Head in the boughs: ‘Designed Forests’ author Dan Handel on the interspecies influences that shape our thickety relationship with nature

We are the humans. We speak for the trees. Sometimes, out both sides of our mouths.

Forests have always borne our mark, carved as indelibly as initials on a tree trunk.

From the Indians and European colonizers who scaled forest planning in the 1800s to the artist–tech bro trio who prototyped a blockchain-enabled, self-managing woodland in the 2010s, architect and curator Dan Handel’s Designed Forests (2024, Routledge) traces the characters and cultural histories of “forest thinking,” a term he coined to illuminate the human and nonhuman forces that have long designed forests and forested design.

It’s a fraught story.

“Forestry, in many cases, is just another name for making a profit from forest lands [and] colonial extraction,” says Handel. “As I got into some of these histories — colonial histories of forest management that later becomes forest planning — I realized that the moment of definition for both professional forestry as we know it today, and some of these very dubious practices of land management and people management, are closely linked.”

Yes, “the dark side of forest development” was “always there.” And today, it’s compounded by climate crisis, fascism, and other perils of our own making that uproot trees from the soil and people from their lands. But all hope is not lost, Handel says. He sees bright spots in our past that can light our path forward.

“Once you look back, you find all these points in which design responded in quite nuanced and interesting ways,” he says, “to establish connections between humans and their environments that are not the extractive, the colonial, the profit-making kind of mainstream that we’re seeing in many places around the world.”

Ahead, he talks with Design Observer about the unlikely collaborations, conflicts, and collisions that have seeded our world’s headiest forests.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

Delaney Rebernik: You introduce the concept of “forest thinking” in the opening lines of your book. What is it, and where does it come from?

Dan Handel: If you go to places like Oregon and Montana, which was where my first experiences with industrial forests were, they’re entirely designed, but at the same time, you feel as if you’re in nature. So you have something in your mind that tells you that you’re in this outdoors, but then you also know that this is completely fabricated.

And this was the initial step in which I began to consider forest through the lens of design and to realize that the history of forestry and forest making is basically also a history of design because most of the forests that we know around the world, including the ones that we consider the wildest — the Amazon Rainforest or the Black Forest in Germany — they’re designed to an extent, or at least shaped dramatically, by the deliberate actions of humans. So forest thinking is really this provocation to adapt a more complex understanding of the boundaries between what to consider natural and artificial.

DR: What are some of these human influences that have shaped our modern understanding of forests?

DH: One of the cases that I was interested in researching was the case of Jerry Franklin, a forester from University of Washington. By now he’s in his 80s, but he was one of the pioneers who basically changed our conception of old-growth forests.

Back in the 60s when Franklin began working, old-growth forests were considered “cellulose cemeteries.” This was the term the foresters gave them because they weren’t considered valuable from any point of view — not ecological and not economical — and what he and his team began doing was studying the carbon economies of these environments and basically changed the conception of the scientific community and then the forest services, as well.

At a certain point, he’s sick of his experiments in Washington, and he comes to Harvard Forest, and he collaborates with [ecologist] Richard T. T. Forman, and they develop basically a set of arguments that connects these forests — how they’re shaped, how big they are, the gaps between one type of forest and the next — and how these patterns are basically performing ecologically and environmentally.

And then you have Richard Forman becoming a very influential person in landscape design because he develops this idea of “landscape ecology,” which describes landscape patterns that you could argue are performing in better ways than others. And this becomes a tool for landscape planning and design. This very interesting set of exchanges really connects the different disciplines around the shared conception of newly found value in a specific type of forest.

DR: Fascinating. So our understanding of — our thinking around — forests was seeded, in part, by collaboration. How about conflict? As an example, President Trump recently issued an executive order to carve up swathes of U.S. forest for timber, which is of course facing tremendous backlash.

DH: You know, I think Trump’s administration in many ways was marked by the great fire in Los Angeles, [which were happening as] he came into office. And to me, this was very symbolic in many ways — not in a supernatural way, but in a way that exemplifies how mismanagement of American forest is perhaps leading to such catastrophic events.

And I think his executive order, and also his response to the fire itself, is very uninformed to put it so gently. I think it draws the wrong conclusions from the evidence, or is perhaps not so much interested in the evidence and how things are connected to one another.

But this is not the first time that this is happening.

The U.S. Forest Service itself, from its first moments 120 years ago, was basically shaped by the many points between conservationists and business leaders. So, if you look at [fourth chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry] Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt, all these early-days players of the Forest Service, it was all the compromise between these interests.

On the one hand, you would have the loggers who basically wanted to cut down everything, and then on the other, you would have people who understand the value of forests, even before there was an ecological or environmental value. The science was not there yet. They were talking more in terms of nation, and spiritualist, and sentimental, and cultural values that forests have.

