Scott, Joanne. 2024. “Invasibility, Movement, and Agency: Exploring Plant-Human Relationships in the Plantationocene.” Global Performance Studies 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv7n2a119
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The soundwalk I created explores the legacies of colonial thinking and practices on our contemporary relationships with plants, through engaging with ideas such as the ‘Plantationocene’, ‘invasibility’, ‘cheap nature’, ‘vegetal labour’ and ‘vegetal agency’ (see Barua 2023; Kirbis 2020; Moore and Patel 2018; Subramaniam 2014). There are methodological choices and creative methods embedded in the walk and this piece of writing outlines and explains those choices. I recommend reading this after you have experienced the soundwalk, so that your experience of the walk informs your reading of how it was made, as opposed to this outline of methods and choices framing and determining your experience of the walk.
This walk is deliberately ‘site-generic’ (Wilkie 2002, 150) in that it asks participants to choose a site and route of their choice. However, it makes itself ‘specific’ to this myriad of possible locations through asking the participant to engage closely with their local vegetal life. In this way, the walk imprints itself onto the participant’s environment through guided and sited encounters. Indeed, it is built around encounters with trees and plants where the participant is encouraged to single out vegetal beings to examine in detail. This was important, as I wanted to ‘ground’ and make materially present the theories around the impact of colonial, extractive thinking on our relationships with plants.
The gaze, movement, and attention of the participant is guided by spoken text, including combinations of theoretical exploration, specific direction, and questioning. As explored below, this is enacted through mixes of voice and accompanied by musical scoring. In creating the walk, I engaged with the vegetal life that is near to where I live and—influenced by the reading I was doing on human-plant relationships and ‘plantation logics’—a number of questions emerged. These were primarily about the relationship between our human intentions and the plant’s lifeway and agency, centring on what plants are for and how they are used by humans.
This developed into a core method within the walk, which was to use questions as a prompt for the participant to offer closer attentiveness to vegetal life. The aim was, within their individual encounter with a plant or tree, to move the participant’s attentiveness between inner reflection and outer engagement, between broader ideas and specific interactions. Also, it is the sensory, embodied, and material aspects of the walk that shift it from a sound file that you might listen to in any context to an experience in and of a landscape of your choice, prompting close engagement with where you are.
This is particularly important to me as someone who uses the creation of soundwalks as a creative method for exploring and interrogating human relationships with more-than-human lives and landscapes. Through connecting ideas and reflections with direct encounters in a landscape or place, new modes of understanding and felt engagement are mobilised—those which cannot be achieved through reading a text or listening to the sound, without connecting that to a sited, embodied experience. For instance, when testing previous soundwalks with participants (Scott 2022), I discovered that “the reflective state that a soundwalk has the capacity to induce through its prompts and sonic qualities, in combination with present movement through a space, opens up the possibilities for new thinking mobilised by noticing, prompts and being drawn into different relationships” with where you are.
In relation to prompting refreshed modes of attention and felt engagement, it is also worth noting that this walk casts human people and plant people as different beings. It works from their differences in a range of ways to explore the possibilities of relations between them. I acknowledge fully that humans are part of nature, that we are fully entangled and integrated and embedded in systems of exchange and flow, which often usefully undermine any sense of human exceptionalism—for instance, the non-human bacterial elements of our bodies which are a vital part of our living systems (see Turner 2013, 46). However, this walk sets out specifically to explore how humans and plants, as entities with distinct evolutionary pathways, have formed relations with each other and the nature of these often damaging and “asymmetric encounters” (Tsing et al. 2017, G5), formed through and in the wake of settler colonialism. As such, I needed to draw clear distinctions between us, using those differences to understand better the nature of our current entanglements and what might be possible in future iterations of our relationalities.
In weaving together the different elements of the walk—academic research, direction for the participant, questions to prompt interaction, spaces for reflection—I developed a set of sonic methods to shape the participant experience. In creating soundwalks I have always combined a mix of different sounds and, as referenced above, much of this is rooted in an aim to open different modes of attentiveness. I want to offer participants prompts to reflect on and think through ideas, as well as to open their attention to the material world around them through specific invitations to interact, look, seek out, touch, and experience. This soundwalk is consistently moving the participant through these different modes of attention and the types of sound which are included help to do this.
