Abstract
Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intelligence in animals. Yet an emerging body of research in the sciences and humanities challenges animal-centred biases in determining consciousness, intelligence, volition, and complex communication capacities amongst living beings. In light of recent theoretical developments in our understandings of plants, this article proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching flora: human-plant studies (HPS). Building upon the conceptual formations of the humanities, social sciences, and plant sciences as advanced by Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, Libby Robin, and most importantly Matthew Hall and Anthony Trewavas, as well as precedents in the emerging areas of human-animal studies (HAS), I will sketch the conceptual basis for the further consideration and exploration of this interdisciplinary framework.
Highlights
What else than the living organism allows one to see and sense true time? For a plant, a form is equivalent to an age—form is linked to size
As the ethnobotanists Michael Balick and Paul Cox assert in Plants, People, and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany, ―the very course of human culture has been deeply influenced by plants, plants that have been used by indigenous peoples around the world‖ [3]
The observation that people assimilate plants to social practices and customs reflects only one side of the reciprocality that characterizes human-vegetal relationships; it entails only the single condition of humans acting upon plants, or in Pollan‘s words, ―I choose the plants, I pull the weeds.‖ Human-plant studies (HPS) would consider the obverse condition as well, that of plants acting upon humans to co-generate our milieus of sustenance, the places in which our everyday lives run their courses
Summary
What else than the living organism allows one to see and sense true time? For a plant, a form is equivalent to an age—form is linked to size. The observation that people assimilate plants to social practices and customs reflects only one side of the reciprocality that characterizes human-vegetal relationships; it entails only the single condition of humans acting upon plants, or in Pollan‘s words, ―I choose the plants, I pull the weeds.‖ Human-plant studies (HPS) would consider the obverse condition as well, that of plants acting upon humans to co-generate our milieus of sustenance, the places in which our everyday lives run their courses The recognition of this dual aspect of the human-vegetal dynamic lays the groundwork for the more contentious discussion of intelligence(s). I will address the following keystones of human-plant studies: (1) plants are intelligent and volitional organisms; (2) plants are integral to socioecological networks and practices; (3) plant intelligences are viable exemplars for societies, cultures, and communities; (4) the roles of plants in society are best articulated through interdisciplinary research that considers art, literature, philosophy, Indigenous knowledges, and science; (5) the HPS framework will complement existing paradigms of ethnobotany and its affiliates
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