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This book charts the multidimensional course of what has come to be known as the "Vegetal Turn" in environmental humanities - a wave of theoretical and practical interest in the complexities and peculiarities of plant life and plant-human relations.
The vegetal turn consists of increasingly sophisticated, inter- and trans-disciplinary, inter- and trans-cultural explorations of the multiple systems and networks of communication, intelligence, technical-operational capabilities, and relations articulated by and via plants - as well as the ethical, economic, cultural, and political dimensions of plant-human interactions and practices. The volume includes contributions from philosophy and the humanities more generally that explore and reflect on the history, prospects, and applications of four main themes that the Vegetal Turn has brought to general attention: the mind of plants, and what their peculiar mentality can tell us about mind more generally; plant personhood and/or moral standing, and the justifications and implications of attributions thereof; plant relationships with humans, plant-based human relationships, and the ethics of human practices with or regarding plants - from agriculture to the arts, from forest management to urban design ; as well as the rights and/or political representation of plant life and the other life-forms that depend on it, human as well as non-human, present and future.
List of contents
Plant Vision and Visioning Plants: Ethics, Relations, Personhood, and Advocacy.- The voice of laleh-va: a plant instrument in ab-bandan forming the mutual cultural heritage of wetlands and humans.- Care and Crops: A case-study in ethics of care and contemporary tomato plant growing practices.- Managing Plant and Human Temporalities in Wartime Colonial Forestry.- Plant Heroes: Voices of Dissent Against the West's Traditional Depreciation of Plants.- Plant Weaving and Human Learning.- Plant Time and Seed Time: The Curious Engines of Enlightened Knowledge.- Plants: the Transindividuals.- Seeing Through the Eyes of Plants.- Decolonizing Plants: Herbaria, Archives, Phyto-Narratives.- Evergreen Gardening Communities.- The Right Relation with Tobacco: De-commercialization and Reverence.- Plant Minds and Plant Biologies.- For a History of Vegetal Thinking.- Ethical Principles and Plants Legal Protection.- Plants as Representational Systems.- Gathering with the Plantcestors: Ancestral Healing, Kinship, and the Gift of Psychotropic Plant Medicine.- Operationalizing a New Way of Being With Plants: What Could This Look Like?.- Different Kinds of Minds: from Bacteria to Plants and Animals.- A Dying World Tree: Ash Trees Legacies of Entangled Stories and Telling Plant Ecologies.- The Challenge of Plant Rights and Human Liberties.- Arboreality and the Ethics of Standing in Place.- Methods for Applied Plant Ethics.- Giving Plants Their Due Respect.- Sap to Sapiens Habitat: From Being to Scribing.- Floriographies. Enactments Between Time-Spaces and Multiple Ontologies.- Multispecies Visuality: Representations of Plant-Technology Encounters as Challenges to Humanist Epistemology and Ethics.- Are Plants Like Patients in Persistent Vegetative States?.- Alien Plants between Practices and Representations: Towards a Transdisciplinary Approach.- Plants, Value, and New Paradigms of Global Health.- Relationality and Metaphor. Another Perspective on the Doctrine of Signatures.- Ruderal Futurism.- Phyto-Care Protocols: An Ethics for Living (With) Plants in the Arts.
About the author
Marcello Di Paola is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities at the University of Palermo. He works on the philosophy of plants, the philosophy of gardens, outer space philosophy, the philosophy of meaning in life, climate change philosophy, the Anthropocene, and the thought of Baruch Spinoza. He is the author of Ethics and Politics of the Built Environment. Gardens of the Anthropocene (Springer, 2017), and co-editor of Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications (Routledge, 2018). The springer handbook of the philosophy of climate change (2023) and the philosophy of outer space: explorations, controversies, speculations (Routledge 2024).
Summary
This book charts the multidimensional course of what has come to be known as the “Vegetal Turn” in environmental humanities - a wave of theoretical and practical interest in the complexities and peculiarities of plant life and plant-human relations.
The vegetal turn consists of increasingly sophisticated, inter- and trans-disciplinary, inter- and trans-cultural explorations of the multiple systems and networks of communication, intelligence, technical-operational capabilities, and relations articulated by and via plants - as well as the ethical, economic, cultural, and political dimensions of plant-human interactions and practices. The volume includes contributions from philosophy and the humanities more generally that explore and reflect on the history, prospects, and applications of four main themes that the Vegetal Turn has brought to general attention: the mind of plants, and what their peculiar mentality can tell us about mind more generally; plant personhood and/or moral standing, and the justifications and implications of attributions thereof; plant relationships with humans, plant-based human relationships, and the ethics of human practices with or regarding plants - from agriculture to the arts, from forest management to urban design ; as well as the rights and/or political representation of plant life and the other life-forms that depend on it, human as well as non-human, present and future.