Before I move on to specific discussion of key sonic methods—vocal qualities, use of song, integration of digital sounds, and use of field recording—it is also worth clarifying the nature of this soundwalk. It is, as Toby Butler (2006) describes it, “a walk […] in the outside world guided by recorded sound and voice” (889), as opposed to the form of soundwalking that Hildegard Westerkamp ([2006] 2023) outlines, which is “any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is an exploration of our ear/environment relationship, unmediated by microphones, headphones and recording equipment.” As a guided and mediated walking experience, this soundwalk opens the participant to the environments around them, through recorded and curated sound, ideally experienced through headphones. This sound is not there to mimic the environment (as I explain below, when discussing the positioning of field recording). Rather, the score I made for the walk, in combination with the spoken text, create a sonic prism through which the material environment is experienced, and which reveals elements of that environment that may be hidden or not immediately evident.[1] The spoken text is also directive, in that it guides the participant’s movement and interactions throughout the experience. Below, I explain and explore the use of some key sonic methods in creating this mode of experiencing and why they were chosen.
A method that I have used in prior soundwalks and which I developed in this experience is to vary the quality and register of the voice. In previous experiments, where I tested soundwalks with participants (Scott 2022), I discovered that “playing with the quality of the vocal delivery” and identifying different registers to adopt in relation to the participant—informing, confiding, guiding, evoking—helped to “mobilise various modes of attention e.g. scanning, imagining, considering, examining, connecting.” In this soundwalk, I moved beyond shifting the vocal delivery towards applying different effects to my voice, through a loop pedal, to texture the voice and offer different inflections within the experience. This supported the movement between reflection/contemplation and action/interaction referenced above, as well as between a general idea and a site-felt experience.
As an example, a filtering effect is added to the voice when I am asking questions to prompt the participant’s interaction and engagement with plants. The more direct address to the participant is marked by this vocal shift; the voice is made thinner and more insistent, opening a more focused quality of attention. Another vocal texture is a combined reverb and chorus effect, when I am expanding on the implications of the theories expounded within the walk. This is often accompanied by more prominent musical scoring, using looped vocals and digital sounds, as I explore below. In combination, these moments offer a more staged presence within the sonic texture of the work, with the expansive effect changing the quality of my voice to something that it is obviously constructed and shaped. This deliberately highlights moments where my interpretation of the significance of the ideas is being shared with the participant.
By way of contrast, a ‘clean’ voice without effects offers instructions, directions, and more straightforward explanations. This establishes a positioning which is more clearly one of a guide, helping to direct attention towards elements that exemplify and reveal ideas about the legacy of plantation logics, the personhood of plants, and the labour they undertake on our behalf, as well as damaging narratives of ‘invasibility’ and ‘cheap nature’.
Finally, in the only element of the walk that engages with the practices of field recording (the lack of which is discussed below), another version of my voice speaks from locations near to where I live, in central Portugal. In these instances, the on-site recording of the voice positions me as someone also walking and discovering and reflecting alongside the participant. It creates the sense of me ‘walking with’ them, through actively describing a particular ‘stop’ on the walk that I am taking and asking the participant to reflect on any similarities and distinctions between the plant and tree formations that they are encountering. In all cases, the voice is mobilised as a tool to enliven, direct, dramatize, and shape the experience of the participant. The walk is constructed in this way to fulfil its aims in bringing the research around the impact of colonial thinking on our relationships with plants into direct contact with plants and trees themselves, so that the ideas are grounded and the embodied experience enlivens and feeds back into those ideas.
As part of the musical scoring that accompanies the spoken text, I created a series of sung vocal loops using a loop pedal, which allows me to build and mix up to six separate looped sequences at a time. The loops were generated live in response to the ideas referenced in the walk and experiences of encountering vegetal life near to where I live. They are all non-verbal and often use the human voice to create a range of different sonic textures.
I love using the sung human voice as a creative tool for exploring and activating feelings and states. I enjoy song moving within and against the digital sounds with which it combines in the score (which I outline below) and how it intersects with the spoken voice and what it is describing or evoking. These elements are not necessarily designed to click and match like they would in a song or formal composition, but rather to weave and entwine with their own energy. They sometimes find solid combinations, but always move out of those into something more dispersed and disparate, while also shifting us into the next phase of the experience.
