The Geography Speaker Series Presents:
Prof. Kelly Kay, UCLA
Talk Title: Charting the historical fiscal geographies of US timberland investment
Abstract: Since the 1990s, there has been a major upheaval in who owns private industrial timberland in most forest-reliant communities in the United States, with formerly vertically-integrated companies restructuring and making vast quantities of land available for purchase by institutional investors like pension funds and university endowments. The resulting financial ownership of timberland has had major impacts on labor norms, recreational access, and how economic value comes to be extracted from the forest. In this talk—grounding in a framework that I term “historical fiscal geographies,”—I argue that it is critical to understand the present-day financialization of private timberland in the US through a set of important historical changes in timber taxation that predate it. Each of these key fiscal moments fundamentally reordered nature-society relationships and inched us closer to the present-day situation in which forestland is now seen as a safe and viable asset class.
Date: Sept 26, 2025
Time: 3:30-5:00pm
Venue: Senate Chamber, 2nd Floor (RM 2145), Ohio Union
