![[ai-label_trianfgle-no-ai-used-protected-intensity-DEFAULT-V2.png|44]] ![[Screenshot 2026-02-24 180022.png]] [Click to view](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bUBICdcqdwvSEc3Q3s8vbcRRIpHyyc6D/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=111099048467130242218&rtpof=true&sd=true) ![[Home/018- Courses/images/Tree Biographies.png]] # Projection & The Non-Human - Every time we describe a tree, we’re describing it from the ‘outside’. We reach towards our own human experience to describe a subject with a totally different experience. And worse, we think that this experience we’ve projected is true. > ‘To propose altering the human role in the story of the world might sound counterintuitive, given that people have caused the disaster. But only a perspective shift in terms of figure and ground can adequately portray the ecological dependencies that have led the world to environmental cataclysm.’ — Elvia Wilk > ‘The word landscape is typically used to suggest the passive, the inert, the natural—the plant, animal, and mineral world that constitutes a backdrop for a human actor. But here, the sudden absence of a human actor occasions a sudden presence: the presence of landscape, the presence of plants.’ — Elvia Wilk - What does it mean for a plant to be present? - Spend a few minutes describing a tree that you know. Go back and circle every word or phrase that projects human experience, values, or emotions. What kept coming up? - Is the way we code the natural world as dark, mysterious, evil, unknowable, reality or projection? If it is projection, what’s the underlying story we are telling ourselves? - Write about your tree but remove yourself as perceiver. No one is watching the tree. What is the tree doing without witness? # Experimenting - Read the question slides from the presentation. Pause between them. Which one landed the hardest? Which one made you uncomfortable? Why? - Choose your subject, spend 20 minutes generating questions about it and create a mind map. Include questions that make you feel embarrassed, questions that feel unanswerable. Slang, time, memory, desire, grief, politics. What would it mean for your subject to have these? What would they look like? Is there something your subject finds meaningful that a human would not? - Are trees singular or plural? Do they ‘speak’ with one voice or many? What is the voice of tree? - Take one of your questions and turn it into a piece of writing from different voice positions (singluar, plural, no pronoun, radical flatness, neo pronoun etc.). - What does interiority mean here? - What does the oak say as a collective? What does it mean to have a ‘we’ without individual consciousness or with it? - Throw away ‘I’ and ‘it’. How would you use the subject’s name? Is there a completely different grammar structure that is preferable? - Write from pure description. What happens when you strip everything away? - What happens when you create a new form of self-identification? - Which of your attempts felt most alive? Which felt dishonest? Which was suprising? Which attempt got closest to the non-human presence? # Non-Human Form - What are the rules of biography as a genre? Chronology, interioritym relationships, death? Which of these does your subject have? Which have it in a completely different way or not at all? - Write your subject as a field guide entry. But, this field guide is written by the subject, it’s not for human readers. What would the oak need to know about other oaks? - What does the tree bequeath? What does it testify to? What would the laws of oak or willow be like? - How does health or illness shape multispecies interactions? # Entanglement - Subjects don’t exist alone. What are they killing? What’s killing them? What are they eating? What are they ignoring? How have they been shaped over the millennia by these interactions? Include the mutalistic, the violent, the extractive, and the parasitic. - Write the moment of contact between your subject and another subject in its web. For example; A tree and the beetle that’s killing it. Who speaks? Who acts? Who waits? - Write your subject in a state of damage or disease. What changes? What does illness mean when you don’t have the same senses as a human? What senses are there? What does recovery mean? - Read ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ a story about decoding non-human writing systems. If your subject had a written langauge, what would the grammar look like? What would it’s politics be? - Write two short passages from your subject. The first in formal language, the second casual. You are inventing a linguistic tradition. What assumptions have you made about what ‘formal’ means to the non-human? What about ‘casual’? Rewrite it if needed to avoid these. # Deep Time - What does it do to the writing when your subject has been alive longer than a single human or even a human civilization? Does your subject have memory or does it carry memory solely on its body? What happens when ‘now’ is completely different? - Write something that happens during the span of a human life. It could be a moment, an hour, a year, a lifetime. How does time change to stretch or compress the syntax? How does the importance of events compress or stretch? Are geological events merely background? Write your subject over it’s long life. The human piece your wrote, but a brief flicker. What counts as an event at this scale? What does inheritance mean? How is memory stored? Where did your piece break down? Did the human keep leaking back in? # Witness - Is ecological writing inevitably about the elegy and grief? What’s the difference between mourning and witnessing? What about mourning and complicity? Does writing about destruction do more harm than good? - Write your subject in the act of disappearing. The tree being cut, climate collapse, extinction, illness and death. Write from the subject’s point of view. Write without flourish. Write it again. - What does our non-human subject leave behind? Is it a multispecies inheritance? Are we named? # Biography - Write a biography of your subject in a form that subject would sanction. Is it the field guide? The legal text? The deep-time narrative? Is it something all together different? Write it.