“This Machine Kills CO2”: Planting a Trillion Trees and Mobilizing Forests as Technologies

Trees and forests often feature as solutions to environmental crises, thereby encouraging tree-planting projects. This article considers how “trillion trees” projects operationalize trees and forests as productive entities for addressing planetary crises. The research asks: How do trees and forests operate through distinct technicities, or technical relations and processes, for mitigating environmental change? What values, benefits, and inequalities does the mobilization of forests-as-technologies generate? How might forests and technologies be transformed toward more equitable environmental relations and practices, especially in a time of proliferating climate technologies? To answer these questions, this text discursively analyzes Crowther Lab research, which proposed trillion tree metrics to inform restoration opportunities worldwide. While these speculative metrics, in turn, supported tree-planting and restoration projects, including the Plant-for-the-Planet Trillion Trees initiative, trees and forests materialized in these situated projects less as carbon removal machinery and more as ongoing practices of communities planting, monitoring, and maintaining environments. This discussion suggests that a more deliberate encounter with forests as technologies could transform social-ecological relations by examining how trees and forests activate and are activated within expressions of technicity. In this way, “forests as technologies” could offer a counterintuitive strategy for cultivating and crafting more equitable and just forest worlds.