Botanical Decolonization: Rethinking Native Plants

Julia Elyachar

2014, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper we use an apparently marginal topic—‘native plants’—to address two issues of concern to contemporary politics and political theory: the legacy of settler colonialism, and dilemmas of scholarship and activism in the ‘Anthropocene’. Drawing on the writings of Francis Bacon and based on a case study of California, we argue that planting and displanting humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor. In contrast to those who equate native plant advocates with antiimmigrant nativism, we see native plant advocacy as part of a broad process of botanical decolonization and a strategic location for ethical action in the Anthropocene.

https://www.academia.edu/9250980/Botanical_Decolonization_Rethinking_Native_Plants

Natives and aliens: who and what belongs in nature and in the nation

Marco Antonsich

22 Pages

Nationalism,

Ecology,

Belonging,

Invasive Alien Species,

Anthropocene

https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12679

Publication Name:  Area

The distinction between native and alien species is a main tenet of various natural sciences, invasion biology in particular. However, it is also a contested one, as it does not reflect the biological features of a species, but only its place of origin and migration history. The present article offers a brief genealogy of the native/alien divide and argues that central to this binary is a national thinking which divides the world into distinct (national) units, enclosed by (natural) borders, with a unique (native) population attached to these spatial units. The article illustrates this argument by looking at two interrelated processes: the nationalisation of nature, by which the national thinking intervenes as an organising principle in determining ecological inclusion/exclusion, and the naturalisation of the nation, through which the nation is given an ontological status. Taken together these two processes confirm the continuing salience of the nation as a bordering principle actively constituting both the social and natural world, also in times of anthropogenic changes and increasing people's mobility.

https://www.academia.edu/44479307/Natives_and_aliens_who_and_what_belongs_in_nature_and_in_the_nation

Plantarium: Human–vegetal ecologies

Marianna Szczygielska

Olga Cielemecka

2019, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

The Special Section explores and problematizes the many intertwined human-vegetal relations and multi-species intimacies brought forward through the complex processes of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, globalization, and extractive labor.

https://www.academia.edu/41276575/Plantarium_Human_vegetal_ecologies

Thinking the feminist vegetal turn in the shadow of Douglas-firs: An interview with Catriona Sandilands

Marianna Szczygielska

2019, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

19 Pages

The interview brings to fore the recent vegetal turn in the humanities, feminist commitments to critical plant studies, and the lessons to be learned from paying close attention to the plants around us.

https://www.academia.edu/41276776/Thinking_the_feminist_vegetal_turn_in_the_shadow_of_Douglas_firs_An_interview_with_Catriona_Sandilands

A POLITICS OF HABITABILITY: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World

Stacey Langwick

2018, Cultural Anthropology

29 Pages

https://www.academia.edu/37301040/A_POLITICS_OF_HABITABILITY_Plants_Healing_and_Sovereignty_in_a_Toxic_World

For Tanzanians, modern bodies bear complicated toxic loads not only because of the dumping of capitalism’s harmful by-products but also because of the social-material effects of efforts designed to address insecurity, poverty, and disease. Dawa lishe(nutritious medicine) is forged in this double bind. Producers of dawa lishe problematize toxicity as the condition under which life is attenuated, diminished, depleted, exhausted, or drained away. Therapies attend not only to individual bodies but also to relations among people, plants, and the soil. The efficacy of herbal remedies and of gardens full of therapeutic foods and nutritious herbs rests in the cultivation of the forms of strength that make places, times, and bodies livable again (and again). This essay examines how Tanzanians are laboring over, and reflecting on, the toxic and its relationship to remedy and memory through dawa lishe. In the process, it argues, they are redefining healing through a politics of habitability. https://culanth.org/articles/968-a-politics-of-habitability-plants-healing-and