Who Will Remember Us? Plants and the Archive (original) (raw)
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Keeping life going: Plants and people today, yesterday and tomorrow
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I review the contributions to this special issue by focusing on the relational qualities that bind people and plants together through religious ritualization of economic activities such as crop cultivation or plant gathering in the wild. I show how an attention to plants as teachers facilitates cross-cultural comparative analysis.
Plants and People: Choices and Diversity through Time
Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage (EARTH): 8,000 Years of Resilience and Innovation, 2014
This first monograph in the EARTH: The Dynamics of Non-Industrial Agriculture: 8,000 years of Resilience and Innovation series, approaches the great variety of agricultural practices in human terms. It focuses on the relationship between plants and people, the complexity of agricultural processes and their organisation within particular communities and societies. Collaborative European research among archaeologists, archaeobotanists, ethnographers, historians and agronomists using a broad analytical scale of investigation seeks to establish new common ground for integrating different approaches. By means of interdisciplinary examples, this book showcases the relationship between people and plants across wide ranging and diverse spatial and temporal milieus, including crop diversity, the use of wild foodstuffs, social context, status and choices of food plants.
Plant totemism. Toward a new imaginary of the plants in the Anthropocene
Im@go, 2020
The Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia coined the concept of "plant totemism" to define the new emerging relationship between humans and plants in the Anthropocene. Recently, the interest in plant life is increasing, thanks to new researches on trees' ability to perceive the environment they live in and to build social relationships. These topics exert great fascination in the social imaginary since they are rooted in popular culture and return in modern times in many science-fiction stories. Moreover, studies on plant intelligence first emerged in the pseudoscientific milieu of New Age. As a result, new forms of spirituality and pseudoscience emerge, from "forest bathing" to the "bioenergetic landscape". The article analyzes the different forms the rediscovery of plant life assumes in the modern imaginary, concluding that plant totemism can be considered a case study in social imaginary to understand the emergence of a new sicentific spirit that tries to reconcile human and non-human world.
Journal of Ethnobiology, 2024
Ethnobiology has long recognized that human and plant relationships produce particular ways of living. The discipline is increasingly asking how these lifeworlds reflect and create sociopolitical formations-from low-impact hunting-gathering or slash-and-burn agriculture, to colonial plantations and runaway settlements, to contemporary agribusiness and alternative biodynamic agriculture. In this special issue, we propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis to highlight the ways in which plants and people are co-produced. We explore entanglements between plants and people over time, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic and historical research to offer new and critical insights into the ways that plant-human lifeworlds co-produce one another-from the processes of racialization in plantation societies to the aspirational interventions of gardeners, farmers, and scientists aiming for redemption from chemical industrial agriculture. The collection centers on acts of reciprocal human and botanical labor through a variety of contexts and perspectives in crop fields, including: how monocrops and plantations reshape socioecological life; ritual dimensions of plant-human interactions; and the regenerative alternatives that re-imagine plant-human relations and agro-ecological possibilities amid the historical weight of extractivist agriculture in plant-anthropo-worlds.
The Stories Plants Tell [Front Matter]
Narrative Culture, 2023
The special issue fits into the larger frame of a recent “vegetal turn” within the humanities that has long been used to find plants marginal, mute, or symbolic supplements to human stories. The articles as well as the interview of this special issue, therefore, aim to contest narrative as an anthropocentric proper and delineate current theories, methods, and challenges of conceiving plants as both storytellers and storied matter. The contributions collected in this issue (by Laura A. Forster, Michael Marder, Natasha Myers, Solvejg Nitzke, Darya Tsymbalyuk) explore forms of vegetal creativity and narrativity. The online version can be found here: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/narrative/vol10/iss2/
Australian Flora Foundation Newsletter, 2020
I have taught botany for over two decades on topics ranging from plant ecology and diversity to plant anatomy and physiology. Much of my 25 years of teaching has been working with students generating micrographs. I have educated first year students through to honours and supervised higher research degree students. So, when invited to write this piece, my intent was to offer some background on botanical literacy but as I was writing I felt my usual scientific tone drift to include my musings in recent weeks. Global discussions about climate change, and the political situation in Australia, which for too long has focused on short term media cycles, accounting timelines, and 3-year political terms at the expense of our long term survival have rendered conversations about our environment an emotional space. I offer this piece as a homage to plants. There is no doubt that phototrophs support all life on our planet, and this makes the care of our botanical environment critical for the survival of animal life. Plants, and other photosynthetic oxygenic organisms sequester carbon from the atmosphere. But they cannot keep up with the amounts of carbon dioxide for which we