Verbing with Trees
Through embodied and traditional research, participants engage in a practice of attuning to the sentience of trees by translating their capacities into verbs.
Tools
Verbing with Trees is a practice of shifting how we relate to the more-than-human beings we share the world with. This is not an exercise of studying or analyzing a tree. Instead, it is a practice of attunement and translation to the sentience that extractivism has muted.
Extractivism teaches us to see trees as resources, as “it,” as something to be used, measured, or extracted. This practice interrupts that story by inviting us to ask different questions: not what is this tree?, but who is this tree? What is their capacity? How do they live, sustain, and relate?
Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer's grammar of animacy, this practice understands language as a way of shaping relationships. When we use verbs instead of nouns, we return force, vitality, and agency to the more-than-human. This practice is also informed by the Amazonian concept of cutipar, where qualities from more-than-human beings can move into human bodies under specific relational conditions.
Our verbing is a refusal to a language that renders trees and other more-than-human as inert. An invitation to attune to the tree's capacities to be felt and, as possible and desired, translated into human language (not everything should be translated).
Although this practice was developed with trees in the context of the school, it can extend to other more-than-human beings. What matters is connecting with a being whose life is entangled with histories of extraction, and approaching them with attention and responsibility.