00:03:36.540We needed the concept of the Anthropocene before we could think about anything other.
00:03:42.040But one of the impetuses for me and many other people who are sitting with this concept of the Anthropocene as we look around the world and wondering, is this the concept that is going to liberate our thought?
00:03:54.800Is this the concept that is going to transform our practices?
00:03:58.440And what I started to realize is that this concept describes the horror we're inside of.
00:04:03.260And this concept of the Anthropocene, a world that has been terraformed by humans, that is in the throes of destruction, a world in which consumer pleasures have trumped every element of support for a thriving more than human world.
00:04:22.480I wonder to myself, how could we move forward for an Anthropocene? And so I've seen so many books about, you know, art in the Anthropocene and designing for the Anthropocene and precisely this imaginary of a world in which humans really are the rulers and the destroyers.
00:04:42.840As we hail ourselves at the sort of the helm of this disastrous world that we've built for ourselves, we have to sort of pull back and say, wait a second, what can we lead with? What can we aspire to? What can we hope for out of these ruins?
00:04:59.940And so the concept of the Anthropocene emerged for me out of an assignment, in a sense. I was invited to join a panel at a conference thinking about force and power in the Anthropocene. And it just struck me that the forces and powers of non-human beings are precisely what are being eclipsed in the concept of the Anthropocene.
00:05:21.600as the anthropos or the human is elevated and recognized as the agent terraforming the planet
00:05:28.120we forget about all the other beings and the plants those magical beings that do this incredible
00:05:35.580practice of conjuring worlds from sunlight sort of eating sunlight to matter the compost to build
00:05:45.860the soil, to nourish the worlds around them. I'm thinking, oh, these are the forces and powers we
00:05:52.460need to reckon with. And so it's not a question about, oh, we need to center now. Now we need to
00:05:58.100center plants as the agents that will terraform the planet. No, the planthropos is the figure
00:06:06.000at the helm of the planthropocene. And in that you can hear the collectivity, collecting up of
00:06:11.620plants and people into a kind of collective, a hybrid collective of beings. And the aim with
00:06:19.220this concept is to center the plants and the people simultaneously. There's no way to extract
00:06:27.600human life from plant life or to separate human life from plant life. And once we begin to
00:06:32.980recognize our alliances with plants, then we are in a place to begin to recognize our power
00:06:40.660to ally with the plants in the work of growing livable worlds. And so the playful work of coming
00:06:47.460up with another concept, a concept that could deflect us from the tragic apocalyptic thinking
00:06:53.980of the Anthropocene, which is about our dire situation. If our goal is to get out of that,
00:07:01.000then we really do need a different guiding figure. We do need a different conceptual formation,
00:07:07.120one that's built on us framing our alliances with other beings rather than framing ourselves
00:07:13.620as alone, isolated, as if saving the planet is really up to us alone. And so the call for the
00:07:21.940Plantrobocene is to really to begin to recognize how we could conspire with the plants, how we
00:07:27.600could learn to breathe with them. Conspire has this wonderful multiple registers in which it
00:07:33.700oscillates that I've learned from my colleague, Timothy Choi, an anthropologist who studies
00:07:38.900breathing and air and air pollution, and his concept of conspiracy, a way of collecting up
00:07:46.400the people together to learn to breathe together. I want to expand that to include the plants,
00:07:53.700to expand that to include a kind of justice for people and their plants, for plants and their
00:08:00.980people as we all search for ways to breathe together more deeply, more powerfully, and in
00:08:09.520more transformative ways. Gosh, that just put me in such a good space. Thank you for explaining
00:08:19.560that. And I've had an interesting relationship with the Anthropocene, or at least that term,
00:08:24.880because when I first realized that it was being used more, there was an excitement thinking,
00:08:31.700okay, people are awakening, people are aware, people are thinking about the dramatic terraforming
00:08:40.200and shifting that humans are doing to this planet. But when I started looking into your work,
00:08:45.480I saw the limitations and in a way how it actually can be harmful to be thinking about
00:08:51.780the Anthropocene and the way that we are. And like you said, designing for the Anthropocene
00:08:55.460and how to really shift our way of relating to this time that we're in and how to move forward.
00:09:02.060And I'm really somebody who also is really exhausted of false solutions and techno fixes.
00:09:09.300And so I just love how you're bringing it back to the earth in this way. And yeah, I've also been
00:09:15.020thinking what succeeds the Anthropocene will be materialized from the thoughts and the actions
00:09:21.360and the relations of today. And so in describing the Planthropocene, you cite the necessity of
00:09:28.260seeding plant people conspiracies, which I love. So I'd love if you could also share
00:09:34.680what these conspiracies are, as well as what other practices, spells, and meditations should we be
00:09:43.160attuning ourselves to? How do these small shifts in orientation and understanding radically impact
00:09:49.700how we understand change. Beautiful. Yeah. So this plant people conspiracy,
00:09:57.440the seeding of the Plantropocene or imagining us rooting into the Plantropocene really does hinge
00:10:03.260on us getting on side with the plant, forming our solidarity projects with the plants. You know,
00:10:11.280I think about this in a way that our entire planet has already been gridded. It's been
00:10:17.180cordoned off. We have lands that have been enclosed through private property. We have lands that have
00:10:23.900been enclosed by nation states. We have pretty much every square inch of the planet has already
00:10:29.100been commanded and controlled by humans. And instead of sort of giving up and saying, oh,
00:10:34.040right, so humans are in control, this is an opportunity to say, ah, what is our responsibility?
00:10:39.900How are we accountable in this way? How does this actually put us into a place of responsibility?
