I was motivated to create “A Tree Is Not A Forest” while taking the week-long “Augmented Audio Realities Workshop” with James T. Green through UnionDocs in December, 2020. For the course, I was tasked with creating a short audio piece over the course of six days that explored a singular topic across time through its past, present and future. Before the class, I’d spent a sunny fall afternoon collecting walnuts from the ground underneath an old black walnut tree in the backyard, which inspired me to create a piece that imagined the life of a single tree over the span of 200+ years, as its surrounding world transformed into a dense cityscape dominated and shaped by humans. 

I was inspired by recent readings of “The Hidden Life of Trees'' by Peter Wohlleben and “Braiding Sweetgrass'' by Robin Wall-Kimmerer, which paint trees as more than just the suppliers of lumber for human civilization or as the earth’s lungs for us to exploit, but as beings instead of objects. As a gardener, forager and lover of the outdoors, I take plant life very seriously and I like to think that they hold more than just water and chlorophyll within their fibers, but that they also contain agency and memory. So each time I move through my community garden, I imagine that the soil and the plants have the capacity to remember my voice, my touch and the care I try to show them.

The piece intends to grapple with questions around the complications of being a silent witness to the rise of the anthropocene, of aging and becoming less visible, of reciprocity within our relationships with plants who do the majority of the work that makes this planet livable for all of us, and of climate change and humanity’s problem with rapid deforestation. Lastly, the title and phrase “a tree is not a forest” comes directly from Wolleben’s book, and it’s a reminder that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts, and a warning to our tendency to turn living beings into objects and to alienate and individualize said beings from the environments they live in.