The mix of voice, song, and digital sound is highly constructed and edited to evoke different feelings, states, energies, and processes throughout the walk, and it is very different from sonically representing the more-than-human world in a more direct way, through the imprint of a field recording. As I explain below, I used field recordings sparingly in the walk, and not at all in the sonic underscoring of the primary text. The abstract sounds and vocal refrains, which form the score, do not attempt to directly represent the more-than-human subject. Rather, in my research and practices, the sung voice is often a reaching out towards the species in question, with this creative gesture of reaching from the human subject-position an acknowledgement of the unknowability of more than humans in their umwelts and modes of experiencing.[2]
In a more straightforward dramaturgical way, the sung vocal refrains also mark the affective undertones of what is being described. When I insert them into the mix, I am often looking for resonance between the sung vocal and the subject matter of the text, so there is an affective exchange, which might open more felt capacities and possibilities in the ideas being described.
As referenced above, field recordings were used sparingly in this walk for a number of reasons. Firstly, the field recordings that are included function as reports from my parallel walk with the participants, where I describe the vegetal life that I am encountering directly from those sites. I wanted to include these snippets to offer a productive comparison with their own engagements with plants and trees. These on-site recordings also offer a sonic break from the non-diegetic scoring that is dominant within the walk.[3]
In previous artistic research projects, I have used field recording in the scoring of the text, but I always felt a paradox in asking a participant to walk through one space while offering them sounds from another in order to provide some kind of ‘natural’ reference point for what they might be encountering; e.g. the sound of birds, water flowing, the breeze moving tree branches. As Mark Wright (2022) points out, a field recording may feel like a neutral capture of sound, but it is actually highly subjective and constructed in that “I point the microphone. I create a mode of representation” (43), but this is “only ever a partial document. It is a slice of one possible truth remade by the ears of another, elsewhere” (78).
In light of these reflections, in this walk I opted for a more evident and revealed set of constructions in the mixes of voice, song, and digital sounds. There is no attempt at offering a ‘natural’ or authentic backdrop for the walk; as Wright points out, this is not what a field recording is anyway, even though, as a form, it might effectively hide its construction from the listener. In addition, the ‘synthetic’ digital sounds that are used, as explored below, are in tune with some of the themes of the walk, particularly how our perceptions of, relationships with, and feelings towards plants have been manipulated by the ongoing legacies of colonial thinking.
The digital sounds that are mixed with the vocal loops and spoken text throughout the walk are melodic refrains and drone-like loops, which I created and recorded using the software instruments in the Apple Logic library.[4] Logic offers a library of synthetic sounds, which can be ‘played’ and manipulated to create loops with a range of melodic and textural qualities. These loops of digital sound—often imperfect and glitchy due to their live imprint—form the base of the walk’s score. In all my work, I approach this library of sounds with a set of ideas, themes, feelings, and processes with which I seek resonance. For instance, in this walk, I recorded in my notes that I was seeking sounds that evoked the growth, energy, resilience, and reciprocity of vegetal life alongside those that opened up the feelings, which for me were embedded in the ideas I was exploring and which included senses of loss, alienation, eeriness, and unsettled, precarious states, alongside those that might evoke more balanced, nourishing, thriving, and curious relationships
My sonic practice is (and always has been) in a conversation with the digital. In foregrounding the synthetic nature of the sounds and mixing these with the voice, I feel that something emerges which is reaching towards a feeling state that has precarity, glitching, instabilities, and clashes built into it. I use this to dance with and enliven the evocations, explorations, and invocations offered by the spoken voice in the walk. Musical scoring like this is also used to move the participant through a range of different moods, states, and energies, as determined by the phases of the walk, its subject matter, and how it asks them to meet the environment around them. More prosaically, these types of digital sound loops help to evoke the actual movement that is at the heart of the experience—for instance, through including a more energetic and higher tempo piece of music to prompt the participant to move forward after a period of reflection and contemplation.
After making several geo-located and site-specific soundwalks, this is the first I have created that is designed to be experienced in a range of different environments and on a route determined by the individual participant. I wanted to create a walk that someone could experience in their local places, without travelling to a particular site. Unlike a site-specific walk, which might zoom in on, contemplate, and reveal elements within a particular location, this site-generic experience offers an overlay or filter through which an individual can encounter vegetal life in local spaces, contemplating their relationships with that life and what might have shaped those relationships. Through combinations of text, vocal effects, sung vocal loops, and digital sounds, the walk seeks to move the participant through their chosen environment and open wider questions about our relationships with our plant kin and how we might positively shift these. Refreshed relationships and different understandings are a crucial tool in addressing the climate and biodiversity crises, and seeking more just and equitable futures. As Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) says “Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth” (338).
