About the author

Terry Harpold is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, and Founder and Director of Imagining Climate Change, an initiative engaging artists, humanists, scientists, educators, students, and the public in the vital work of imagining our collective climate futures. Since 2015, ICC has sponsored or co-sponsored more than fifty colloquia, lectures, performances, readings, and film screenings on the UF campus and in the wider Gainesville, Florida, community, featuring activists, creators, researchers, and scholars who represent the full range of inventive responses to planetary environmental crisis and injustice. Harpold’s research and teaching interests include environmental humanities, science fiction and film, animal studies, digital humanities, image-text studies, and psychoanalysis. Nominated five times for College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Mentoring and Teaching Awards, he was a winner of the CLAS Teacher of the Year Award in 2008 and 2020.

Excerpts from the chapter

“Our morning’s labors, I remind the planters, nudge these wondrous legacies forward, but they are not of our making. While still in the nursery pot the sapling is already alive, already photosynthesizing and respiring, already aware of and responsive to its environment in ways that elude our immediate perception and understanding. What we do at most is (re) introduce the sapling to an expansive, vital order of the already and the ongoing that is specific to its way of life.”

“In the context of a morning spent doing something as unpretentious, pleasant, and efficacious as planting trees, the planters’ surrender of their feelings of responsibility for the sapling, and their recognition of its qualities of the already and ongoing, exemplify the greening of the human self. We’re drawn away, in joyous wonder, from the evidence of the plant’s self-realization, then back again, more deeply into an embrace of a general conviviality that unites us. We’re more than tuning in; moving away from the lonely-making illusion of human autonomy, we liberate the transformative truth of co-arising human-plant heteronomy.”

Relevant links

• Terry Harpold home page: https://people.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/.

• Imagining Climate Change home page: https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu.

• Trees! home page: https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu/trees/.

Chapter overview

My environmental humanities courses at the University of Florida are closely linked with a faculty and student initiative I founded in 2019, “Trees!” In collaboration with the Alachua County Department of Land Conservation and Management, Trees! organizes volunteer tree plantings in and around the city of Gainesville, Florida, where the university’s main campus is located. The plantings are, very simply, a lot of fun: festive mornings spent in the company of enthusiastic, like-minded humans, dirtying one’s hands and knees in the service of a common good. They are, moreover, opportunities for the release of transformative truths about human-plant conviviality and world-making co-conspiracies…

“Though they cannot know if the sapling senses liberty in the moment of release… something in them is liberated. Their ecological fatalism and learned passivity, products of the endless drumbeat of terrible news about the planet’s future, fall away. Newcomers are shocked by this experience the first time; the returning planters tell me that they keep coming back for its euphoric jolt.”

Samples of student work

• Additional photos of students participating in the tree plantings are available here. All are released under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 license.

Contact details

Terry is interested in speaking to live audiences. You can find his contact details via this website (people.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/).