by Solvejg Nitzke
This text has been translated to German: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/366
Ghost trees are the result of a failed bet. Bald cypresses (Taxodium distichum), the signature tree species of the Southern wetlands from Louisiana to the Carolinas, have developed a series of strategies to survive and thrive in environments that would literally overwhelm most other trees. Where even most wetland species such as willows and poplars might tolerate occasional flooding, bald cypresses grow right in the middle of the swamp, supporting islands of life in otherwise hostile conditions. Occupying prime ground, the trees contribute to immensely productive ecosystems. Their equally deep and high roots – bald cypresses grow “knees” granting them access to air when flooded – anchor the trees and allow them to grow for thousands of years, becoming giants that produce their own climate and environment. Thus, in effect, they become the major actors in wetland-systems on which myriads of other humans and nonhumans depend. However, there is a caveat to this way of life: it depends on fresh water.
Many of the wetlands in the Southern USA line the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Usually, that does not bother any of the large trees, and yet, they depend on betting that saltwater is kept off by the pressure of fresh-water rivers flowing into the sea and by salt marshes acting as borderlands between the swamps and the ocean. Sometimes this bet fails. When saltwater pushes back and flows into the swamp, the trees become victim of their own steadfastness. Stating their inability to run away seems redundant, but it is their very rootedness that seals their fate. Once the salinity of their environment crosses a certain threshold, death is certain. Salt crystals find their way through the vascular tissue of the tree and destroy cell walls on their way, cutting of life support in both directions (water flowing upwards and sugars downwards). Like poison into veins or, maybe in a more apt comparison, gas into (mammalian) lungs, the spreading of the deadly substance is irreversibly taking over and destroying the body of the affected being.
All that remains are ghosts. Bleached trunks and defoliated branches materialize the absence of the once vibrant green, denying – sometimes for centuries – the cathartic fall that in human imaginations marks the death of a tree. Uncanny enough, ghost trees are a so-called natural phenomenon (see National Geographic). Storm surges happen, and trees that grow to close to the sea will lose the evolutionary bet while others, whose seeds sprouted at luckier places, continue to thrive. That is, until human beings enter the scene. An article in Wrightsville Beach Magazine, geared at tourists visiting the area in North Carolina, recommends visiting the eerie spectacle. By drawing attention to the ‘inexorable’ rise of sea levels due to anthropogenic climate change, the touristy recommendation inadvertently draws the picture of an apocalyptic future worthy of J.G. Ballard’s science fiction classic The Drowned World (1962).
Reverence for trees and the multispecies ecosystems they enable and are enabled by depends on several factors. One of them is their perceived beauty; another, often trumping the first, is profit. Bald cypresses may be one of the few aspects that generated affective attachment to the swamp lands and, thus, helped protect them. (Despised as they were by colonizers, these were therefore often drenched and destroyed.) But bald cypresses also stabilize conditions which make it difficult to ship the wetlands and thus transport goods from the sea into the continent and vice versa. When European settler-colonialists (mostly French and British) tried to figure out ways of exploiting the landscape that in their imported traditions was associated with illness and moral depravity (still prevalent in the Southern Gothic genre), digging canals was the obvious solution. These literally transgressed the boundaries between land and seas increasing the number of saltwater floods pushing into the swamps and killing trees. Ghost forests line these canals but (in typical capitalist fashion) rather than interpreting them as signs of potentially dangerous interventions, presently, they attract tourists and storytellers who revel in their eerie presence and appreciate the photo-op. Yet in the background of the very tourist-imageries looms a larger catastrophe, which foregrounds, once again, the role of ghost trees as warning signs that assemble the mistakes of past interventions and future catastrophe in the present moment: when, for example, a tourist magazine almost casually refers to the spectre of rising sea levels, it becomes visible that these trees embody a future in which neither trees nor humans might be able to survive.
These trees and the ecological as well as medial conditions of their existence pose challenges to multispecies (Hi-)Stories and storytelling not only because of their ghostly appearance, but also because they entangle temporalities (arboreal and human, oceanic and aquatic) and produce “chronoferences” (A. Landwehr), that is, they manifest past, present and future in a body whose role in the ecological and economic networks cannot be reduced to a binary of dead or alive. But swamp trees are not the only arboreal spectres that trouble human stores and histories. Literature, especially so-called genre-texts, is positively swarming with possessed trees, trees harbouring spirits and trees haunting humans. Whether it is the ghostly rattling of branches against windows, the monstrous shapes of trees in the forest twilight or the haunting presence of trees who seem to have forgotten that they are neither supposed to move nor think, let alone speak. By taking some of the uncanny abilities of trees seriously – abilities that are just being ‘discovered’ by science – ghost stories as well as weird and gothic stories – such as Annette von Droste Hüllshoff’s Die Judenbuche, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Giant Wistaria and Algernon Blackwood’s The Man Whom the Trees Loved and The Willows – envision plants as actors in more-than-human worlds which are not dependent on humans to recognize their agency. Thus, there is a whole taxonomy of ghost trees which challenge the ways in which humans are (un-)able to act with and conceptualize their intervention in more-than-human environments.
By comparing the bald cypresses from the US-American South to two of their literary counterparts – Elif Shafak’s fig tree in The Island of Missing Trees and Andrew Michael Hurley’s oak in Starve Acre – I will explore arboreal chronoferences as a concept that bridges (environmental) history and (ecological) storytelling in and for the time of human intervention on a planetary scale. Connecting the historical and literary concepts of (Hi-)Stories to anthropological and ethnographic (Anna Tsing et al) as well as new materialist (Karen Barad) approaches to multispecies-stories, I will propose a way of acknowledging trees and their vibrant existence beyond ‘death’ as an active approach to embodied and, possibly, rooted mediation of (Hi-)story-writing as an ongoing, open process of connecting and caring for more-than-human worlds.
Dr. habil. Solvejg Nitzke is interim professor of comparative literature at Ruhr-University Bochum. Her work revolves around questions of knowledge production under precarious circumstances in climate fiction, disaster stories and plant worlds. In her project “Making kin with trees/Fremde Verwandtschaft. Eine Kulturpoetik der Bäume” she investigates human-tree relations. Making Kin with Trees. A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care will be published with Palgrave in 2025.
https://www.komparatistik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/mitarbeiter/nitzke/publikationen.html.de