The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in anthropology, sociology, ecology, environmental studies, biology, agroforestry, and related fields.

Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes is by Associate Professor Andrew S. Mathews, who teaches anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the United States of America.

The TU Library collection also includes other books about different aspects of trees.

Associate Professor Mathews argues that maintaining landscape stability by caring for the forms of trees, rivers, and hillsides is a way that people link their experiences to the past and to larger-scale political questions.

Agroforestry is the intentional integration of trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming systems to create environmental, economic, and social benefits.

It has been practiced around the world for centuries.

The World Agroforestry Centre specializes in the sustainable management, protection and regulation of tropical rainforest and natural reserves.

The centre conducts research in agroforestry, in partnership with national agricultural research systems with a view to developing more sustainable and productive land use

In a 2011 publication which is available online for free download, How trees and people can co-adapt to climate change: Reducing vulnerability in multifunctional landscapes, the centre examined the relationship between climate-change adaptation, rural development and the roles of trees and agroforestry:

Trees in the landscape, in various forms and under various types of management, play a critical role in reducing vulnerability to uncertain and shifting climates. Trees can buffer microclimates, modulate water flows, store carbon, provide habitat for plants and animals in protected areas and corridors, and provide food for people. Where ‘national adaptation plans’ are made for developing countries, trees and forests deserve full attention. Jointly, they are part of ‘multifunctional landscapes’, a concept that is gaining appreciation as a unifying perspective on the provision of goods and services for local livelihoods as well as stakeholders at greater distance: within the same watershed or within the same carbon-shed (that is, planet Earth).

In examining morphology, the study of the forms of things, the branch of biology that deals with the form of living organisms, and with relationships between their structures, Associate Professor Mathews notes:

Plants are extraordinary beings. Many of us take them for granted as part of the background of daily life. It takes time to notice their wild inventiveness and adaptability. Unlike animals, plants have their digestive organs on the outside of their bodies. Leaves and roots are the location of nutrient absorption, the equivalent of stomachs for animals. Rather than ­running around the landscape as we animals do, plants stay in place, sensing and responding to the world. Plants do not have the luxury of running away from predators or of chasing prey, as animals do. Plants endure fires, diseases, predators, and lack of nutrients, with little capacity for immediate escape. Faced with ­these challenges, plants have become adept at sensing danger and opportunity. Plants are shape shifters that can engage in metamorphoses that humans can only dream of. Plants can shed limbs or leaves that are no longer useful, they can grow toward water and light, they can resprout from tree stumps or from tiny seeds scattered across fire-blasted landscapes. Plants can form alliances with plants, animals, or fungi, and they can share nutrients through root grafts and symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi. Plants challenge our assumptions about individuality and competition. The shape-shifting capacities of plants tell me of the histories of particular places and of entire landscapes. Plants change the shapes of the stories that I tell about the world.

The rootedness of plants, their insistence on staying in place, means that plant morphologies rec­ord biographies of encounter. Humans, fires, diseases, weather, soils, plants, and animals can all leave traces in plant morphologies. Long-lived trees, in particular, can be witnesses to history. Through their capacity to live for centuries, trees can entice people into caring for processes that stretch beyond ­human lifetimes. Through their affinity for deep soils and moisture, short-lived domesticated plants have also persuaded humans to reshape landscapes, from cornfields in Iowa to wheat fields in Tuscany. The gardens, agricultural fields, and the terracing and drainage systems that surround us are the vis­i­ble consequences of human love, de­pen­dency, and exploitation of plants. Much of the time we fail to notice what a plant-centered world we live in. Learning to notice plant ingenuity requires us to slow down, to walk, look, and wonder, to realize that what we took for granted is much stranger than we had imagined. […]

Plant morphology was the clue that led me to notice morphologies not only of trees, but of soils and drainage systems and then of a distinctive form of human biogeomorphological politics through which people in Italy confront climate change. Noticing plants drew me into noticing other processes, the slow movement of soils across terraces, the rapid movement of floodwaters and mudflows down hillsides. As with plants, diagrams and drawings are the best way to slow down and notice choreographies of plant/soil/water assemblages across Mediterranean landscapes. […]

Biologists and ecologists largely abandoned morphological analysis in the twentieth ­century. Morphology could tell you about the biographies of individual organisms, and it could help you make sense of evolution, but in its specificity and uniqueness it seemed to lack the capacity to support more general stories about ecological relations. The natu­ral sciences, including ecology, focused on quantification, largely sidelining historical and morphological thinking. Morphological evidence does not have to remain at the level of individual organisms, however. The shapes of fire-scarred trees on the Monte Pisano led me to the landscape patterns of forest fires and the histories of pastoralism, agricultural abandonment, and industrialization that have reshaped landscapes across the Mediterranean. Morphologies can be linked to larger-scale landscape patterns and to the regional histories that brought these structures into being. Morphological analy­sis can bring disparate temporalities into the same frame, from soil formation and forest fires to urban housing politics. This book is about the details of our encounters with landscapes, but it is also about our capacity to project our imagination from these details in order to tell larger-scale stories. In moving from the details of human encounters with plants and soils to larger-scale landscape structures, I argue for the importance of what might seem unimportant details. Plant and landscape morphologies bring the past into the present, they bear witness to disaster, and they bring ­humans into projects of long-term care. Around the world, scientists and activists and policymakers have tried to persuade ordinary people of the urgency of climate change. Such approaches assume that ordinary people do not have their own ideas about climate and that a shared understanding of climate is necessary for effective climate change policies. Climate change policy in Italy encounters popular knowledge rather than ignorance. Vernacular models of climate/landscape/plant assemblages have inspired largely invisible forms of landscape care and of biogeomorphological politics that have transformed climate change policy in Italy.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)