| Резюме: | <p>This thesis examines the ecological politics of reforestation in the Scottish Highlands, the large, sparsely populated expanse of mountains and moorland covering the north-western third of Scotland. The region has long been considered one of the UK’s last ‘wild’ places and, somewhat paradoxically, is increasingly framed as an ecologically degraded space ready to restore. The shared concern for reforesting Scotland brings together a range of epistemic groups, with varying commitments to generate profit, sequester carbon, and restore ecological processes. Stakeholders including private companies, research scientists, field ecologists, and state agencies are developing new models, metrics, and technologies to measure reforestation and create data which shows the ‘nature-based solutions’ forests deliver.</p>
<p>Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis develops a central claim: in the Scottish Highlands, <em>forests are made as they are measured</em>, and this process is shaped by uneven distributions of wealth, class, and power. Measurement fixes the ways forests are translated into data, determines which elements of forests are valuable, and ultimately shapes which natures materialise in reforestation schemes. To develop this argument, I draw on critical work from STS, political ecology, and environmental geography to offer a new conceptual framework, which I term ‘environmental performativity’. The framework provides a set of analytics which differentiate the various processes described as ‘performative’ in critical environmental scholarship. By differentiating <em>object making</em>, <em>environment making</em> and <em>society making</em> performativity, the framework articulates the multiple ways that natures are discursively and materially co-constituted as they are described and represented, especially as they are measured. I offer the concept of <em>disruptive performativity</em> to describe how measurement can unsettle the dominant ways natures are made.</p>
<p>The four empirical chapters examine different ways that measurements make forests in the Scottish Highlands. Chapter Five closely analyses the Woodland Carbon Code (WCC), the state-backed metric used to quantify and attribute carbon credits to forests. I trace the political and economic factors that shaped the WCC’s creation, investigate how the WCC maintains credibility in a contested political atmosphere, and outline the streamlined natures which emerge from its design. Cognisant of the WCC’s technical limitations, start-ups are developing Advanced Measurement Technologies (AMTs), such as drones and remote sensing, to independently verify forest carbon and other natural capital stocks with improved accuracy and precision. In Chapter Six, I break down the political and economic motivations behind these forms of forest carbon measurement, to argue that carbon is ‘<em>known not grown</em>’: more numerous and legitimate carbon credits can be created through a shift in knowledge practices rather than a material change in nature-based carbon sequestration. I outline the potentially dangerous political and economic consequences which emerge from this process.</p>
<p>The first two empirical chapters focus on the multiple ways that forest carbon can be quantified through measurement. They only fleetingly nod to the variable prices that different forest carbon credits command. In Scotland, there is no functioning biodiversity credit market, which means that the ecological value of a reforestation project is bundled into the price of a carbon credit. Chapter Seven disambiguates three performances which create ‘wild carbon’, an emerging type of high-integrity carbon credit promising ecological uplift alongside carbon sequestration. Through these performances, I argue that rewilding organisations are increasingly drawing on discursive and aesthetic elements of the Romantic and the Modern, Scotland’s dominant and often competing strands of environmentalism, to foster a new culture of nature I term ‘technical wildness’. Chapter Eight offers an uplifting analysis which empirically traces how environmental measurement can be employed for its <em>disruptive performativity</em>, upsetting the natural capital frame which is increasingly dominant for measuring and valuing forests. Based on extensive empirical fieldwork with a rewilding ecologist developing a new ecosystem measurement method, the Wild Trees Survey (WTS), Chapter Eight shows how measurement can be reflexively designed to reframe Highland nature. I describe how three shifts in measurement perform an alternative ontology of forests, which disrupts the status quo modes of forest governance to facilitate more ecologically flourishing forms of nature restoration.</p>
<p>Throughout, the thesis is punctuated with ethnographic vignettes and images which situate my theoretical exploration of environmental measurement within its wider social and ecological context. The Conclusion reviews the arguments developed, hints to future directions for research, and ends with a direct call for prioritising the natural regeneration of wild woodland. The growing appetite for reforestation is not, of course, unique to the Scottish Highlands. Although the empirical nuances are context-specific, the intersecting themes of nature restoration, carbon finance, and the politics of environmental measurement should interest a wide range of scholars studying forests and a range of other landscapes which are being restored and rewilded.</p>
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