Melodies of the toppling trees: the tree farm pastoral, extractivism, and attachment in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper develops a concept, ‘the tree farm pastoral,’ that describes the ability to perceive beauty in the midst of destruction and dispossession through a particular framing of the extraction of wood and the cultivation of crops. The tree farm pastoral is an affective orientation marked by a series of profound transformations in the management of forests – the development of ‘sustained yield forestry’ – which occurred around the middle of the twentieth century and that fundamentally shifted the relationship between settlers and trees in British Columbia, Canada. Emerging from an analysis of forest management documents as well as the life and work of Robert Swanson – a poet, logger, engineer, railway inspector and whistle inventor – this paper argues that this transformation was also discursive and perceptual, occurring on the level of language and sound. Bringing insights from cultural studies, sound studies, settler-colonial, and Indigenous studies into conversation with primary sources about forestry from the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that the tree farm pastoral – as constructed materially, discursively, and perceptually – serves to help settlers affectively navigate the tension between loving and caring for, while disrespecting and destroying, the forests of British Columbia. The tree farm pastoral names a particular entanglement between the material and discursive forms of extraction and dispossession – the concrete and physical versus the ideological and affective – that can be hard to parse when theorized in general or out of context. This paper offers the tree farm pastoral as a tool we can use to describe a way of being oriented towards the world that fuels and enables settler-colonialism, to complicate our understanding of the affective dimensions of extractivism, and to add to discussions about metaphor, language, and sound as they relate to techno-utopian discourses in media studies and beyond.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".