City Trees

My background is rooted in English literature, cre- ative writing, anthropology, and forest conservation. Throughout my studies, much of my experience and training focused on creative, applied, and technical models. If I wasn't performing in theatre or reciting poetry on stage, I was trudging through school grounds with a clinometer to conduct tree inventories. Delving into theoretical frameworks was a completely foreign activity to me until I pursued my doctoral studies at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. This experience expanded my perspectives and allowed me to think critically about the world in which I was working. Through this exploration, I found adequate language and meaningful substance that helped elucidate the importance of the stories that emerged from my research and explain the distinction that my case reveals for urban forestry and arboriculture. In my doctoral dissertation (2015), I used a political ecology lens (Robbins, 2004) to argue that by commu- nicating under-represented narratives, through lived experience and dialogue (human portraits), stories become the catalyst for change; and then by examining those narratives, they offer comprehensive insights into better practice in urban forestry. My methods were primarily qualitative and centered on theoret- ical reflection, primary and secondary research, and a series of in-depth (semi-focused) interviews and site visits with urban foresters and field arborists. Lived Experience, Essential Narratives, Part 1: How Stories from Urban Foresters and Arborists Can Inform Our Field Modified excerpt from the author's PhD dissertation, Learning from Limbwalkers: Arborists' Stories in Southern Ontario's Urban Forests (Bardekjian, 2015). Adrina C. Bardekjian, MFC, PhD Director, Engagement and Research, Tree Canada Adjunct Professor, Institute of Forestry and Conservation, Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto 22 CityTREES Being the overarching lens through which my research is examined, political ecology helped me to understand and build on the methods employed in urban forest practices that I witnessed as an active participant for over a decade while working for various organizations. Inspired by Thomas Kuhn's (1962) notions of how pro- fessional fields need paradigm shifts to progress beyond regular or normal avenues, and Eisenhart's (1989) notions of building theories from case study analyses, I argued in my dissertation that seeing urban forestry through narratives of lived experience by field workers can better integrate social and ecological considerations in urban forest research, management, and education. Throughout my dissertation, using arboriculture as a case study, I make theoretical connections in political ecology to the four dominant narratives that emerged from my interviews: language, labour, agency, and learning. By profiling the personal and professional lives of municipal and private sector field arborists in Southern Ontario, Canada, my work suggests ways to reimagine urban forestry related to: how language and discourse shape identity and thus influence worker perceptions and practice; how considerations for field arborist labour with respect to inequalities and gender perspectives is marginalized and absent in policy; how nature's agency or tree cultures influence and interact with human agency; and how teaching and learning in silos and maintaining a status quo stunts arboricultural thinking with respect to social factors.

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