Displaced in Nature: The Cultural Production of (Non-)Place in Place-Based Forest Conservation Pedagogy

Abstract

This study examines spatial practices in a forest conservation education program that incorporates place as a tool to teach environmental and forestry issues to schoolchildren and connect them with nature. By analyzing educational forests, “talking-tree trails,” classes taught to children, and how visitors move throughout the sites, this paper argues that people and practices within the forests employ a rhetoric of spatial and temporal transience that can enable a displaced experience. Human-nature dualistic tendencies that foster environmental alienation are produced culturally and spatially and are experienced in ways that can promote disconnectedness. Instead of re-placing students with nature, as place-based environmental education promotes, forestry and pedagogical systems can practice nature as non-placed.