Pacific Perspectives of the Anthropocene: Trees and Human relationships

"Trees act upon as well as being acted upon [..] they possess very significant forms of active agency, which have usually been assumed to exist only in the human realm" (Jones&Clock 2002:49). Tim Ingold argues that humans and their activities are part of the environment for plants and animals rather than the opposite, underlyingthe non-human world's agency (2001). We, indeed, aim to stress such non-human agency, as well as the culture of inter-dependence of these different worlds, by presenting the cases of two Oceanian trees, the Hawaiian ohia lehua (metrosideros polymorpha) and the Tongan fa (pandanus tectorius); in the attempt to de-construct an anthropocentric view and to present different perspectives on the nature-culture relationship.