[1] I use the term ‘score’ to refer to the musical elements that I created to underscore and accompany the vocal delivery of the text and to create different atmospheres throughout the walk.
[2] As Ed Yong (2023) explains, the term ‘umwelt’ comes from the German word for environment and ‘was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakub von Uexküll in 1909 to describe not just surroundings, but ‘specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience’ (3). I use it here similarly here to refer to the umwelt of plants and trees, defined by what and how they sense and experience in the world around them.
[3] Non-diegetic sound in film theory and practice ‘refers to music that accompanies a scene but is external to the fictional world […]. Nondiegetic music is not part of the sensory world that film characters are assumed to be able to see, touch, smell, feel, or hear’ (Tan et al. 605). Similarly, the musical scoring which accompanies the text in this walk does not emanate from the world through which the participant is walking; it is a set of additional sounds created to accompany that walk.
[4] Logic is sound recording and editing software, created by Apple: https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/.
I am walking up the steep hill from my house in central Portugal into the woods. The caminhos florestais, or forest paths, in this area are sandy walkways up and down the planted hills of trees. There are rows of pinheiros (pines) and plantations of eucalyptus that are so controversial here in Portugal, because of their association with wildfires. There are also gnarled and twisted cork oaks, beloved of the Portuguese; mimosas, with their sprays of bright yellow stamens; vivid green strawberry trees, lots of gorse just coming into bloom, heather popping with pinky-purple flowers, and plenty of creeping brambles, winding through the undergrowth.
On this sound walk, we will travel together, offering our attentiveness to vegetal life—the plants and trees growing along our respective routes. We will consider relationships with our planty kin and what legacies we live with, which determine what plants are to us and what they can be. You can travel directly from your home, if you like, or your workplace. You can walk in an urban or rural space or a mix of the two. If you like, you can plan your route in advance to encounter plants and trees which interest you. Alternatively, you can allow the walk’s prompts to lead you on a fruitful meander, from wherever you choose to begin to an as-yet unknown end point. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you travel safely and remember that you can stop the audio at any point if you need to pay more attention to your immediate surroundings.
Choose your start point now and make your way there if you haven’t already done so. Once you arrive, seek out the first plant or tree you see growing in or around the area that you can comfortably examine in detail. You can pause the audio now if you need to, and press play again when you reach that first growing being.
Firstly, move around the plant or tree if you can. Examine their shape and how they emerge from the ground, what forms and patterns you can see in their fronds, leaves, shoots, and branches. If they are blooming or fruiting, look closely at the flowers and fruits—their colour, texture, shape, aroma.
Consider who might have placed this plant here and for what purpose. Do you think they have been intentionally positioned here by human hands? If so, how do you know? If not, how else might their seeds have arrived and grown into what you see? Were they spread by the wind? Dropped by birds, insects, or other animals? If this is a plant that we humans have put there, why do you think they are growing in that particular spot? For beauty, shade, food, money? What evidence is there in how the plant is growing or how they have been positioned, cut, pruned, and trained as to how they are being used by us? What work is that plant doing?
Moore and Patel (2018) argue that “capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work—as cheaply as possible.” As they explore and as we will think about on this walk, the plantation was the earliest and most powerful manifestation of putting nature to work on an industrial scale, combining the work of plants with the enforced labour of enslaved peoples to create commodities cheaply.
We will think about the legacy of the plantation in our relations with plants soon enough. For now, let’s return to the work that this plant or tree is doing right now. They are working to take the energy from the sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, drawing that in through their roots and leaves and transforming it into glucose and oxygen. They are working to live, to grow, to bear fruit, and to reproduce—all that work is happening right now and it’s what makes plants so different from us. As autotrophs, they are able to make their own food from raw materials and energy (National Geographic Society 2023).
