He applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Andrew S. Mathews's website.Such expert framings of climate change assume that ordinary people are ignorant, in need of education and persuasion, and it ignores the things that they already know and care about. A better approach starts by asking how people know and experience their surroundings, including, but not only, climate. As I have shown in this chapter, climate change, is for most people not called into doubt, but also for most, climate is an abstract process that is not linked to the nonhumans, to the landscape structures, or to the political scales of action to which they are committed. The case of the Monte Pisano suggests that we should study climate change politics by focusing on people’s relationships with the non humans they care about, the landscape structures they live in, and the histories they recount. In the following chapters we will begin to move out from the Monte Pisano to the politics of landscape care in Italy more broadly. As we shall see, the politics of weather/plant/soil/connections have permeated environmental politics and climate change science in Italy.This page does an excellent job summarizing one of the key arguments of the book, that people experience and respond to environmental change as it appears in their daily lived experience. The ‘climate change’ of scientists and policy makers is a mathematical construct, the average of weather over a large scale in time and space. We all live in a world of weather: rain, clouds, sun and wind. We are experts in our own environments, and we always have to translate the expert knowledge of scientists and policymakers and see how it makes sense (or not) in terms of the environments that we know. A lot of climate policy is premised on ordinary peoples’ lack of knowledge, when in reality, ordinary people know different things from scientists and policymakers.
Even when, as will increasingly happen in the future, people begin to talk more about climate change, we should notice the political contexts in which they use these words and how they link them with the landscapes where they work. Ranchers in the American West, who worry about the decline of pastures and the health of their cattle in the face of drought, and who resent government oversight, should not be asked how or if they “believe in climate change.” The political scales that they attach to their experiences of environmental change may not connect with the scale of global climate change, nor does the caring for one’s surroundings always produce positive environmental change. Hill farmers in Italy who do not “believe” in climate change, as well as those who do, may find more detailed and dramatic ways of noticing and talking about environmental change, through their capacity to notice droughts, forest fires, terracing systems, and pest epidemics.
This section does have one critically important thing missing however. One important argument of the book is that people care about tree and landscape morphology, and that trees and landscapes can change shape in response to human care, forest fires, diseases, and disasters. I want readers to learn to notice plant and landscape morphology by looking at diagrams and examples. You could find some of these on pages 101-108, or at my own drawings of chestnut trees on page 55. Plants are amazing shape changers and they have persuaded humans to reshape landscapes also. If you learned one thing from this book, I hope that would be it!
--Marshal Zeringue
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