Diana K. Davis
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Diana K. Davis, a Geographer and Veterinarian, is Professor of History and Geography at the University of California, Davis.
She recently completed an extended term as Chair of the Geography Program. She is the author of the award-winning Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ohio); The Arid Lands: History, Knowledge Power (MIT); Co-editor of Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa; and over four dozen articles and book chapters.
Her research has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Diana K. Davis joins the Paris IAS in March 2027 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Arid Lands; Arborocentrism; Colonialism & Decolonization; Geographical Political Ecoogy; Pastoralism; Environmental History; Indigenous Knowledge & Ethnoveterinary Medicine; and Medical Geography.
Arborocentrism at the Golden Gate: What the World can Learn from the Tribulations of Tree-Planting in San Francisco
San Francisco, before Anglo-European contact, was a nearly tree-less landscape dominated by mobile sand dunes that stretched across what would become one of the world’s most iconic cities. The semi-arid ecosystem supported an astonishingly rich variety of plants and animals, as well as a substantial indigenous population, the Ohlone. One of the importations that accompanied the settlers who flocked to San Francisco was an environmental imaginary of arborocentrism, a moralistic tree-centered world view. This project excavates the deep roots of arborocentrism over the last several hundred years in Anglo-European thought and practice, and analyzes how arborocentrism helped to drive, since about 1850, the planting of millions of exotic trees throughout the city. A large body of research shows that there are significant problems caused by planting trees in biomes where they have not existed for thousands of years. Such trees can lower water tables, desiccate soils, negatively alter soil nutrient cycles, and lower biodiversity. In San Francisco, landscaping and massive afforestation has resulted in a less resilient, and culturally homogenous, urban environment increasingly unable to deal with climate variability. This project develops the theory that, in many cases, environmental transformation driven by arborocentric urban landscape design may be interpreted as a form of cultural and ecological imperialism that deserves to be reconsidered, especially in our time of climate crisis.
Key publications
Davis, D.K. and P. Robbins. "Ecologies of the Colonial Present: Pathological Forestry from the 'Taux de Boisement' to Civilized Plantations”, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(4): 447-469, 2018
Davis, Diana K. The Arid Lands: History, Knowledge Power, The MIT Press, 2016
Davis, Diana K. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa, Ohio University Press, 2007.
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