What trees taught me about Covid-19: on relational accounting and other magic

Abstract

When I left Paris five years ago to live in the Forest City, a small college town in the middle of the Great Lakes, most of my friends believed that I was becoming foolish, going through a sort of countryside parental crisis. While the reality was that the world was falling apart, the trees refused to tell me their secrets, and my potential contribution as an accounting academic to the recovery was, to say the least, unclear. Deer became spirit animals teaching me about resilience and unconditional love, beavers: symbolic incarnation of the fur trade and the associated conquest of the West and dandelions: potential salad substitutes in a messed-up supply chain of fresh food. While economics portrays human beings as rational Homo economicus willing to maximize their own benefits, relational sociology places social relationships at the center of economic action (Wherry, 2016).