Jared Farmer

Class of Spring 2019

Professor of History

Stony Brook University

New York

The Latest Oldest Tree: Survival Stories for a Time of Extinction

In his Academy project, The Latest Oldest Tree: Survival Stories for a Time of Extinction, under contract with Basic Books, Farmer plans to bring together the history of trees and the science of longevity to contemplate the ethics of long-term thinking in the Anthropocene. For Farmer, climate change is both “the” policy problem of our time, and a problem “of” time. Climate change requires thinking—and caring—in the long term, beyond the moment, beyond the individual, and beyond the species. For all recorded history, Farmer argues, people have used trees to think about deeper time. This respect for ancient trees—“emblematic elderflora”—is an instinct shared by many ethnic and religious groups. Arboreal Old Ones are more than carbon sinks and providers of ecosystem services; they help enlarge and sustain the human spirit. Old trees are also technical tools for scientists to model past and future climates. As objects of empirical inquiry as well as spiritual reverence, ancient trees bridge the nature/culture and science/religion divides. “Our long-term relationships with long-lived plants are hopeful glints in a darkening firmament,” Farmer writes.

A professor of history at Stony Brook University, Jared Farmer studies the overlapping historical dimensions of landscape, environment, technology, science, religion, and culture, with regional expertise in the American West. Farmer earned a BA from Utah State University, MA from the University of Montana, and PhD from Stanford University. He has received grants from the National Humanities Center, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2014, Farmer won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute for scholars “whose work shows extraordinary promise and has a significant public component related to contemporary culture.” In 2017, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Farmer’s book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard, 2008) received five awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for best-written nonfiction book on an American theme. His subsequent work, Trees in Paradise: A California History (Norton, 2013), won four awards, including the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians for best book on the history of native and/or settler peoples in frontier, border, and borderland zones.