Table Of ContentYale Agrarian Studies Series
james c. scott, series editor
the agrarian studies series at yale university press
seeks to publish outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural
society— for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question existing para-
digms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural people are especially
encouraged.
— James C. Scott, Series Editor
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed
Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of Amer i ca’s Favorite Food
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland
Southeast Asia
Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics
of Sight
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
Loka Ashwood, For- Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of
Rural Amer i ca
Jonah Steinberg, A Garland of Bones: Child Runaways in India
Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics,
and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism
Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti
Christian C. Lentz, Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of
Northwest Vietnam
Dan Allosso, Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History
Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West
Christian Lund, Nine- Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia
Shaila Seshia Galvin, Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the
Indian Him a la ya
Michael Dove, B itter Shade: The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness
Japhy Wilson, Real ity of Dreams: Post- Neoliberal Utopias in the Ec ua dor ian Amazon
Aniket Aga, Genet ically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Con temporary India
Ruth Mostern, The Yellow River: A Natu ral and Unnatural History
Brian Lander, The King’s Harvest: A Po liti cal Ecol ogy of China from the First Farmers
to the First Empire
Jo Guldi, The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights
Andrew S. Mathews, Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change,
and Disaster Create Landscapes
Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraive, Moving
Crops and the Scales of History
For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit yalebooks . com
/ agrarian.
Trees Are
Shape Shifters
How Cultivation, Climate Change,
and Disaster Create Landscapes
A N D R E W S . M A T H E W S
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of
Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College.
Copyright © 2022 by Andrew S. Mathews.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any
form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from
the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or
promotional use. For information, please e-m ail sales . press@yale . edu (U.S. office) or
sales@yaleup . co . uk (U.K. office).
Set in Electra type by Westchester Publishing Ser vices.
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951702
ISBN 978-0-300-26038-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-300-26037-3 (paper)
A cata logue reco rd for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Kaia, Elias, Taddeo, and Tara
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contents
Preface and Acknowl edgments ix
Introduction 1
one
Sensing the Invisible:
Plant Form and Landscape Transformation 13
Interlude I. Plant Morphology Leads to Geomorphology 33
two
From Plant Morphologies to Landscape Structures 42
three
Fast and Slow Disasters:
Plant Disease, Forest Fires, and Climate Change 73
Interlude II. Pine Cultivation and Pine as an Agent of
Landscape Transformation 101
four
Plant Morphology, Geomorphology, and Weather 109
contents
five
Biogeomorphological Politics 126
six
From Landscape Histories to Climate Models 150
seven
From Climate Change to Biomass Energy 178
Interlude III. Airscapes 199
eight
Landscapes and Energy Politics 203
epilogue
Trees Are Shape Shifters 223
Appendix 1. Ecol ogy and Climate of the Monte Pisano 231
Appendix 2. Equations as Stories 233
Appendix 3. List of Organ izations 235
Glossary 237
Notes 241
References 269
Index 293
viii
Preface and Acknowl edgments
As a child in the 1970s, I encountered an Italian landscape and rural soci-
ety that were changing rapidly. Returning to Tuscany every summer,
I thought of this world as stable and more or less eternal. As a teenager and
college student, I began to notice change. Abandoned farmh ouses w ere con-
verted into holiday cottages. An industrial wine estate ripped out thousands
of hectares of small farms to plant kilo meters of grape vines. I was happy to
get summer jobs picking grapes, an arduous and often boring job in the heat
of summer, but doing so was also a way to spend days outdoors. By the time
I went to gradua te school, first to study forestry and then anthropology, I had
learned that change has been a constant feature of the Italian landscape.
Over the past several thousand years, peasant farmers constantly tinkered with
the plants, animals, and soils that they depended upon. The results of their
labors w ere olive terraces, carefully tended woodlands, grazed mountain pas-
tures, and chestnut groves. This was an agrosilvopastoral landscape of ex-
traordinary beauty that required constant care. I learned tiny fragments of
their knowledge from these peasants through conversations and working in
fields and when staying with my Aunt Beatrice Cazac, who shares my pro-
found re spect for them. That world is now largely gone.
This book bears witness to the knowledge of the peasant cultivators who
built this landscape, and explores how this history continues to affect the
world we now live in, as we strugg le to confront climate change, forest fires,
and plant disease epidemics. To protect their privacy, I have used pseudonyms
ix