This plant or tree might be doing other work too—perhaps they are labouring for some other purpose than their own growth and flourishing. Unlike the plant, we are heterotrophs, who cannot transform the raw materials from the sun, air, and earth into food—we need to consume other beings in order to live, and so plants are a vital source of energy for us, but plants have also become valuable commodities (National Geographic Society 2023).
Who owns the plant? What is valuable about them? What are they making right now and how is that being used, or sold, or consumed?
As I stand here in the plantations of young eucalyptus trees, it is not at all clear who would claim ownership of them, but human intention and design is evident everywhere in the serried ranks of the trees, all in neat rows, how they are grown so close together to maximise the crop, how nothing else is allowed to grow around them. Sometimes that uniformity can be pleasing to the eye—the way light shafts filter through the rows of tall thin trunks in neat, slender, iridescent blocks. In other ways this feels like a monocultural dead zone—devoid of the undergrowth where other beings might flourish—but the trees are so vigorous, so good at growing here, that it is hard not to find what they are doing on some level impressive.
How do you consider the plants that grow around you? Do you tend to them, love them, enjoy what they offer, eat what they provide? Fear them? Fear for them? That question sits at the heart of this walk, which aims to interrogate our lived relationships with our vegetal kin. As we travel, let’s pay attention to everything we see growing along our path and how we would characterise our relationship with this vegetal life. Start moving forward now—do it on your own terms at whatever pace suits you. You can listen as you move, or you can stop to look at the plants you pass if you wish.
Let’s think together about this time not as the Anthropocene, broadly defined as an era where human actions have terra-formed, re-shaped, degraded, and destroyed the ecosystems of the planet, but as the Plantationocene, a term which specifically identifies the violent practices of empire and settler colonisation, as culpable, with such practices crystallised in the form of the plantation—what Maan Barua (2023) calls “a pivotal engine for producing novel but fraught natures” (13). Some say our relationships with nature are still led by the logic of the plantation.
That idea of novel and fraught nature emerging from the plantation is an interesting one to consider in relation to what we find growing around us now. Plant science developed in tandem with plantation economies as the wealth of one fuelled the other, and the findings of that other fed back into the wealth creation (see Schiebinger and Swan 2007; Subramaniam 2024)—maximising yields, breeding and schooling plants for efficiency, destroying pests, weeds, and other lifeforms, and violently enforcing labour of humans and more-than-humans to create ‘cheap nature’ and extract monetary wealth and power.
So, the legacy of the plantation is not just ways of planting and types of plants, but a nature which is ‘fraught’, and relationships between human and plant which focus on extractive approaches—what the growth and work and fruiting of the plant can do for us, what we get from them, how we can make them work harder, more efficiently, not wasting abundance, but capturing and harnessing their energy. Barua also talks about the Plantationocene as evident in the “violent creation of simplified ecologies” in our landscapes (14)—from planted forests to soy fields to tea plantations, in monocultural growing patterns that characterise contemporary industrial scale agriculture and do not tolerate complex lifeworlds and assemblages of beings together.
Look around you at the growing patterns of the trees and plants that you can see—is this an ecology that has been managed and simplified by humans? What is allowed to grow here? What do you think might have been removed or killed? If you are in a more complex assemblage of nature, where plants are growing together without that kind of intervention, what are the qualities of growth that you can see there?
Barua says that the site of the plantation is one where the time of vegetal life is reoriented into that of production (19), where plant bodies and human bodies “are disciplined with the aim of generating surplus value” (25). How do you think the life of the plants and trees around you have been brought into a “time of production”? Perhaps they have been allowed to live out their full life, but are cut of their crop every year, or perhaps they only live for as long as they are ‘producing’ and then are cut down to allow new production to happen. Do you see any forms of human disciplining in the growth of the plants here? How have they been cut or pruned? Have they been tied up or trained to grow in a particular way?
Such disciplining practices change and influence how we see plants, what connections we have with them, what they can be in our world. Looking at the tea plantations of Assam in North-East India, Barua says that “the tea plant’s metabolic and photosynthetic activities become fully internal to the process of commodity production” (25).
This is also true of the eucalyptus trees I am standing by here, which manifest primarily as a commodity to be sold, rather than a living being. They will be cut after only a fraction of their natural lifespan has been lived—they will never extend their leaves and branches out into the world and grow strong on thick, ageing trunks. They are not loved or enjoyed by humans, as other types of forests can be, but planted at scale and manipulated to achieve the biggest crop possible on the land available.
