Reforesting Native America with Drones: Rooting Carbon with Arborescent Governmentality and Decolonial Geoengineering

Abstract

The Confederated Colville Tribes collaborated with DroneSeed, a forestry drone start-up, to use drones to replant their tribal forest after a devastating fire. Using concepts from Bernard Stiegler to interrogate ethnographic data, this article argues that forestry drones are pharmaka: their biopolitics can be therapeutic, that is, negentropic, capable of reversing ecological simplification. Drone forestry is a type of arborescent governmentality, a tree-based computer-coded attempt to control the growth of a forest. For the Colville, this negentropy is also an act of sovereignty that protects culture and honors multispecies relationships. For DroneSeed, it is an experiment in negentropic geoengineering, an attempt to profitably leverage technologies and biological regeneration to sequester carbon and reduce global existential risk. Ultimately the project was not the success desired; the failure of technoliberal projects that blend ecological and economic liberalism shows that a more radical approach might be necessary to root carbon and slow capitalism.