Dawn of the lively dead: Living queerly with rot in the sustainable city

Abstract

This paper presents stories of living with dead trees in Baltimore, MD, USA to explore where, how, and with whom tree remains become lively through art, farming, and sustainability practices. These stories serve as a lens into the diverse ways practitioners produce knowledge about death, healing, disease, and decay as they encounter and transform dead nonhuman bodies. I find that practitioners who work with dead trees develop a circular understanding of death, and propose that decay is needed to heal bodies and remediate land. However, when these everyday embodied knowledges are translated from the level of body to the city, death does not become lively for all. When circular ways of knowing death are applied to the city, death is displaced into vulnerable human and tree bodies showing that the sustainable city both relies on and (re)produces the binaries of life and death. As a contrast, practitioner knowledges of tree death suggest sustainabilities that trouble established notions of life and death, bodies and environments, health and disease, and decay and beauty.

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