Lament for a tree: theorising a human-nonhuman relationship

When the sycamore tree at Sycamore Gap, made famous worldwide by the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) and voted England’s Tree of the Year in 2016, was cut down last September, many individuals expressed grief and recounted their memories of the tree and what it meant to them, much as people do when grieving over the death of a relative or friend, and inspired a musical composition by Riccardo Pes called “Lament for the Tree” (2023). It also prompted Hairy Biker chef Si King to post on social media, “I hope whoever has done that has a conscience because you have just murdered a sentinel of time and elemental spirit of Northumberland”. A National Trust manager said the removal afterward was “like the funeral or the wake” of the tree (BBC 12/10/2023). The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) invited people to post their memories and photographs, as did other news sources, such as the Hexham Courant, while Hexham Abbey set-up a memorial for the tree where people could light candles. When a meme was shared criticising this response to the loss of a single tree when whole forests were being destroyed, it led me to defend those who mourned and to theorise how this was different. It includes an element of eco-grief due to the tree’s location in a landscape denuded of trees, highlighting their absence, as well as solastalgia (Albrecht 2005) – distress caused by change in the environment. In addition, the collective nature of this grieving leads me to consider the practice of lamenting, defined by Catherine Phillips and colleagues (2023) in their study of emails sent to a felled tree in Melbourne, Australia, as a shared shaping and expressing of loss. Protests against the felling of individual trees are fairly common, including for at least two felled recently during the construction of a high-speed railway line in England. However, key to examining this grief is the relational aspect in a natureculture (Haraway 2003) between persons (whether human or other-than-human) (Hallowell 1960; Harvey 2005; Ingold 2006).