A Forest Is Never One Thing

Madhuri Karak

ᨒ↟ 𖠰𖥧˚ Ways of knowing

1.1 Sensors and satellites ‘see’ and measure a forest’s biomass and their canopy heights. Calculated from orbit, forests become spectral signatures that can be re-constituted and interpreted as ecosystem health.

1.2 Our interpretation of earth observation data is based on patterns, calculations that cannot accommodate worldviews and stories of a particular place and its inhabitants.

For forest dwellers belonging to Indigenous and local communities, the ‘view from the sky’ is an incomplete accounting of their ancestral relationships with land.

Beyond Carbon inhabits this incommensurable gap.

1.3 Developed through collaboration with elders, women, and youth technologists in Mekar Raya village in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, this installation brings together oral histories, community-created maps, eco-acoustic recordings, myth and satellite data in a single-channel video format to ask:

how might assembling and contrasting multiple ways of knowing landscapes cultivate attunements to our collective planetary co-existence?

Dayak children collecting food from the forest surrounding Mekar Raya village. Courtesy: Michelle Cheripka

1.4 When scientists adopt the lens of climate governance, the forest re-emerges as a carbon sink, a financial asset that can be bought and sold within planetary systems of accounting.

This is a way of knowing that travels seamlessly from orbit to servers to dashboards.

1.5 Forest data infrastructures, biodiversity monitoring systems, and satellite imagery—i.e., Big Forest Data—are critical for tracking changes across every inch of the earth’s surface, but remote sensing technologies also privilege a particular mode of attention and erase others.

Another forest unfolds when we walk through the forest: when we work, live and play within it.

1.6 This forest is a site of stories, relationships, and ancestors; it is a landscape with memories and knowledges embedded so deeply in the everyday that its meaning(s) exceeds the categories through which environmental and climate data is rendered.

These knowledges, and the communities who hold them, are invisible in Big Forest Data and sidelined in how this data is interpreted and deployed, whether in multilateral climate forums or conservation efforts.

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°‧ 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 ·｡The Serpent is not a Metaphor: Counter-Practice to Planetary Climate Metrics

2.1 In A Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene, Anna Tsing and her collaborators draw our attention toward “patches”: contingent sites where human and more than human lives assemble amid histories of colonialism, capitalism, ecological loss, and survival.1

Mekar Raya is one such patch, not a generic “rainforest” or a “carbon sink”, but a site for exploring counter-practices to the top-down generalizations that planetary climate metrics tend to produce.

2.2 The forest that appears in this installation is not a pristine ecosystem outside time. It is a landscape shaped by generations of Indigenous and local stewardship, by the expansion of palm oil plantations, and by traditional practices through which environmental knowledge is produced and transmitted.

2.3 Community members recount the disappearance of forest to old and new threats, and enduring relationships with ancestral beings such as Nabau, the Indigenous Dayak serpent guardian of Mekar Raya.

Indigenous Dayak serpent guardian Nabau conceptualized and illustrated by Laura N-Tamara

These narratives do not function as cultural supplements to environmental data. They are constitutive of environmental and climate knowledges.2

2.4 In the oral history segment animated by Laura N-Tamara and Masaya Inaba, the Indigenous Dayak serpent guardian Nabau invites the Simpakng Dayak to build a home in Mekar Raya, and through that invitation, the land becomes a site of physical and spiritual healing.

Nabau is imagined in red-and-black by Nasir-Tamara, a motif she borrows from Dayak ritual attire, but the serpent is not a metaphor. That would entail imagining humans as the only source of agency in a landscape they alone can act on, whereas in fact, Nabau holds the other end of a two-way relationship.3

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𓇢𓆸 Multi-sensory Experiments as Epistemology

3.1 The shadow of colonial knowledge production looms over the present - from botany collections to present day earth observation data, scientific expertise on the natural world has always depended upon extracting information from the social fabric that sustains it.

Forests become inventories. Species become data points in the long arc of biological evolution. Territories become maps.

Beyond Carbon proposes another approach. The installation re-embeds abstract data in place, in Mekar Raya specifically.

3.2 Satellite imagery, canopy-height models, and carbon measurements of Mekar Raya’s forests are placed alongside oral histories, sound recordings, and community mapping practices.