You may not be in an area of such highly manipulated nature as the tea plantations of Assam or the eucalyptus stands of Portugal, but you might also see in the growth around you something that echoes with plantation logic. Wendy Wolford (2021) says we see it in the “extreme manipulation of nature” certainly, but also in how we idealise what she calls “rationally ordered, large scale, extractive landscapes” (1623)—landscapes where vegetal lifeways are subsumed into organised, ordered, neat environments, from which we can easily extract what we need, whether that is food, shade, pleasure, or beauty.
Look around you. What evidence is there of rational order in the vegetal life you see growing? At what scale is that growth happening? If the growing you see is not obviously subject to human organisation, is that lack of cultivation appealing to you?
Working from the idea of the Plantationocene, Barua argues that we can start to understand our present “vegetal geographies”, including the globalised and local economies that centre on human labour and the work that plants do (13), how that work is transformed into wealth through unequal or asymmetric power relations and, as we will now explore, “the circulation of both plants and people […] where life is subjected to the exercise of power in terms of its movement and flows”(14).
Keep moving forward on your chosen route, stopping when you wish to offer closer attentiveness to the vegetal life you see. As you travel, look for plants around you that could be considered to be ‘out of place’. What does this mean? Maybe vegetal life has taken advantage of a habitat we have unintentionally made for them—moss and lichen creeping over wet walls and stones, or wild plants growing on disturbed or abandoned land.
We might see these wild plants as weeds—ugly, unruly, aggressive in their growth—and pull them from the ground around the plants which we want to flourish, but there is no botanical or ecological classification for a weed. They are simply plants that grow where they are not wanted, where they have not been planted and where they are therefore considered ‘out of place’.
Find something which you would consider a weed because of the type of plant they are or where they are growing and that you can examine in a little more detail. Pause the sound and press play again when you have found your weedy friend. If you can, get a little closer to examine the plant. Where are they growing? How might they have got there? What makes them a weed in your eyes?
Tusha Yakoleva says that because there is no botanical definition for weeds, they are instead defined “according to the relationship between a plant and a person in a given time and place,” so this plant in front of you is only a weed because of something to do with your relationship with them here and now (Young 2022). Yakoleva also says that weedy beings are our ancestry and our inheritance—we have a shared history, and they are our future too. Look at what is in front of you—this flexible, feisty, brave and opportunistic being that grows where they can, where they haven’t been placed, where they aren’t nurtured and cared for by humans. These plants hold some solutions to our plantation legacies, as seen in the renewed interest in complex, messy, biodiverse, and self-willed or re-wilded landscapes, but they perhaps also hold the ghost of a nonhuman future—a sense of what might continue to live, grow and flourish on a planet without us.
Let’s move on now. We will follow the path of these ideas of nature out of place as we travel together. That term ‘out of place’ might also mean that the plant is not from where you currently are—they are from elsewhere and, in ecological terms, are considered ‘alien’. Sometimes these species—often carried by humans from one place to another—find conditions where they grow bounteously, joyfully, where they spread and outcompete and dominate the landscape, disturbing the ecosystems present in that place. They are considered by ecologists to be invasive. Which plants do you know of which are considered invasive and alien to the country where you are and who do you think decides this? Who determines what is native and what belongs?
Banu Subramaniam (2014) points out “the remarkable parallels between the campaigns against human immigrants” and those against “foreign plants and animals.” In considering the rhetoric around invasive species in ecology, Subramaniam argues that “like human immigrants, alien plants and animals are seen as ‘other,’” with “colonial and racist narratives of dirt, disease, and hygiene” present in the ways in which they are characterised “as aggressive, uncontrollable, prolific, invasive, and expanding” (231). This in turn creates a logic of ‘invasibility’, which has been used throughout history to separate “the human and nonhuman bodies into those that belonged and those that were considered invasive” (Kirbis 2020, 837).
We are often told that we need to protect and cultivate native plant species, but Subramaniam challenges this perspective because of what she calls “pervasive nativism” in conservation biology, where “everything is in its ‘rightful’ place in the world” and where the “true natives in colonised lands are the white settlers who displaced the original natives” (Subramaniam 2014, 233) In this context, who gets to be called a native species of plant? What is the cut-off point? What does being native mean if it is only connected back to the ecological imperialism of European settlers who brought their agriculture and animals with them—“a bio invasion of mass proportions which led to the collapse of indigenous and local ecosystems” as Alfred Crosby says (quoted in Subramaniam 2014, 230). Equally, it was often colonial plant hunters and botanists who brought species back from the so-called ‘new world’—aliens that have since thrived in their new homes.
