for action in an Anthropocene beyond modern referents of nature and culture. These possibilities open up choices within planetary dynamics that are inherently human but not reducible to human agency. This is a politics of sustenance attuned to difference and relation and directed to the multitude of human‐other‐than‐human collectives, to the specific shared projects of existence, in which human interests are composed.