Forests possess mythical significance in various global cultural traditions—as mysterious spiritual ecologies and spaces of healing, transition, and regeneration through human and more than human life cycles. They also pose a core problem for modernity. Can Western ideas of social and economic progress, speed, and growth coexist within forest time? This is a question for which Afro-descendant peoples in the “New World” were forced to provide an answer—through the clearance of forests and other native ecosystems to construct the plantation. But the shapes of their livingness, and spatial imaginaries of freedoms were (and are) bound up with their abilities to reclaim forest time as against ever encroaching plantation time across generations. With the U.S. South (the country’s “wood basket”) experiencing an expansion of concentrated forestland ownership and local place divestment—most recently through the emergence of the wood biomass industry as a UK/EU climate solution—I argue that a social-relational view of the forest from the perspectives of Black communities now experiencing forest loss and place destruction via the carbon market offers an important critique of modern methods to shape forest futures.

In this talk, Professor Mah will discuss her book, Red Pockets: An Offering, which blends memoir, environmental storytelling, and reflections on migration, memory, and intergenerational legacies. Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors. They make offerings of food and incense to prevent their ancestors from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune, illnesses and crop failures. Yet for the past century, the tombs of many have been left unattended because of the ruptures of war and revolution. Ninety years after her grandfather’s last visit and fifty years after her last relative died in the village, Alice Mah returns to her ancestral home in South China. While she finds clan members who still remember her family, there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid. Mah chronicles her search for an offering to the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, which takes her from the rice villages of South China to post-industrial England, to the Chinatowns of British Columbia where she grew up and the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors’ neglected graves, which culminates in a crisis of spiritual belief: what do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?

This event will take the form of a conversation between Prof. Laura Pulido and Prof. Marco Armiero on their research and personal trajectories. Both have envisioned and lived their academic work in a dialectical relationship with political and social engagement. Pulido has sought to challenge white supremacy by researching political ecology, social movements among people of color, and cultural memory. Armiero has looked at environmental issues—be they dam disasters, toxicity, or fascist ecologies—as if power matters, striving to politicize environmental humanities while employing storytelling as a revolutionary device. Both have embraced an explicit commitment to side with marginalized communities, approaching their academic work as part of a broader struggle for social and environmental justice. In this conversation, they will reflect on their paths, intertwining personal choices with the wider development of the two interdisciplinary fields they have actively shaped. Faithful to the feminist principle that the personal is political, our guests will share their experiences while addressing the challenges of being activist-scholars. The session will conclude with an open exchange, welcoming questions from participants in a spirit of mutual support.