00:10:45.420of what could our responsibilities to land, to the earth look like? And part of that would be
00:10:51.900our responsibility to make room for plants, to make space for them, to express their unfettered
00:11:00.240powers, to photosynthesize, or as I like to say, practice a form of cosmic mattering, where they
00:11:07.240call up the energy of the sun to matter, matter the worlds around them. And so if we shifted our
00:11:13.720understanding of human responsibility from being the center of command and control to
00:11:20.420ceding our control and giving some of that over to the plants. And our control is really about
00:11:27.840giving them space and time, expanding the spaces available to the plants. That's within our
00:11:33.900responsibility. These are things that we could very easily do. Make more space for plants to grow,
00:11:39.100create better conditions for them, cleanse the waters, clean the airs, allow them to exercise
00:11:46.540their responsibilities to the earth as they terraform it with their remarkable practices.
00:11:53.300And this is sort of a way of saying, ah, like to conspire with them, to allow them to breathe
00:11:59.140more deeply and allow us to breathe more deeply. In a sense, it's a social justice project that
00:12:04.460would create more profound connections between people.
00:12:11.460So it's not just about changing our relationship to plants.
00:12:14.060It's actually also about food security and food justice, where people can have this opportunity
00:12:20.300to get acquainted with the plants, to make room for them in their cities, to make room
00:12:27.340for them in their lawns, to make room for them in their daily lives and their practice
00:12:34.460learn what plants love, what their pleasures are. We should all learn to talk to the plants,
00:12:42.140learn to listen to them. And so when I think about these plant people's conspiracies and
00:12:46.120seeding them, it is like growing a garden, right? It is like building a world in which they can
00:12:53.760thrive. And so if we thought about our responsibilities on the planet as gardeners,
00:12:59.600right gardeners tending a living world that would shift our sense of relationship and allow us to be
00:13:06.780accountable to to this world so a plant people conspiracy could take any kind of shape whether
00:13:11.840it's creating a place for a tree where there wasn't one before creating spaces for trees to
00:13:18.940nourish the more than human beings around them so to be in relationship with their pollinators to
00:13:24.420facilitate their access to their animal allies, to their microbial allies, to their fungal allies.
00:13:31.480And so that's this kind of practice of tending would be a new kind of responsibility for us
00:13:36.380in this imagined world of the Anthropocene. But of course, the Anthropocene has already been
00:13:41.380taking place all over the world. And so I want us to think about this not as an aspirational epoch,
00:13:46.100something that can only happen after apocalypse, after the Anthropocene, but rather the
00:13:52.220plant-throbocene, these plant-people conspiracies have been what traditionally Indigenous people
00:13:58.560and all the people living locally on the land, this is what they've been doing all along.
00:14:04.040And so it's about both recognizing the deep time of plant-people conspiracies and being at the
00:14:12.280forefront of inventing new ways for us to conspire with the plants. So that's one way that we can
00:14:16.820think about that. And I think there's a second part of your question, which is about what are
00:14:21.020the practices that could facilitate our connection? What are the ways of doing, ways of living that
00:14:28.920would expand the human sensorium in a way that would allow us to meet the world of plants? And
00:14:36.420so this is something that I've been thinking about a lot over the many, many years as an artist, a
00:14:41.040dancer, a scientist, and now as an anthropologist, this fluidity of our embodiments, the fluidity
00:14:49.980of our relationships with other beings and the potential that we have to use our imagination to
00:14:56.260extend our sensorium, our modes of sensing, our sensibilities to meet the more than human realm.
00:15:04.540And with plants, we have this sense that they're so other than us. They don't have eyes. They don't
00:15:10.000have noses. They don't have fingers. They don't look like us, like animals do. And so there's
00:15:15.160the sense that they're this ultimate other to the human. But when we really attend to their
00:15:21.400practices, we can actually begin to recognize almost the animal-like qualities that are part
00:15:28.000of plants and the plant-like qualities that are part of humans. And so I've spent some time
00:15:32.760developing meditations that allow us to expand our sensorium to begin to feel what it might be like
00:15:40.500to be a plant and these conjectural pleasurable practices we could be playing with to expand our
00:15:48.760understanding of what the limitations of the human sensorium are we could learn to sense
00:15:54.320alongside plants who actually are much more sensitive than humans who can see in a broader
00:15:59.340range of colors than we can and who could sense vibrations and make sounds and actually sing in
00:16:05.540ways that are well beyond human sensing. So even as we deal with this remarkable difference,
00:16:11.260there are practices that could bring us closer. Meditations that allow us to learn how to root,
00:16:16.960to learn how to send shoots out of our own limbs, to allow us to feel what it might be like to
00:16:24.980photosynthesize with our own tissues or to form fruits within our bodies or even seeds and let
00:16:33.540them dispersed. And so there's the pleasures that we could have with our own imagination that would
00:16:37.300allow us to meet the plants as if they're our allies, as if they're kin, as if they're friends,
00:16:42.400as if they are our relations as Indigenous people engage them. And this means a lot of work for
00:16:48.340humans. This is a lot of work that we need to do. This is part of our responsibility if we plan to
00:16:53.660rework the world, to rearrange the planet in a way that will allow plants and people to thrive
00:16:58.940together. Gosh, as you were speaking this, I was looking at all of the plants and trees around me
00:17:06.740feeling their sensitivities, intelligence, their autonomy, just feeling into all of those pieces.
00:17:15.600And I'm really grateful that you speak like this because I think we've been so conditioned
00:17:21.020to think that plants are non-sentient. Yeah, that they don't feel that they don't have a life of
00:17:26.720their own. But in so many ways in this dominant culture, we've been taught to believe that
00:17:33.300plants live for us and they're made for us, but that is very untrue. And I feel like the plants
00:17:42.680are very grateful for everything you're saying, or at least that's what I'm picking up. They're
00:17:46.380like, yes, thank you. Thanks for thinking about us. You also often mention that if plants are
00:17:53.020sun worshipers, then we ought to be plant worshipers. And I would really like to explore
00:17:59.220worship as a practice with you a little bit further. How can the mentality of worship propel
00:18:05.380us to radically restage our relationships with the earth? So yeah, the question of reverence
00:18:11.420is so profound and one that is so challenging to bring up in academic circles, which is where I
00:18:18.140move through a lot of the time, except I'm also an artist and I'm also a Reiki master and a dancer
00:18:25.740and an energy worker. So I'm crossing thresholds between worlds and trying to push the conversation
00:18:33.100that's happening inside of academia a little bit to change our assumptions about reverence.
