Exploring multi-species solidarity: a case for the urban forest in the age of climate change

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 16: Culture, Identity, and Environmental Meaning

Abstract

Climate change, an anthropogenic crisis, poses profound threats to human survival. Increasingly, however, attention has turned to the role of “nature” as collaborator, companion, and partner—particularly in its non-human forms (Tsing, 2015). As concerns about biodiversity loss, the expansion of nature-based solutions, and movements toward anti-capitalist degrowth intensify, anthropocentric frameworks are unsettled. Although such efforts are often framed as safeguarding humanity, they reveal a deeper phenomenology of codependency between human and other-than-human life.

While the conversation may begin with human survival, the relationship between human and other-than-human actors continues to unfold in unexpected ways. These entanglements extend across methodologies, forms of expression, and conceptions of agency within shared ecological systems (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016). This manuscript examines how such partnerships materialize in urban environments—sites of growing importance in an era of climate change. As the majority of people now live in cities, urban spaces are central to ecological futures, yet they have rarely been understood as sites of natural entanglement. The conventional urban–rural divide mirrors a broader Western dualism between nature and human (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010). Images of rubbish-strewn streets contrast sharply with bucolic parks and forests. Yet emerging ecological perspectives challenge these binaries, revealing cities as dynamic multispecies assemblages that complicate what counts as “natural.”

Building on the work of Chao and Tsing (Chao, 2024; Tsing, 2013), this essay explores possibilities for multispecies solidarity in the age of climate change through Project Cool Trees. I examine the urban forest as a site of renewal, destruction, and opportunity, where trees and city-dwelling humans together confront extreme heat, air pollution, and flooding. Drawing from research in Australia, community engagement in Harlem, New York, and interdisciplinary collaboration with forest ecologists and plant biologists, I interrogate questions of causality, scientific liminality, and ecological interdependence. Ultimately, I argue that urban forests are not merely instruments of nature-based solutions but active agents within shared, climate-shaped futures.

Author

• Arnab Kumar Ghosh, CUNY-Graduate Center