Sara Khatib

In the US Pacific Northwest, giant trees and expansive forests hold a central significance for communities that represent different relations to more-than-human others. These communities often confront their differences in hostile terms. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Forest Wars erupted up and down the coast as activists and local communities fought against timber industries converting lush and moist old-growth forests into apocalyptic clear-cuts and tree plantations. While the wars have subsided to embers, climate change, unprecedented wildfires, and disease outbreaks are sparking another wave of contention across communities that share contrary ideas on responding to the urgencies of the Anthropocene.

In my work, I look at how science and politics intersect to construct our understanding of these forest landscapes. How does politics underlie and motivate science-based knowledge? What ontologies are silenced and left to the shadows? How do these different ontologies manifest in other land-based practices? I move away from the idea of forests as a singular reality that science will “discover” and instead explore how forests represent many worlds and histories that interact in a co-constitutive manner.