essay by BAYO AKOMOLAFE artworks by DIKE BLAIR Nigerian-born philosopher, psychologist, and poet Bayo Akomolafe is a global environmental activist, and chief curator and executive director of the Emergence Network. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home and other works. Thinking of how science creates its knowledge is important to thinking carefully about climate change and what it asks of us. There are generally two conceptions on how everything comes to be: one is an arboreal model, which resembles a tree with its roots, trunk, branches, and leaves. There is a foundational and classificatory sentiment here that figures how “things” flow in a unidirectional causal pattern — from roots to tips of leaves. What this model assumes is that things are discrete and follow each other in some Newtonian cascading fashion. In more recent years, noticing…