humans are responsible. Carbon emissions are able to cross international borders so this is collective 'we'. Our Great Southern Continent in unique and our plants and animals have adapted ways to survive here. These adaptations are being put to the ultimate test as fires increase in intensity and frequency and there is emerging evidence that tree survival is diminishing because of this (Fairman et al. 2019). The recent fires that have raged across millions of hectares have resulted in what ecologists would call a ‘natural experiment’, offering opportunities to assess diversity of biota of the scorched earth, to count the survival rates of vertebrates, and diversity of pollinators visiting the plants as they regenerate in comparison to unburnt areas. As a plant scientist, I found the focus on animals (mainly koalas) to be strange. With the notable exception of the Wollemi Pine, it was as if the trees, the things that were burning, were invisible. This invisibility of plants is referred to in the scholarly literature as ‘plant blindness’ (Wandersee and Schussler 1999), the antidote to which is ‘botanical literacy’ (e.g. Mathes 1983). Throughout my career, I have deliberately shied away from the term ‘plant blindness’, as it is a deficit definition (the inability to see plants or to recognise differences between plant species), and have instead focussed on devising ways to improve engagement of both students and the broader campus community with the botanical world. One innovation has been a mobile app called CampusFlora (currently undergoing redevelopment) where the plants growing on the campuses of the University of Sydney are presented as learning objects making spaces outside of the classroom learning places for botany (e.g. Pettit et al. 2014; Cheung et al. 2015; Dimon et al. 2019). Alongside this initiative I have offer reminders via Yammer posts to the university community prompting us all to stop, look and learn about at the plants in our working environment, which in our campus context, is akin to a botanic garden. Although I have taught botany for a long time, I feel obliged to share my knowledge, noting that I learn something new every year. I feel a bit sad knowing that I will never completely satisfy my botanical curiosity. As a case in point, on a recent field excursion to the Kimberley, it was such a treat to be able to see and touch Boab trees. Their mode of arrival to the Australian landscape remains a mystery to western science (see Baum et al. 1998). It is all so interesting to me. I often ask myself the question: when did it become normal to not be able to recognise and appreciate plants? Does it start when we are young? I ask this because when I have looked at flash cards that are used to teach children to speak, I feel myself getting cross when, for example, the picture of the African savanna with a lion in it is only labelled as ‘lion’. I recall seeing images spruiking national tree day where the inclusion of a bird in the tree branches seemed to be obligatory. Is it true that most people will only pay attention when an animal is present? A study out of the US provides some evidence to confirm that our (human) attention is skewed to animals rather than plants (Balas and Momsen 2014). I wonder if there is a cultural element at play. Over the past 5 or so years I have been privileged to have been invited onto Country and, on every occasion, have been introduced first and foremost to the plants, considered as brothers and sisters (Martin and Mirrboopa, 2003). As a plant-lover, I can’t tell you how much it pleases me that plants are in the forefront of these introductions. Maybe it is worth noting that my background is Celtic with forebears coming to Australia only about 150 years ago. It should also be noted that here I am relying on a fuzzy memory of things my mother told me years ago. My mother, too, was a lover of plants. She would be moved to tears (literally) if she found an off-cut of a plant (a sprig) on the footpath. She would take it home and coax it to grow, usually with success. When my sister passed away, my mother grew one of the white roses from my sister’s wreath into a healthy plant. I recognise that some might view this as dark. But beyond our very existence being contingent on plants (calories, nutrients, oxygen, medicine, shelter) our emotional and cultural wellness is connected with plants. In our celebrations we include plants, roses on Valentine’s day, the bride’s bouquet, chrysanthemums on Mothers’ day. And plants are integral to our commemorations – lilies for death, rosemary for remembrance, trees planted as memory waypoints. More explicitly, the Australian War Memorial offers an opportunity to purchase one of progeny of Gallipoli’s Lone Pine; sunflower seeds from the field in the Ukraine where MH17 was shot down were sent back to Australia to respectfully commemorate those who were not able to come home. There are many more examples. I find it acutely interesting that plants, particularly their flowers, offer us ways to express what our words cannot. Gently and with beauty. Sometimes when I look at our Southern landscape, I edit out the buildings, the roads, the poles and wires, the dams, so that I can imagine what our country was pre-contact, pre-colonisation, pre-invasion. That humans are still able to survive and thrive in remote areas speaks to the remarkable sophistication of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the resilience of a culture derived from and integrated with the land and the sea. I like to think of the time when we will reintegrate with the land. When we die, we decompose. Our molecules disassembled and become available for use by the macro and micro soil biota. Carbon released into the atmosphere is refixed via photosynthesis; our nitrogenous waste is taken up by root systems. Even those who are the loudest climate change deniers will realise their full environmental potential when their bodily chemicals contribute to nutrient cycles to be incorporated into lignin, cellulose, botanical genomes. Incorporated into branches and leaves, I like to think of us dancing joyfully in the treetops together.