' . . . they stuck carefully to the narrow paths that wandered through the carpet of moss from one granite outcropping to another and down to the sand beach. Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss. What they don't know - and it cannot be repeared too often - is that moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn't rise back up. And the third time you step on moss it dies. Elder ducks are the same way - the third time you fighten them up from their nexts, they never come back. Sometime in July the moss would adorn itself with a kind of long, light grass. Tiny clusters of flowers would open at exactly the same height above the ground and sway together in the wind, like inland meadows, and the while island would be covered with a veil dipped in heat, hardly visible and gone in a week. Nothing could give a stronger impression of untouched wilderness.'
Tove Jannson, The Summer Book
Natasha Myers A Krya For Cultivating your Inner Plant.
Accepting the position that ‘to view plants as entirely disposable objects is to do them an injustice’ is becoming one of the new challenges facing us in the twentieth first century. We are now rediscovering plants as a result of the emergence of plant neurobiology generating discussions on ‘plant intelligence’, ‘root brains’, ‘plant memory’ and other phenomena related to plant signaling and communication. Scientific knowledge of plants, however, has also enabled and accelerated their technological use, although plants have been the subjects of biotech since the very beginning of agriculture. At the same time proposals concerning the ‘rights of plants’ and ‘plant dignity’ are being put forth in response to new contexts created by biotechnology that is re-shaping human-plant relations. A growing interest in our ethical approach to plants – their being considered as life forms with an inherent worth, and therefore deserving protection for their own sake – is now gaining visibility in both the humanities and in art practices. Methodology: The goal of this stream is to gather researchers, artists, designers, architects and others whose work involve plants both on a material and on a discursive level opening up a territory where the complexity of plant lives can be put forward and communicated to a wider public. Projects/proposals of interest to this stream should pose theoretical and practical questions concerning the use of plants as well as indicate and promote change in attitudes towards them. Research with the potential to challenge the mainstream anthropocentric approach to plants, usually based on instrumentalization, colonization, separation, and control, is particularly welcomed. Presentations may also directly or indirectly deal with plant related biotechnologies – implemented either in professional laboratories or in a do-it-yourself mode – and open up the possibilities of a more inclusive postnatural history of human-plant relations.
Plants have been profoundly queer players in the modern project of describing "life" for ethical and political consideration. From their taxonomic destabilizations of colonial order in the eighteenth century to their current questionings concerning agency in recent posthumanist discourses, plants demand that we think about living, being, and becoming in ways that interrupt anthropocentric and heteronormative figurings of ethics, agency, futurity, and life in general. In this presentation, Catriona Sandilands, an internationally recognized scholar in both queer ecologies and plant studies, will speak about "botanical queerness" with an eye to thinking through the complexity of humans' relations to plants beyond habitual environmentalist modes of address. Plants are not simply objects of human concern; they offer up modes of being. becoming, living, and futurity that have been overlooked in many more animal-centric accounts, and that may serve as the basis of a more critical, queer, and ecological understanding of life in relation to power.
'The 120-meter tall pine tree in the courtyard of the Casa Reisser y Curioni, which dominates all the horizons of this intense city that is defending itself against the aggression of ugly concrete--not of the good concrete—that pine tree came to be my best friend.'
Read further
José María Arguedas, The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, trans. Frances Horning Barraclough (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) 184-5