00:18:39.540And so this is a tricky conversation for some people, but in a space where we begin to recognize, and I wonder if this pandemic of ours is changing people's recognition of gratitude, simple practices of gratitude.
00:18:55.840And when I imagine a mode of reverence that centers the plants, it's one that would necessarily begin in gratitude.
00:19:05.460This thankfulness, this gratitude we have of just, wow, the capacity we have for breath.
00:19:14.340That, oh, the recognition that plants are breathing us into being.
00:19:19.020That their exhaling is the possibility of our inhale.
00:19:23.620Concepts like that begin to stir up, I think, in us a sense of the more than rational, the more than mechanistic, a world where magic can happen, a world where the numinous, that sense of the divine can also be present.
00:19:42.440And so the question for me is, we can think about there are many, many religions around the world who do center plants.
00:19:48.620There are many spiritual traditions that do center plants.
00:19:50.920And I think we have something to learn from them. We have something to learn from people who practice gratitude in relationship to the plants that they harvest. For people who practice the honorable harvest, many indigenous people who recognize that if you are going to take from plants, you first have to ask permission.
00:20:07.900that if you want to harvest from cedar or from the raspberry bush, you first begin in ceremony,
00:20:19.260you begin in a place, first of all, of thanking the plant and of asking if you can take and how
00:20:26.040much you can take without assuming that it's just there for the taking. And any move in this
00:20:33.740direction immediately calls up the question for people who are doubting of like, well, how can
00:20:38.580you know? How can you know if the plant gives consent or not? And for those people who've spent
00:20:45.160their lifetimes working with plants, they know. They know when a plant says yes or when a plant
00:20:51.320says no, when a tree gives permission for you to hug it or to harvest from it. And so these are
00:20:57.600very, very deeply subtle cues that deeply listening people can have access to. And so that there can
00:21:04.840begin to be that sense of reciprocity. It begins in gratitude and perhaps in that gesture of
00:21:11.340gratitude and thankfulness, and perhaps even gifting, gifting the plant something that you
00:21:17.160value as an offering in exchange for what it is you want to gather from that plant. These are
00:21:24.260of fairly simple practices that don't require any religious fervor or sentiment. They don't
00:21:31.700require a belief in a god. They don't even require an institution of sorts. But they are the kind of
00:21:38.980mundane ways that we could very quickly begin to recognize the beings around us, get to know them,
00:21:46.880ask them about who they are, and in that way center these plants and trees that are holding
00:21:53.740the sky up, that are cleansing our waters, that are providing all the nourishment, all the fiber,
00:22:00.480all of the fuel, all of the materials, all the adornments, the fragrances, the clothing that
00:22:07.980we're wearing, all the plants that make that, begin in that gratitude. And that would be
00:22:13.660such a profound shift, I think, for so many people in their daily life. But it would also mean like
00:22:20.600going over to that tree that's outside of your window and spending a moment with it and putting
00:22:26.240your hand on the tree in the subtlest of gestures. And it's in that moment of reaching towards the
00:22:34.120plants as if they are a being worthy of address. We've changed everything. We've changed the very
00:22:41.080structure of our social worlds because we're honoring a being that previously was considered
00:22:48.080to be in the undergrowth or in the background of our lives.
00:23:18.080Now I'd like to touch on the topic of anthropomorphism a little bit, as I'm sure this is an accusation
00:23:29.100that often gets hurled your way, and I wonder how the fear of engaging in anthropomorphism
00:23:35.660actually limits our ability to play with the power and fluidity of recognition. How do you
00:23:41.680balance the presence of animism as well as our historical tendency to exert supremacy and ecology
00:23:47.600when you think about our relationship with plants?
00:23:51.440Or perhaps, how does anthropomorphism hinder our ability to relinquish
00:25:01.260the colonial formation is maintained in part
00:25:05.460by denigrating people who practice the art of animism.
00:25:11.240who see the animistic in the world of inanimate objects or who extend human practices or human sensibilities to the more than human realm.
00:25:21.440And so once we start to recognize that as a pattern or a habit of a colonial figure, we have to sort of be like, wait a second.
00:25:29.580I've spent a lot of time interviewing scientists about anthropomorphism in their work with plants or in their work on molecular formations and molecules.
00:25:38.480and they police these anthropomorphisms
00:26:01.320it means you've actually broken the system.
00:26:05.020You've erred in the most serious and egregious of ways.
00:26:07.800And so I spent a lot of time listening to scientists police themselves, and they'd be able to express the most remarkable, most interesting insights of the world. And then they'd admonish themselves for having anthropomorphized or having animated something beyond it.
00:26:22.400And so I watched this dynamic and recognized that, oh, scientists are using anthropomorphism all the time.
00:26:28.600They're animating things all the time with their language, with their bodies, with their own curiosities and imagination.
00:26:36.700And the second thing that they do is police it and say, oh, no, no, I didn't mean it that way.
00:26:40.300And so I want to allow us to give ourselves more room.
00:26:43.020And so I think about anthropomorphism in a couple of different ways.
00:26:45.540One is to say anthropomorphism isn't what we thought it was.
00:26:48.760in fact there's more of a metamorphism happening in our relating with more than human realms
00:26:58.000it isn't just that we impute human faculties to non-human things it's that we are actually
00:27:06.220when we are in a deep relationship with another thing or being that is other than us there's a
00:27:12.120profound exchange and i call it a kind of metamorphism a morphing between the bodies
00:27:18.220So sometimes it's not the human animating the plant or anthropomorphizing the plant. It's actually the plant imposing itself on the human. And I like to think about this in a couple contexts. One is a lovely story I have about Charles Darwin, who was trying to figure out how orchids fling their pollen at such remarkable distances and with such force.
