Kevin Burke

KEVIN BURKE, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was approved for funding in April 2022 to aid research on “The Social Lives of Dead Trees:Ghost Forests and the Politics of Landscape Management across the US Atlantic Coastal Plain.” Low-lying forest landscapes are rapidly converting to saltwater marshes and swamps along the eastern seaboard of the United States due to climate change. This process is producing a particular forest type that biologists refer to as a “ghost forest.” These forests, which are characterized by the synchronous mass death of trees, are striking figures of the climate run amok. This research is an ethnographic study of the social lives of these dead forests that traces the ways they become objects of concern and sites of intervention in the cultural politics of climate change in the United States. Further, as the saltwater moves inland, it is affecting the agricultural fields immediately adjacent to the ghost forests. Here the grantee tracks the forms of government that emerge around saltwater intrusion, which brings us into the longer histories of drainage infrastructure and the history of plantations. That is, these ghost forests form, not just in the wake of rising seas, but also in the wake of the plantation. Lastly, this project demonstrates how ghost forests often have their corresponding ghost towns. By tracing the booms and busts of several speculative projects, it shows how speculation and accumulation returns as the spectral and as decay.