William Shivers

The Tree at the Center: Reconstructing Landscape History and Analysis in the American Landscape's Periphery

The American landscape is fundamental to American identity. America’s national security is predicated on its natural security. The landscape is the grounds to which democratic ideology is tested, reiterated, enforced, and remade. Practices of landscape architecture and the discipline has been active in this process of nation-building and nation-dreaming. For the discipline and profession of landscape architecture to radically accept its role in the creation, expansion, and maintenance of the American landscape is for it to interrogate and recontextualize landscape history and the roles it has played in the country’s successes and failures. 
This dissertation is framed within the American periphery, where the frontier is constantly being remade. Focusing on Hawaii provides the space to evaluate plantation histories, struggles of Hawaiian legitimacy, white supremacy, and assimilation into the active democratic project of America. Further, the dissertation positions culturally and ecologically significant species as a means to nest competing approaches and frameworks together, highlighting the transdisciplinary power of landscape history and analysis. ‘Ohi’a Lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) becomes the focus of the project, alongside other key species, to ground multiple topics. The tree is both the first pioneer species after lava flows, establishing and dominating Hawaiian forests, but also a deep component of Hawaiian cultural identity and folklore. Yet the stability of these forests and broader cultural landscape is at risk with the emergence and spread of a new aeolian pathogen killing the trees: Rapid ‘Ohi’a Death. 
Multiple methods are interwoven into the project. First are primary sources in American and Hawaiian environmental history alongside landscape history and theory. Second is the assembly of archival imagery including maps, photographs, postcards, travel posters, and fine art. Third is fieldwork photography taken on trips from 2021- 2024. Lastly are multimedia geospatial and abstract drawings made with available data through analogue and digital drawing tools. 
Together, the dissertation projects the role of landscape architecture, its histories, and analysis in the (re)making of the American landscape in the 21st century. The project provides a means to critique current trends of solutionism like mass tree plantings in an era of a destabilized climate. Additionally, it offers a synthetic approach towards understanding the United States as a biopolitical project. As Rachel Carson writes, “It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.”