We exist in plant worlds, in places filled with, and shaped, oxygenated, and fed by vegetal lives. The drama of botanical power often fails to catch our scattered and rather solipsistic attention, at least in contemporary industrial cultures, despite our complete bodily and cultural dependence on the “light-eating” power of plants to fuel our world (and to form “fossil fuels” with their dead bodies). As the editors of Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation (2020) write, “the way we think about vegetation is not simply central to the way we think about ourselves or even humanity; the way we think about vegetation may also be key to our continued existence.” This lecture introduces the field of Critical Plant studies, a subcategory of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and then presents briefly my own current project on the “Dark Green: Plants, People, Power.” Focusing on the fairy tales from the German Romantics Ludwig Tieck, ETA Hoffmann, and the Brothers Grimm, the lecture will address the seemingly separate but actually integrated ideas of agriculture and forests that became divided in the late 18th and early 19th century (as per F.W.M. Vera in Grazing Ecology and Forest History, 2000). Most of the current assumptions about the dark, endless forests thought be original to Europe and North America are wrong, according to Vera, and thus so are many assumptions about our fundamental relationship to ecological systems. We will explore how the strange imaginations of the Romantic tales contain significant insights into vegetal-human history in order to gain better insights into how we engage with, rely upon, and endanger our plant-fed environmental systems.
Workshop: Plant-Human Entanglements( Saturday, April 12th - Duke Universioty Campus - Old Chemistry Bldg - 119)
The workshop will take seriously Robin Wall Kimmerer’s botanical clarity in Braiding Sweetgrass that plants are animate subjects and not mere objects. She writes that her botanical studies were “reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective. Plants were reduced to objects; they were not subjects.” All of her written works demonstrate how, in contrast, to understand plants as our co-subjects, as older and more substantial beings with whom we always cooperate. In the three-part workshop, we will use three short readings as the basis for 1) a discussion of critical plant studies based on The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature ; 2) an exploration of the idea of Sullivan’s “Dark Green” based on the essay “Bad Plants”; and 3) consideration of Anna Tsing’s co-edited volume, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet as a guide to reconsidering how we live in reciprocity with the vegetal and are immersed in plant worlds and entangled with other species. The goal of the workshop is to reshape assumptions about our environmental existence specifically in terms of our cultural and literary responses to vegetation, to the light eaters (Zoë Schlanger) whose impacts we tend to trivialize in our technological era of human wizardry that feels itself master over the ecological worlds. While much of techno-industrial culture has become oblivious to what Val Plumwood calls “our enabling conditions” (Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason 2002), ancient cultures, indigenous cultures, ecologically-based thinking, fairy/folk tales, and some recent science fiction offer more productive ideas of reciprocity.
