Patience

When considering the emotional political ecologies of the restoration process, Sara discussed how:

“tree breeding has made me much more patient because it just requires time requires time to grow trees to make trees it takes them a long time to flower and I mean there are techniques to reduce the amount of time for all of those things but it’s still a lot easier or a lot harder to work with and say Arabidopsis or Tomatoes or Corn, you know, and so tree breeding in general has taught me a lot of patience.”

Sara,
click text to visit interview

When considering the emotions of patience in the political ecology of the Chestnut restoration, varying scales and senses of time reveal the challenges of restoring a species of tree rather than a different species of plant or animal with shorter life-spans and (more importantly for restoration) time to sexual maturity. Ideas of patience become required when restoring a species that works in a different time scale, as some more-than-human geographers term this “tree time” (Dyke, Geoghegan, and Bruin, 2018).

Prior to the blight introduction, there was patience needed in growing trees for harvest, nut-production, or shade, but now there is a shift in what the emotion is needed for–restoration. The ideas of “tree time” have profound implications on funding cycles for obtaining grants, timelines for developing a blight resistant tree, and even finding the next generation of Chestnut enthusiasts to carry on the missions of the organization as the Chestnut tree lives much longer than a human. All of these require the emotional political ecology of patience for having success in restoration.