People and Plants (original) (raw)

"Plant fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. This book argues that the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise our relationship with plants at a time of deep ecological crisis. 'Why Look at Plants?' challenges readers’ pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies". https://brill.com/view/title/33086

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.

Humans are becoming an urban species. Living in megalopolitan cities reduces intimate contact with the natural world thus placing greater emphasis on 'presented nature' settings, such as zoos, botanic gardens and natural history museums. Botanic gardens provide opportunities for aesthetic interactions with the plant world. However, previous research has demonstrated that 'plant blindness' inhibits human perceptions of plants. Increased extinction levels (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005) mean the world can no longer afford our citizens to see 'nothing' when they look at plants, the basis of most life on earth. Despite a key educational role identified in the global plant conservation strategy 2011- 2020 botanic gardens, and allied settings, have received limited research attention. In the Swedish context the education system should provide students with knowledge about nature, the environment and sustainable development (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2011). Given the critical role of plants in ecosystem resilience it is imperative to motivate teaching and learning that can move beyond ‘plant blindness’ towards experiences in which teachers and learners see the importance of plants for a sustainable world. A recent survey by Wilson and Mant (2011) concludes that exemplary science teachers used a broad repertoire of stories, metaphors, analogies and models to translate their scientific knowledge and make it comprehensible to their students. Similarly, multimodal approaches to teaching and learning science have been shown to be effective in engaging students (Ainsworth et al, 2011). Furthermore, Bell (1997) has framed natural history as the possibility of a ‘fully-embodied participation in the non-human world’ (p.132). These findings suggest that multimodal and sensoric experiences in ‘presented nature’ settings might create shifts away from plant-blindness towards reading the importance of plants.

Without plants, life on earth as we know it simply could not exist. In terms of sheer mass, plants dominate terrestrial ecosystems, with one thousand times more plant than animal biomass on land (Bar-on et al. 2018). Within this vital mass is incredibly diversity: according to recent estimates, there are just shy of four hundred thousand species of plants in the world (Willis 2017). The significance of this is as much cultural as it is ecological. All human societies rely on plants in myriad ways – as resources, as symbols, as ideas, as cohabitants. And like an optical illusion, while often going completely unnoticed, the centrality of plants to social life, once seen, cannot be unseen. Just as they do in ecosystems, plants underpin and thread their way through human social worlds with grace and tenacity.

This chapter addresses issues such as the history of plant knowledge within the Western context, the specificity of plants’ bodily functions, intelligent behavior and sensitivity in plants, their sex life and botanical queerness, technologically augmented plants, the future environments of plants on the earth and beyond, human-plant ethics, and finally, the imperative to ‘‘follow plants,’’ that is, to look to plants’ lives for inspiration on how to coexist with them and with others.