Mathews, Andrew S. 2022. Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-26037-3

Abstract

In the Monte Pisano, a mountain range in Tuscany, Italy, people have been living in human-altered landscapes for millennia. Here, histories of peasant cultivation of chestnut and the slow ongoing disasters of plant disease, state abandonment, and capitalism have left marks on the landscape. In Trees are Shape Shifters, Mathews walks the reader through the villages, hillsides, and forests of the Monte Pisano, teaching us how to read these long-term processes from the graft scars of individual trees and the shapes of ancient terraces. As diverse temporalities and overlapping histories are sown together, these past forms leave an echo that affects climate policy in Italy today.