The decay of carbon isotopes against a protected riverbank in Mekar Raya village, graphic by Adrian Randall.

The result is not a hierarchy of knowledge systems but an encounter. Scientific datasets are grounded within a broader ecology of relations. Carbon ceases to be an abstract quantity and instead emerges entwined with histories of care, labor, and multi-species coexistence.

The installation’s multi-sensory form therefore is more than an aesthetic strategy. It is an epistemological attempt to build, even temporarily, a shared technical and narrative format capacious enough to hold a Dayak myth and satellite carbon data as commensurable evidence of a changing forest ecosystem.

3.3 To bring together datasets that are never seen together before, woven on the same plane by the insistence that all ways of knowing matter ~must be made to matter~ is also a data justice claim, one that the counter-mapping tradition in Indonesia has been pushing since the early 1990s.  

3.4 Consisting of 190 member organizations spread across 25 provinces in Indonesia, Jaringan Kerja Pemetaan Partisipatif (JKPP, or Participatory Mapping Network in English) pioneered a decentralized vision of sovereignty that continues to be a key element of Indigenous and local communities’ fight for territorial recognition. 

Imam Hanafi, JKPP’s former national coordinator, categorically dismisses official forest data as incomplete because,

“Spatial data without social accuracy is inaccurate data…without communities’ involvement in the mapping process, it's nothing, it's useless for resolving land conflict or figuring out how to resolve the current situation of overlapping areas between communities and plantations, between communities and forests.

When forest datasets are created, that data can come from the government, or other parties, or satellites, but also from the communities. That’s how we move towards greater social accuracy.4

3.5 By incorporating sound, narrative, movement, and memory, Beyond Carbon goes a step further, challenging the assumption that seeing is the primary route to knowing. As the installation loops between sounds, stories, and datasets, visitors too are encouraged to shift scales. 

From satellite views to motorcycle journeys through the forest; from offset plantations threatening to reduce the value of forests to their lowest common denominator of carbon to the voice of an elder retelling a sacred myth; from computational models to the rhythms of more-than-human life, Beyond Carbon is a field guide urging viewers to perceive these entanglements between ways of knowing the natural world.5

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Beyond Carbon is hosting two immersive screenings in Rotterdam and Utrecht this September. More details here.

  1. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou. 2024. Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.  ↩︎︎
  2. Our partner organization the Working Group for ICCAs in Indonesia (WGII) defines “ICCA” as “territories and areas conserved by indigenous peoples and local communities” or simply,  “territories of life” to emphasize this co-constitution of traditional ecological knowledges, hutan adat (customary forests), and ecosystem health. ↩︎︎
  3. Hélène Frichot's account of woven fish fences and eel traps as sites of "agentic entanglement" between human communities and nonhuman species offers a useful frame for Nabau as participant rather than backdrop. See Hélène Frichot. 2025. "Agentic Entanglements: Eel Traps and Fish Fences," e-flux Architecture. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/technoecologies/6783015/agentic-entanglements-eel-traps-and-fish-fences (Accessed August 20 2026) ↩︎︎
  4. Karak, Madhuri, and Michelle Cheripka. 2023. "Spatial data + social accuracy: the politics of participatory mapping." Data Dialogues. (Podcast). Open Environmental Data Project. Available at: https://www.openenvironmentaldata.org/data-dialogues/episode-3-spatial-data-social-accuracy-the-politics-of-participatory-mapping (Accessed June 29 2026). ↩︎︎
  5. My gratitude to Michelle Cheripka, Samuel Hertz, and Felipe Mammoli for their comments on this essay at different junctures. To the Mekar Raya community in West Kalimantan, especially Ibu Manseh, Pak Tondi, Pak Tony and Ibu Serena, the strength and pride with which you defend your forests against all odds inspires us everyday. Thank you to Cindy Julianty for your friendship. ↩︎︎

Madhuri Karak (she/her) is a researcher working at the intersections of climate, technology, and people's movements in South and South East Asia for the last 15+ years. She writes, teaches, and speaks on topics ranging from Indigenous data sovereignty and the environmental impacts of tech infrastructures to the limits of geospatial tools for territorial recognition. Madhuri was a Mellon - American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow (2019-2021) and holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York.