In the abundant growth of these so-called alien and invasive species, we can see something that we could characterise as vegetal agency (Barua 2023; Ernwein et al. 2021)—the lifeway of a plant as they establish themselves where they are. Plants and trees draw from what it is in their environment and live or die on the basis of their ability to adapt to new and changing circumstances—new growths of species, shifting landscapes, disturbed ecologies, and a changing climate. In this, we share something with them—what Petra Tschakert (2022) calls “reciprocal vulnerability” (278) to the damage and change wrought within the Plantationocene, through colonial capitalism and the violent extraction of work from plants and humans on an industrial scale. As we move into the final part of the walk we will consider how we might re-shape our relationships with our planty kin and what small actions might help us loosen the ties of the plantation on our entanglements with vegetal life.
Head now to a place where you can be at rest among at least a few other living vegetal beings. It could be in a park, under a street tree, in a garden, on a balcony, or in a room at home with a plant that lives there with you. As you move to this final point, we will consider what it might take to shift our perspectives of and entanglements with our plant kin.
We have travelled through the present of the Plantationocene, with its legacies of cheap nature—made through violently enforced labour and dispossession—that reverberate through our relationships with plants and nature. These relationships are textured with the logic of the plantation, of invasibility and colonial classifications of who does and does not belong. But we need plants, and plants can also live in beneficial and harmonious relationships with us too. How can we combat some of what we have been taught, or what has seeped into us, as to what our plant kin are for? Are there ways to form new relationships with our more than human companions?
The practices of Indigenous communities across the world are a hugely valuable alternative to such perspectives. Those practices of right relation, reciprocity, the honourable harvest and above all, seeing plants as “a community of sovereign beings” (Kimmerer 2013, 331) might help us to enter into different types of feeling entanglements with plants and trees—changing how we think about, interact with, care for, and see them.
Are you settled in your chosen spot yet, with at least some vegetal life in easy reach? If not, pause the recording until you arrive at your chosen location.
When you look at the plants or trees around you, what do you see? What do we know of their lifeworlds? Certainly, scientific research is developing in this area which reveals more and more about the types of knowings and intelligences and modes of perception embodied in plants (see Bridle 2022, 63-76; Lawrence 2022). But we already knew that, didn’t we? At least some of us did. Native and Indigenous people across the world share deep relationalities and entanglements with vegetal life that are about connecting with these other beings, and subjectivities and ways of knowing—their worldings, or world-making capacities, their ‘personhood’.
If we acknowledge what Ailton Krenak (2023) calls a “cosmic sense of life”, we remember that “life moves through everything in the world” and that “it is transcendence” which “cannot be made ‘useful’ within the utilitarian logic of the colonial habitation of the planet” (xii). Following such principles, the plants around you, suffused with transcendent life, cannot be made useful, just as our transcendent lifeworld cannot be subsumed within utilitarian logics.
But we are heterotrophs, so we must consume other living beings to live. Here, Indigenous practices of the Honourable Harvest (see Kimmerer 2013, 183) can help us to do this with respect and Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) says can be “reinforced in small acts of daily life” (183) and “everyday acts of practical reverence” (190). Because yes, of course, we need plants to live and breathe on this planet, but the plants are not here for us, they are with us. They are our companions, as we are theirs. They can be our allies and collaborators too, as we approach a precarious future and look for new alliances and possibilities beyond those that colonial capitalism and the plantation have left us with.
So, nothing is the right thing to do in this moment, but you might:
This is the end of the sound walk and our time together, but feel free to stay where you are to engage in a little more practical reverence for and with our plant collaborators and kin. Do take any of the practices of attentiveness, care, and resistance that we have discussed out into the world. Small, local, situated acts can do a lot to heal, shift, and enliven our relationships with the vegetal life that surrounds us in our day to day lives. Through these respectful, curious, and reciprocal feeling-entanglements with the beings with which we share the planet, we build collaborations which might help support a robust, just, multispecies response to the challenges we face.
Goodbye.
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