00:27:42.260And so he has this very elaborate description of an orchid as if it's a man standing at attention with his arms wrapped in a certain configuration.
00:27:50.800And you realize that actually, no, it's not that he's saying that the plant acts like a man shaped in this configuration.
00:27:58.140If you listen carefully to what he's saying, he's like, ah, if you move your body into this form, you too can mimic the form of the plant.
00:28:10.780And so I'm interested in the ways that through passionate inquiry, people find ways to change
00:28:17.940and alter their bodies and their sensoria to meet the plant world.
00:28:22.360And so he, in a sense, instead of dictating the structure of what a man would look like
00:28:26.880if it looked like this flower, we can see Darwin folding his body around the flower,
00:28:33.200emulating the flower with his own body, allowing the flower to alter his embodiment.
00:28:40.180So in this sense, he's moving with and being moved by the other being. And that's a real difference.
00:28:45.920That's a real difference. That's a moment where his willingness to be transformed by the other
00:28:52.200actually has a metamorphic quality. So this is an example of a moment where we would assume
00:28:57.980that anthropomorphism is happening, but in fact, it's a metamorphic practice. In fact,
00:29:02.420it could be said that he is phytomorphizing or perhaps vegetalizing his tissues. And so I like
00:29:08.720to think about ways that instead of the activity of us imputing human form to others, we could
00:29:14.000actually loosen up our human form and absorb or play with or try on the habits or comportments
00:29:21.640or postures of other beings. And that to me is a kind of metamorphic practice that allows for
00:29:28.300an interchange. And it's in that interchange between the bodies, this exchange between
00:29:32.820embodiments that we actually find some moment of shared understanding, of shared sensibility,
00:29:38.280of shared sensing. And that has real consequences for how we understand our role.
00:29:43.900The other thing that's happening with anthropomorphism is we're allowed to have
00:29:48.000sentience. We're allowed to have all of these amazing faculties. But because we have no window
00:29:53.800into all these other beings, we render them mechanical. So the scientist's response to
00:30:01.060avoiding anthropomorphism is to turn everything into a machine, to show it that it's just little
00:30:06.320parts randomly interacting with one another that forms these emergent structures that are in fact
00:30:11.960just mechanistic. We just have to understand what the mechanism is. Now I think of mechanism
00:30:18.040as some of the most violent forms of anthropomorphism we can have, because by turning
00:30:24.780the living world into a machine, we've actually set it up to work for us. By turning the world
00:30:32.840into a machine, we've created a context in which we can deploy plants and organisms,
00:30:40.860molecules, and other things in our service. We can run them like machines. And so some people
00:30:46.880would say, oh, mechanism is not anthropomorphism, but I'm starting to recognize rendering the world
00:30:51.960as machine is making it work for us, is making it into a machine that can do work for us. And that
00:30:58.120is a kind of anthropomorphism in the sense that it's about modeling the world on a form that would
00:31:03.320serve human ends. And so I think we can challenge anthropomorphism in really powerful ways by
00:31:09.280participating actively in the work of refusing to disenchant the living world. And so we could say,
00:31:18.080ah, Darwin wasn't an animist, but what he didn't do was he didn't disenchant the world, okay? Or
00:31:25.860we could look at all these scientists who fail to properly turn the world into bits of mechanistic
00:31:30.860objects. They have failed to disenchant the world. And then it's a real difference. Instead of
00:31:36.180accusing people of animating the world, we can open up space to stop disenchanting it. And that
00:31:42.700really changes our relationship. And it could really radically change our relationship to plants
00:31:48.180as we expand our sensibilities for their forms of sentience, their intelligences, their knowledge,
00:31:55.660their know-how, their ways of being. Gosh, I love what you just said. Yeah,
00:32:02.460really thinking about how some of us humans somehow think that humans have the ability to do
00:32:11.800all these things or have the sentience or the ability to connect yet nothing else does.
00:32:18.140It's like we're flipping things to create things to work only for us in the way that we want them
00:32:23.860to, but it's actually not supporting us in the long run. It's not actually even helping humans
00:32:29.360to think like this, to make things into machines, even though I think some humans think that by
00:32:34.900doing this, they're supporting humanity in some way. But this disconnection, this lack of reverence,
00:32:42.640this lack of like what you were talking about with the enchantment has so stripped our sense
00:32:49.280of fulfillment, of wonder, of connection to each other, of being able to live healthy lives,
00:32:55.140drinking clean water. It really has so many horrendous domino effects when we do not
00:33:01.660give more space to the living world and try to be the controlling species of it all.
00:33:10.580And of course, so many of us know this, but the way that you speak to it really opens up a whole
00:33:15.060other channel in my mind and i wanted to now bring up again in how to grow livable worlds
00:33:22.30010 not so easy steps for life in the planthropocene you write quote yes there are apocalypses already
00:33:28.120ongoing all around us the dissemination of the boreal forest to extract bitumen on stolen
00:33:34.000indigenous land in canada is one such apocalypse but giving into apocalyptic thinking is itself a
00:33:40.800kind of exit strategy, an easy out. Ruin porn, including all those two compelling images of0.79
00:33:47.220plants rupturing through abandoned buildings in Detroit and Chernobyl, thrives on this narrative
00:33:52.200of a world without us. The earth will be better off without people, so we are told. Beware of such
00:33:59.340apocalyptic thinking. Anthropocentric thought catches you up in thrall of apocalypse and sets
00:34:05.200us all to work, furatively dreaming the end of times, end quote. This is something that feels
00:34:11.780so incredibly precise and magnetic in context to what many of us are feeling right now. So
00:34:17.320I'd love to ask you about how you frame the relationship between the Anthropocene and
00:34:22.060apocalypse, or perhaps how our apocalyptic thinking is yet another trap set in motion
00:34:28.180by the machine of capitalism. Who does apocalyptic imagery work for?
