Tree planting affirms a subversive long-term civic time against short-term kleptocratic rule.

Evidence

To plant a tree is an act of intergenerational optimism, a selfless act at once practical and utopian, an investment in a communal future the planter will not see; to plant a tree is to offer shade to unborn strangers. To act in this manner was to secede ethically from Kenya’s top-down culture of ruthless short-term self-interest. (Kenyan intellectuals used to quip that under Moi l’etat c’est Moi.) A social movement devoted to tree planting, in addition to regenerating embattled forests, thus also helped regenerate an endangered vision of civic time. Against the backdrop of Kenya’s winner-takes-all-and-takes-it-now kleptocracy, the movement affirmed a radically subversive ethic—an ethic of selflessness—allied to an equally subversive timeframe, the longue durée of patient growth for sustainable collective gain. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 379

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Intergenerational planning and planting-for-unborn-strangers is scaffolding for the trees-as-infrastructure article’s grafting-as-narrative-metaphor thread.
• XREF: connects to: A living tree can serve as a moral witness to successive human follies; Sometimes the right political action is to wait and organize instead of disrupt — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 908

Broader Connections

• A living tree can serve as a moral witness to successive human follies #expands (0.85)
• Sometimes the right political action is to wait and organize instead of disrupt #expands (0.75) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 908