Intro
by Nick Koenig
Moving from the historical baseline, I will now be exploring the vast emotional political ecologies surrounding the Chestnut extinction through a combination of, primarily, interviewing data, but supplemented with participant observation and multispecies ethnographic data. The structure is similar to the community types described in a flora as I find this framing to be apt in putting together emotions that overlap and intermesh, but still contained within the idea of the American Chestnut.
Contrasting from a flora, however, the emotional political ecologies here will be organized temporally rather than spatially (Fig 2), starting with the more reflective and passed-down through generations emotions (such as nostalgia) and moving towards forward looking emotions (such as hope for restoration). Additionally, when writing the accounts of each emotion, inspiration was drawn from Leila Harris’s (2021) on shaping political ecological analyses in constructing them into narrative form.
