Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation

Elkin defies the current moment’s obsession with tree planting to challenge what we know about what we are planting. As a landscape architect, Elkin argues that we need to carefully consider how we steward trees and the places where they thrive and in turn, better understand the places where they don’t. Elkin’s critique of tree planting as a cause célèbre to assuage climate change impacts is based in historical and geographically diverse examples. The work reads with a specialist’s eye for horticulture and a storyteller’s narrative arc.

- Reviewer's comment of Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation by Rosetta S. Elkin

About Rosetta S. Elkin

Rosetta S. Elkin is the Founding Academic Director of Landscape Architecture at Pratt Institute, where she teaches landscape as a practice and a medium through the behavior of plants across time and in our everyday lives. In writing and scholarship, she aims to experiment with the ways in which we compose our worlds, blurring the traditional boundaries in the research process through first hand engagement and fieldwork. Professionally, she is the Principal of Practice Landscape, a collaborative studio that prioritizes landscape-making, gardens, public exhibitions, and horticultural design to promote a more thoughtful and accountable design agenda, while Practice Grant supports community attempts to expand land based practices. She is also a research Associate at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, which helps her stay connected to landscape architecture in the public realm at the scale of individual plants.