00:34:33.960Well, your question and some of my thinking has come out of reading this great theorist,
00:34:39.360Eric Swingido, who really thinks that apocalyptic thinking serves capitalism. Apocalypse forever,
00:34:46.400according to him, is the motto of capitalism, because it can always grow a market around
00:34:53.120disaster. You could always grow markets around disaster. And I think that if we learned from
00:34:59.880things like the Excel and Valdez as a kind of boost in GDP disaster, and that technological
00:35:06.560fixes are kind of market opportunities, really, for capital to continue to extract oil, minerals,
00:35:16.040metals, and maintain the economy. And so I often think about sustainability rhetoric,
00:35:21.560Precisely as, in many places, the translation of sustainability means sustaining the economy, keeping the economy going in the face of everything else.
00:35:32.000And so one of the things we want to think about are like, oh, how do we get out of that?
00:35:37.940And I'm really concerned with this whole explosion of imaginings around exit strategies, whether people are figuring this pandemic as the thing that will finally get rid of humans and save the planet.
00:35:49.100Or like, people are expendable, the planet will survive us, it'll be fine as long as we're gone.
00:35:54.840This is exactly what Donna Haraway calls the tragic detournessence of this narrative arc,
00:36:00.340the wonderful quote that she brought in, where we are so enamored with ourselves and our might
00:36:06.080and our power of destruction, and yet we're on course to destroy ourselves.
00:36:11.620And anyone who kind of celebrates that and also celebrates, oh, it's so great,
00:36:15.880We're designing rockets to get us out of here. We're designing colonies that we can live on on Mars, this kind of exit strategy. This is that moment where I feel like we've abandoned our responsibilities. And in fact, we are accountable and responsible to this land here and now.
00:36:32.260And any desire to exit, any desire to escape is precisely an abandonment of our responsibilities.
00:36:40.240And it's not just that we're responsible for cleaning up those oil wells or maintaining these vast stores of uranium waste from our nuclear infrastructures.
00:36:52.380Yes, we need people around to take care of those things into perpetuity for the hundreds of thousands of years that we will need to.
00:36:58.420But we are also being called to be present and accountable. And so the plant propos, which sort of de-centers the human, but actually centers the human-plant hybrid as the figure that should ground our actions moving forward, it allows us to take action in an alliance, in a form of solidarity that would seed livable worlds.
00:37:21.740And so in fact, we can't leave. In fact, we should not dream about apocalypse. We need to thwart that as direly as possible so we can actually begin to aspire to something livable. And the possibility of regeneration, the possibility of altering the course that we set ourselves.
00:37:41.360Imagining that if we think about what will have been, Beth Pavidelli has this beautiful way of thinking about the future at Interior Ave, what will have been.
00:37:51.600Yes, what will have been will be destruction if we carry on this way, but it doesn't have to be that.
00:37:56.880And I think that really the power of aligning ourselves with the plants, the power of forming those solidarity projects with the plants, is that with the tiniest bit of soil and one seed, we actually can begin to do the work of transformation.
00:38:13.500We actually can, on the smallest scale, with the most minimal technology imaginable, activate processes to heal the planet.
00:38:22.100And that hope, I think, is what we need to live with.
00:38:26.320Hope can be quite dangerous. One person's hope can be the other person's nightmare. So we have to be very careful with hope. But I'm interested in an aspirational politics that says what we're doing right now isn't viable. What we're doing right now isn't going to nourish us into the future. What are the smallest things we can do? Not the biggest technological fixes, but the smallest gestures that we can begin to make that would actually fundamentally reconfigure our relationship to the future.
00:38:53.840so the opposite of apocalypse is a livable future not an unlivable one and I think there are some
00:39:01.920hints for us in this moment of COVID-19 where we are being bound up in our homes where we are
00:39:09.740no longer allowed to fling our bodies and objects around the world that we're being called to attend
00:39:15.800to the local to the place right here where we stand whether it's growing some flowers and a
00:39:22.860on our windowsill, or rescuing waste from our kitchens and growing celery and green onions
00:39:29.780from cuttings on our windowsill, or whether we're able to liberate our lawns and grow food
00:39:35.560in our cities. We are being called right now to build those relationships in a way that is
00:39:41.560so therapeutic. It's being action around one's garden at this very moment. Many, many people
00:39:47.680around the world are gardening because of COVID-19. They're returning to the land. They're
00:39:53.360returning to their responsibilities, to growing food and to being in relationship with the living
00:39:59.040world. And that is where the hope is. And it's in the smallest gesture. It's in the smallest
00:40:06.000moment of gratitude for the power of a plant to take root and transform the world around it.
00:40:12.480And these are the tiny ways that we could bypass or circumvent the powerful grip that capitalism has on our imagination, on our desires, on our consumption, and our qualities of life as well.
00:40:28.340Your response reminds me of something that is in your bio, and it's about the colonial violence of restoration ecology.
00:40:37.760And as you've been talking about tending to plants, I really want to hear how that sort of tending or restoration is not actually beneficial in your eyes for the earth.
00:40:54.220And maybe if you could just get into some more detail with us around how you see restoration ecology being violent towards the earth.
00:41:06.100Yeah. So this is a sort of focus of my work right now. I live five minutes from an ancient
00:41:13.120oak savanna, which is Toronto's, Tkaronto, which is an indigenous name for this region,
00:41:19.500is the site of this incredible rare ecology called the oak savanna ecologies. And we have black oaks
00:41:26.980here. And these ecologies are precisely, they are plant people conspiracies. There is no pure nature.
