Andrew Mathews

Post Peasant Landscapes and Biomass Energy in Italy

I spend a lot of time walking across the landscape of the Monti Pisani, between Lucca and Pisa in Central Italy. I have gradually learned to recognize  choreographies of trees, soil, and water in chestnut, olive, and tree cultivation. My training as forester taught me to think about trees, but it is through talking to farmers that I have learned to see tree cultivation as a practice of attending to the slow mobilities of plants and soils. The picture below shows me talking to a young chestnut farmer who is passionate about grafting and cultivating the ancient chestnut trees on his family farm. This second picture is an encounter with the ancient chestnut of Pratofosco, high up in the Apennine mountains of Italy. This strange tree, which looks nothing like the tall straight trees of foresters’ imaginations, is the product of skilled grafting and more or less continuous care by peasant farmers over the last six hundred years.

Forests in Italy are now the object of state efforts to prevent climate change. By cutting trees, chipping them, and burning them in biomass energy plants, the government hopes to reduce fossil fuel emissions and slow down climate change. I follow around wood chips, trucks, and energy plants.