So the business interest was always there, and this was always a negotiation — definitely in the American case, but also in other forest services around the world. And the ongoing compromise is what makes the patterns of land management work in many cases.

DR: Since we’ve been in moments similarly conflicted (if not always as dire) before, how can we retrace our steps to move forward?

DH: The thing that I find perhaps hopeful is that such catastrophic events may lead us to look back at the history of the United States and its relationship to forestry and forests and draw inspiration from that. The crisis in Los Angeles is a crisis of the Santa Ana winds basically coming down from the Great Basin as much as it is a crisis of fire. Because what was happening is that the wind assisted the fire to progress above fire barriers. So it was not only a case of bad management where you didn’t have the barriers; it was also the extreme wind condition that assisted these sort of grenades being shot over asphalt roads.

But the United States has been experimenting in the past with slowing down the wind in the Midwest by planting forests. So I think there are some ideas that we could nurture and reconsider as a type of infrastructure that could be more intelligent with dealing with such challenges.

There’s a question, of course, of whether the current administration would even be interested in infrastructure projects, and I would say the answer is “no.” But the question that still lingers is whether there are schemes in which the private sector could be involved. For instance, insurance companies are losing a lot of money when such things are happening. So perhaps there’s a way, by this compromise, to consider how we can invest in infrastructure that would be more resilient toward such events that are becoming more frequent.

DR: At the same time, you say there’s a danger in “hiding behind the forest veil,” which reads to me like a critique of green washing that you’ve observed in spatial design. How do you see that playing out?

DH: It really comes in waves, but in the last 10, maybe 15 years, as the climate crisis has become more mainstream, the forest is being pulled out to rescue us, and it’s being used in all sorts of ways.

Sometimes, it’s really what you mentioned: a draping of ourselves in green sort of thing. If you take these [Bosco Verticale] forest towers in Milan, just as one of the most famous examples, they’re basically a real estate scheme organized in the most conventional way: You have all these investors, none of whom have shown any previous interest in environmental issues, and they invest, and they make a profit. Everybody feels nice. But once they argue that these towers are equivalent to [7,000] square meters of forest, which is what they say, this is a little bit problematic because they’re not. It’s basically just looking at what’s happening above ground and saying, ‘we have this number of plants, and that is why it equals the forest,’ but it doesn’t bring to the city the ecological or even the shade aspect of a forest.

It’s not that I’m saying that we shouldn’t cover cities with forest; it’s just that we could be more conscious of, what do we mean when we say we want to bring some values associated with forests into cities? This could be spiritual values; this could be real estate values, in some cases; this could be aesthetic values. I think the best way to tackle these projects that are trying to hide is really to ask: What kind of values are right for the specific communities that are there?

DR: What’s the future of forest thinking look like?

DH: The hyper-technological forest is a very interesting metaphor to me. You go there, and you see a hyper-saturated environment full of technology, full of sensors and transmitters and things that make noise and trees that are covered with all sorts of strange stuff. And all of this is sending data continuously to computers that are analyzing it. And then it feeds back into the way the forest is being managed and the machines are moving.

And it’s a strikingly artificial envelope that goes over such environments. In my experience, it’s not very comfortable being in these places because they feel as if you’re in a strange sort of dystopian future. But once we realize that this is part of the way forests are being managed right now, I think it opens up all sorts of opportunities and brings us back to the idea that forests are hyper-designed environments in many ways.

It also connects to our cultural obsession with intelligence — AI and even plant sentience — of our fascination with the idea that we are not the only species on earth that has intelligence, and of the larger obsession with intelligence that is also prevalent in technology. These smart environments and the forest saturated with technology also come from Silicon Valley thinking.

In terms of where it leads us, perhaps the most progressive project that I cover in this book is the self-managing forest. It’s called terra0. It’s a very interesting experiment with smart contracts and blockchain technology, with the idea that the forest could eventually manage itself. It’s not as strange as it sounds when you hear it for the first time, but the point is that by lending money and then returning the money based on its profits, a forest unit could make the best decisions for its survival — not based on human action, not based on human interests.

And while this project is still somewhat conceptual, it really opens up this discussion about human-nonhuman interactions. And I think you see this not only in academic discourse these days; you see it more and more in design projects — definitely landscape design projects, that, for a while now, have considered various perspectives when they think of: Who’s using our design? For how long? Who’s going to be using it 10 years from now? What are the kinds of interspecies relationships that we are trying to establish or maintain? This is a very interesting and promising discussion that is trying to reconsider or at least question the way development has been going on for at least four or five decades.