00:41:36.100in an oak savanna. An oak savanna is made over millennia, and it's made not just by the shrinking
00:41:43.760and expanding lakes that leave in their wake vast stretches of sand dunes on the land,
00:41:52.180not just the power of wind, not just the power of water and glacier activity, but the incredible
00:41:59.620ceremonial and reverent work of tending lands that indigenous people in this region have been
00:42:07.800doing for millennia. And they've tended the land with fire. Oak savannas are fire ecologies,
00:42:13.680and they are hungry for fire. And no one relies on random lightning strikes to wait to bring
00:42:23.380fire to these lands. These were lands that have been tended over millennia by people who bring
00:42:28.320fire to the land to ensure that these oak savannas continue to thrive. Without fire,
00:42:34.380they would fill in, they would be encroached with other plants, and they would thicken into
00:42:39.700forests that would leave no room for the animals that love to wander through the savanna and graze
00:42:46.920on the grasses. It would leave fewer nut trees, fewer acorns, fewer nourishing medicines.
00:42:52.820So the oak savannas of this region were incredibly powerful places. They're the site of treaty making for the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe peoples here in Canada.
00:43:05.560And it was the oak savannas, which were the hunting grounds, the places where you would gather your acorns, the places you would gather your medicines, you would grow your corn in the open spaces, in the canopy, places for making villages and creating kind of life and trade and community.
00:43:23.860These are now lands that in the late 1980s, no one recognized these lands as oak savannas.
00:43:29.180the city of Toronto, it was only in the late 1980s that a report came out that recognized that the
00:43:35.020lands in one of our major parks here in Toronto, it was actually oak savanna land. And in fact,
00:43:41.020there are remnant oak savannas all the way through Toronto. There are real big pockets of these
00:43:44.680beautiful oak savannas. And so the restoration ecologists came in, they looked at all the
00:43:49.240different species, and they realized that they needed to do these controlled burns and that they
00:43:54.140had to restore the land. And so what they did was they came in with their pesticides. They came in
00:44:00.820with Roundup and they decided who should live and who should die in the Oaks of Anna. They're there0.99
00:44:07.660to rip out the garlic mustard. They're there to wick the dog strangling vine with glyphosate to
00:44:15.720remove it. They're there to cut down the European buckthorn, even though it's nourishing all the
00:44:21.320birds right now, cut down the European buckthorn and purify these oak savannas to make them look
00:44:27.040like they were supposed to historically. Unfortunately, restoration ecologists have
00:44:32.740not understood the indigenous history of the use of fire for oak savannas. There are also oak
00:44:37.700savannas in California that were maintained by fire by indigenous people. And so the entire story0.99
00:44:43.700that restoration ecologists write up about oak savannas is that they are replacing natural
00:44:48.640wildfires. And that the fires that they bring to the land are just mimicking these natural
00:44:54.840wildfires. It has nothing to do with any human activity. And so there's a complete erasure of
00:45:00.760indigenous livelihood, of indigenous history, of indigenous stewardship, and the intimate
00:45:06.820relationship of the relationship between people, fire, and these oak savannas. And so restoration
00:45:14.120restoration ecologists have taken over the stewardship of the Oak Savannah for the last
00:45:17.86020 years. And I'm involved right now. First of all, my research was documenting the work
00:45:22.840of restoration ecologists. And now my work has been transformed entirely towards supporting
00:45:29.000Indigenous stewards to take leadership in Oak Savannah restoration. And for them,
00:45:34.200they see Indigenous stewardship as a form of harm reduction. So removing pesticides,
00:45:38.600getting pesticides and their entire economies, destructive economies out of the oak savannas.
00:45:45.660And they want to bring fire through ceremony. And bringing fire through ceremony is a very
00:45:50.760different thing. Fire is not just combustion. Fire is not just about the fuel levels in the
00:45:56.000ground. It's not just about maintaining ecosystem services. It's actually about being in right
00:46:01.220relation with the land, with the spirit, and with all of the other beings. And so transforming,
00:46:10.540we're right now in the midst of building consultations with the city of Toronto,
00:46:15.620the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle in Toronto, which is made up of Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe,
00:46:26.160And the work now is really about educating restoration ecologists here in Indigenous stewardship to center Indigenous stewardship in land work, not just to heal the land, but also to help to support the healing of Indigenous community and to support the climate action in the city that would actually have effects more powerfully for everyone.
00:46:49.560And so some of the violences of colonial restoration ecology really are around indigenous erasure. It's this sort of like terra nullius. There was nothing here, nothing to look at, nothing to think about before the colonizers came. And this work that we're doing with around indigenous stewardship is about totally changing that story.
00:47:08.520And by empowering Indigenous people to take up this work, it recenters them on the land, it gives them the opportunity to heal from intergenerational traumas of colonialism. And this is what the land needs, this is what the land wants. And the trees do remember their people, they know who's bringing pesticides and who's not bringing pesticides to the land.
00:47:30.080And there are trees here on the land that come from pre-colonial times where there were Indigenous people burning the land. And so the shift for restoration ecology is big. And it can't be about restoring the land to some idea of some de-peopled nature. It's about bringing Indigenous people back to land and integrating people on the land.
00:47:54.460It's about recognizing that these lands are not sites of pure nature where we have to keep people out, but actually activating spaces for healing of people and plants together, the land and the plants and the people together in ways that could actually alter the course for the future.
00:48:13.240And so studies have been done recently that biodiversity is highest on indigenous lands, that indigenous people are at the forefront of climate action, that they are at the forefront of land stewardship, and that these are the people we need to follow if we want to build the plant people conspiracies that will grow the livable world.
00:48:30.160Hmm. Yes. Thank you for speaking to that. I studied restoration ecology and I really set out to be engaged with restoration ecology physically. And the more that I learned, I started to feel like something wasn't right here.
00:48:49.700And I had to unlearn a lot of the methods and tools that I was being taught about reforestation and propagation and just learning about the entire restoration industrial complex in and of itself has been a real eye opener.
00:49:08.420And I love how you speak about ungriddable protocols and the ways that you're understanding restoration ecology and the spiritual element of it, the relational element of it, I think has been really lost in academia and a lot of scientific protocols.
00:49:30.400And I do think that it is extremely detrimental more than we really realize right now.
