Haste and Waste in the City: Rekindling Care about and for Trees in Another Time

Environmental time is one of the most pivotal yet least explicated issues raised by anthropogenic environmental change. This essay contributes an understanding of this issue by exploring the temporalities of ethical regard and disregard for trees in the context of urban timescapes. The exploration of ethical urban temporalities is organized around three digital artistic interventions focused on Paris (One Heart One Tree), New York City (PopUP Forest), and London (Trees on Sidewalks). These interventions are examined as ecocritical case studies, which aim to confront and subsequently rearticulate human-tree relations, using the city as a material and symbolic site to facilitate ecological awareness and disruption. Each case study is discussed with respect to how environmental time is at once magnified and muted, foregrounded and marginalized, by a given intervention, whose timespan and relationship with the temporalities of urban living are as much ethical considerations as is the temporal logic of capitalism that mediates against inhabiting human-tree relations with care and consideration. The use of digital media in each case is discussed with respect to how the interventions differentially make urban ecological temporalities (in)visible. The essay suggests ways in which the interventions stimulate reflection on employing digital media technologies in art, research, and everyday life to make empirically accessible and theoretically meaningful the elusive but substantial role of time in facilitating human care about and for trees.