ABSTRACT

This paper presents stories of living with dead trees in Baltimore, MD, USA to explore where, how, and with whom tree remains become lively through art, farming, and sustainability practices. These stories serve as a lens into the diverse ways practitioners produce knowledge about death, healing, disease, and decay as they encounter and transform dead nonhuman bodies. I find that practitioners who work with dead trees develop a circular understanding of death, and propose that decay is needed to heal bodies and remediate land. However, when these everyday embodied knowledges are translated from the level of body to the city, death does not become lively for all. When circular ways of knowing death are applied to the city, death is displaced into vulnerable human and tree bodies showing that the sustainable city both relies on and (re)produces the binaries of life and death. As a contrast, practitioner knowledges of tree death suggest sustainabilities that trouble established notions of life and death, bodies and environments, health and disease, and decay and beauty.

摘要

本文介绍了在美国马里兰州巴尔的摩市死树的生活故事，以探讨通过艺术，耕作和可持续发展实践，树木在哪里，如何以及与谁一起变得活跃。这些故事是从业人员在遇到和转化死亡的非人体时产生关于死亡，治愈，疾病和衰变的知识的多种方式的镜头。我发现从事枯木工作的从业人员对死亡有一种循环的了解，并建议需要腐烂才能治愈尸体和修复土地。但是，当将这些日常体现的知识从身体的层面转化为城市的层面时，死亡并不会成为所有人的活命。当将知道死亡的循环方法应用于城市时，死亡被转移到脆弱的人类和树木中，这表明可持续发展的城市既依赖并（再）繁殖了生命和死亡的二进制文件。相比之下，从业人员对树木死亡的认识表明，可持续性困扰着已确立的生死，身体和环境，健康与疾病以及衰败与美丽的观念。