00:49:36.180And it's hard when we try to do good things with good intentions, but we're doing it from
00:49:41.440a reductionist lens or a human supremacist lens or an urgent lens even, and how that
00:51:58.480I also wanted to mention that you cite the importance of detuning settler common sense.0.97
00:52:05.440And I'm also thinking about the ways in which opening ourselves to foreign embodiments invites breakdown and makes unsense of things, which feels important to name, right?0.98
00:52:17.700Like the incredible power of breakdown, fracture, and confusion.1.00
00:52:21.840and I'm wondering how do you define not knowing as an ethic and how does lending ourselves to
00:52:29.920the unknown provide a fruitful opportunity for imagining and creating? That's a great question
00:52:37.480and I mean I've spent so much of my academic life studying knowledge epistemology and knowledge
00:52:43.800formations and what we know and how we know and all the things that science can know and I realize
00:52:49.940that there's also this assumption that everything should be made knowable, that we should be able to
00:52:59.020unmask the truth behind everything. And that, you know, with just a little more time and better
00:53:05.420equipment and better techniques, we can know, we can really know. And I think the invitation,
00:53:11.760what I'm learning from the work of detuning my settler common sense and the common sense being0.74
00:53:17.580like the things that fit in my world, all the things that fit, that make sense, that0.56
00:53:24.240hold together, that hang together, that so much of our conditioning has been in a colonial
00:53:31.220mindset that has forced us to sort of recognize the inherent value of one thing over another
00:53:36.840or the value of knowledge or the value of research, the value of inquiry, the value
00:53:43.000of curiosity and getting to the bottom of things and extracting something from something or really
00:53:48.400digging into something. All of these things have a kind of extractive force to them as if it's our
00:53:55.040right, as if it's something that humans need is access to knowledge and not knowing. And so that
00:54:01.420prevents us, all this knowledge we have actually is limiting our imagination. It's limiting what
00:54:07.300we could possibly sense and feel about the world. And so there's so much knowledge we have about
00:54:13.940the non-human world. And a lot of it's rooted in science. And in that way, a lot of it is also
00:54:19.700rooted in colonial formations and understanding. And so I worry about the way that restoration
00:54:26.240ecologists talk about ecosystem services as if they could calculate the benefit of a tree as
00:54:32.680its contribution to our capitalist economy. There's a kind of knowing in that that I want
00:54:37.020to unlearn radically. I want to not know that. I want to think about the world in really different
00:54:43.260ways. So stepping into not knowing, I think if we want to get to know plants well, if we want to
00:54:47.380get a feel for what they care about, for what they enjoy about life, for what they want to give us,
00:54:54.720and the attitudes and postures and attentions that we think are necessary for us to get to
00:55:01.940the bottom of things or to answer things and so an ethic of not knowing is suspending sometimes
00:55:07.640even our curiosity right and allowing ourselves to be in the presence of another being without
00:55:15.020needing to know its scientific name without needing to know the molecules that it's making
00:55:21.800in its tissues and actually just being present with another being and opening ourselves up
00:55:27.340to the learning and the teaching that can come from that. And stepping into not knowing means
00:55:32.380kind of taking off the veils, these blinders that we've put on that tell us what we think matters.
00:55:40.520Our attentions have so been shaped by what we're told matters in the world. I think other things
00:55:45.420might also matter. And the only way we're going to get to those things, the phenomena that are
00:55:50.320calling our attention, but we can't see or hear or attend to because we're so busy trying to
00:55:56.300dissect or extract or parse all these things so an ethic of not knowing it precisely what
00:56:03.800needs to open up our hearts and open up our minds and our sensorium to kind of other sensibilities
00:56:11.280other ways of doing life and that's where the learning will begin and so a kind of ungriddable
00:56:17.520ecology is a practice of ecology that forgets about ecosystem services it forgets about cost
00:56:24.380benefit analyses. It forgets about the mechanisms in plants that allow it to gather light as energy.
00:56:33.140We just have to forget about those things in order to actually build relationships
00:56:36.880with the plants that could give us a chance at forming these solidarities with them.
00:56:44.800Yes. So beautiful, Natasha. I just want to go hug a tree right now, honestly, which I do.
00:56:56.740Yeah, I feel so much kinship from your words and so much opportunity and possibility and
00:57:06.040creativity and just so much more opportunity for love, for relating, for joy, for purpose.
00:57:17.200and yeah it's really yeah it's this conversation has really put me in such a good mood and I know
00:57:28.360it's hard right now because we're going through a lot of course COVID-19 has swept us all away
00:57:37.020in one sense or the other and there's a lot of loneliness I'm sure that's happening for many
00:57:43.820people and when i think about relating to the plants that loneliness fades and there's this
00:57:51.740type of future vision of being able to expand our way of connecting with other beings and and yeah
00:58:00.200also a kind of hope for the future not just with covid but also with the effects of the extinction
00:58:08.440crisis and climate change. We know that we are up against a lot in the upcoming decades and how
00:58:16.320we'll get through this is a question I think on so many people's hearts, but it's not just about us
00:58:20.840and it's not just about relying on humans or human ingenuity. There's so much more to listen to and
00:58:28.740that to me brings a lot of relief to know that it's not all on our shoulders to quote figure it
00:58:33.920out or find the solutions or the fixes. But instead, how do we quiet and listen? Because
00:58:40.060there are beings that are, I think, far wiser than we are, who really do know how to deal with
00:58:48.680the issues at hand. And I don't think we'll ever figure it out. And I love how you speak to the
00:58:54.600humility of not knowing. And that ethic is so powerful in a world where we are being just
00:59:05.800hit over the head with this idea that we should know everything and we should figure everything
00:59:11.320out and somehow somebody somewhere should have all the answers. And the pressure that it then
00:59:17.160puts on those certain people, the ego, it's really just a spiral of BS. It doesn't make sense. So
00:59:24.980I'm really appreciative of your take on things. And as much as I don't want to close this
00:59:33.200conversation, I know we have been speaking for a while. And as we start to wrap up our conversation
00:59:41.240For the moment, I'd like to ask you about the work of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle in Toronto a little bit more. I know you've spoken to how it's relating to the high parks, oak savannas. But if there's anything else that you would like to speak about this circle with us, if there is any lessons or other stories that come to mind, I would really love to hear them.
01:00:08.820So one of the things that's so important around the plantropocene is not just allying with the plants, but allying with the people who know the plants in deep ways.
01:00:20.260The people who have the knowledge, who have the protocols, who have the stories and the ancient practices that can support our moving forward.
01:00:31.280And so it became really clear to me as soon as I took on this project of looking at colonial formations of restoration ecology that actually I couldn't go very far into this project until I found ways to become an accomplice to Indigenous community here in Toronto.
01:00:47.880The questions I was asking, I couldn't even ask on my own. They're not my questions to ask, and they aren't really my stories to tell. What I needed to be doing as a researcher was to find ways to support Indigenous people in their research and engagement and curiosity and practices in order to facilitate a transformation of who gets to do the restoration work.
01:01:14.220And so I think the Planned Parenthood scene really does hinge on us, on people all over the world, elevating Indigenous voices, centering the people with the knowledge and creating opportunities for them to practice and to develop and elaborate their protocols, their ancient protocols that they've inherited, but then also as they create new ones.
01:01:39.160And so building relationships with Indigenous community in Toronto around that stewardship
01:01:43.940has been the most rewarding and most powerful work I've ever done.
01:01:47.900And it also feels like the only thing that I need to be doing right now, which is raising
01:01:53.880money for the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle to do their work.
01:01:57.760So resourcing and organizing and supporting and facilitating any processes they need right
01:02:06.240Especially with COVID-19, we have Indigenous communities who are disproportionately affected here in Canada.
01:02:12.780I know also in the U.S. and Canada, Black communities are also disproportionately affected.
01:02:18.340And so there's a real moment of an exposure of the inequalities.
01:02:23.060And the source of healing for Indigenous people is access to land.
01:02:26.940And for us to begin to rethink who runs a city and who is responsible for land in a city, especially given that so many Indigenous people in Canada at least live in cities because this is where the jobs are, these are where the resources are, they no longer have access to a land base.
01:02:46.140And so creating opportunities for land-based pedagogies, for land-based healing and ceremony here in the city feels like that's where the work is.
01:02:54.700And these are the people who have formed solidaries with the plants. These are the people who know how to listen, who know how to talk to them, who know how to do the honorable harvest, who know how to sing to the seedlings as they're growing, as they plant their gardens.
01:03:10.360And so becoming an accomplice, which is, you know, a little different than an ally, becoming an accomplice, being able to make oneself available to serve community and whatever their needs are, feels like that's actually work for the Plantapocene.
01:03:23.820supporting the people who know how, who have the plant know-how, and who have deep knowledge,
01:03:30.080feels like where we could put our energy. And what we're hoping to do with the Indigenous
01:03:34.660Land Stewardship Circle is create a toolkit and a model for Indigenous people in cities across
01:03:40.540North America, wherever, really to begin to organize, begin to recognize the municipal
01:03:46.920structures and to see where they can create opportunities for restoration and taking
01:03:53.900leadership in restoration. And I love the idea that the word restoration, which is to restore
01:03:58.600to something, is actually about restoring to Indigenous people, restoring to the original
01:04:04.640landholders, restoring to the treaty holders, the people who have the inherent entreaty
01:04:10.900responsibilities to tend these lands. If they're not tending the lands, they're not fulfilling
01:04:15.020the responsibilities and whatever obstacles colonial governments have put in their way
01:04:18.600have to be removed so that becomes possible. And so that feels like work for the Planthropocene
01:04:25.360is part of the work that settlers like myself are responsible for. If I want to research
01:04:31.260restoration ecology, I need to be able to spend a lot of my energy supporting Indigenous researchers
01:04:37.440to do that work. Yes. I think rematriation and land back is such an important part of the
01:04:46.860philanthropic scene. And yeah, it reminds me of the conversation I've had with Kurt Russo
01:04:52.100about the Sailor Sea and the orcas and that to rematriate the stolen orcas back to their natal
01:05:00.500waters will create a type of healing that is beyond our understanding. And I feel the same
01:05:06.240way about the rematuration of land and respecting the original stewards of this land who do have
01:05:13.720the plant knowledge that settlers just can't have. Studying restoration ecology even for 100 years
01:05:19.960is a drop in the bucket. What is that really? 100 years, but it's not even 100 years for most
01:05:25.280people. Going to school for seven years, even two years, what does that really tell us? We're
01:05:30.840crawling babies with not a lot of actual time spent with these plants and this land. And so
01:05:39.720I'm really with you there. And Natasha, this has been such a beautiful conversation. And
01:05:45.300I'm sure for the folks who are listening like me, you're probably at this point smiling and
01:05:51.200feeling like a very deep warmth. I know I feel that, like a warmth in my heart because there's
01:05:57.140like I had mentioned earlier, a type of loneliness that has faded, knowing that there are so many
01:06:02.900other beings out there who can hold so much, who hold us, protect us, give us life. If there are
01:06:11.240answers to have, they have them. And we don't have to try to build up our human ego to think that we
01:06:17.760should try to have them. And to me, there is so much relief and joy and connection in that. So
01:06:24.920thank you again for all your work and for speaking to us today.
01:06:30.180Thank you so much. I'm also smiling and I feel that good warmth for this conversation. So I'm
01:06:34.760really grateful. Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast.
01:06:48.600i'm audio producer andrew stores the music you heard today was from eliza edens and sunshine
01:06:55.300shadow i'd like to thank our host and founder ayana young as well as the rest of our podcast
01:07:01.540production team francesca glassbell carter lou mcelroy erica ekram and melanie younger