coe012_myers.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:25] Welcome back, podcast, listeners to the Cultures of Energy podcast, and we are once again actually not recording in the basement of Fonda and Library.

Speaker2: [00:00:37] We're in a different kind of bunker today,

Speaker1: [00:00:39] A different kind of bunker, and we've been bunkered up because the university has been closed for two days and the library along with it, so we haven't been able to enter our sacred studio. And instead, we've been reduced to recording in a closet, literally

Speaker2: [00:00:55] In a

Speaker1: [00:00:56] Closet. See all those years of being a queer studies scholar and all this writing about people coming out of the closet and I am stuck in one God. It's cramped in here. It is no wonder people want to get out.

Speaker2: [00:01:10] I hear you, but it's dangerous out there. According to national and international news media, we are being besieged by snakes and chemicals and alligators that are flooding all around Houston right now, which is not to make light of truly tragic situations that have taken place, especially in the northern and western suburbs of Houston, where we have received. And this is amazing for a city that you know, fairly routinely experiences hurricanes. Monday morning was the largest single daily rainfall in Houston's history.

Speaker1: [00:01:48] It's two feet, wasn't it?

Speaker2: [00:01:49] Well, in some areas it got up to 20 inches.

Speaker1: [00:01:51] Not right air, but almost almost two feet. Yeah, it was an incredible amount of water and a lot of thunder and lightning to go along with it. And of course, the Gators are up and about and ambling around town. Or so they say, and I think it's good that we're hiding out here in the closet instead of in the garage with the Gators.

Speaker2: [00:02:09] That's right. And this is also a snake proof closet that's important to

Speaker1: [00:02:12] That's important, too, unless they can slither upstairs, which I don't know, they're pretty capable. We saw a lot of videos of them swimming, so I I wouldn't put it past them, especially like chemically enhanced snakes, which is apparently what's out there.

Speaker2: [00:02:26] We've got Snake Nardo bearing down on us as we speak, and you know, literally anything is possible in these apocalyptic end of times.

Speaker1: [00:02:34] Yes. Well, we have a wonderful conversation, though today to share with our listeners that it's not apocalyptic in tone and it's quite uplifting and future forward and a very spirited, lovely conversation about the flora and what our guest Natasha Meyers calls the plant therapy scene.

Speaker2: [00:02:57] It's all plants this week plants, plants,

Speaker1: [00:03:00] Plants, it's all plants all the way down. And Natasha Mayers came to Rice University under the auspices of Mutant Anthropologists Shout Out, which is a student group that our anthropology graduate students have organized and they do cool stuff and workshops. And so Natasha came out for that. But then we got to chat with her too, about plants. They did an underground tour of rice through the tunnels and the infrastructure, and I don't talk about snakes and spiders, but I guess it was a pretty interesting event and she's a very interesting scholar. She's in the Department of Anthropology at York University. She's the convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, and she's also the director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory. Great, fantastic. And her most recent book is called Rendering Life, Molecular Rendering Life, Molecular Colon Models, Modelers and Excitable Matter, and that came out from Duke University Press in Twenty Fifteen.

Speaker2: [00:04:02] Well, I mean, it was a great conversation. She is absolutely lovely, has a beautiful radio voice. Right, right, right. Right. Quite beautiful. And yeah, it's just it was just great to have a conversation with somebody who truly loves the plant world and appreciates it and reminds us of how much we owe to photosynthesizing beings, which is pretty much everything, as it turns out.

Speaker1: [00:04:27] Essentially, yes, we have a lot of dependence on in the best way on plant matter. And I think for me, one of the lovely outcomes of this conversation is that after doing this podcast with Natasha Meyers, the next night or maybe the night after that, I had a dream that I could kind of communicate with the plants. Oh, it was very interesting. So it's like in the dream I could put out my fingers and plants would turn their leaves and their stems toward me as though they were tuned in. It was like I was a plant whisperer, and I credit her with that or like or the mother of plants. If we want to do kind of a Game of Thrones,

Speaker2: [00:05:02] Which we've been, we've been mining frequently. But also we should also note, we've both been reading a little bit into Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, in which plant human relationships are also very complicated. And I think that book which those books which have been messing with my mind in particular recently, definitely somehow seemed to connect to this conversation.

Speaker1: [00:05:24] Well, maybe that's the meta factor at work here. In any case, without further ado, let us turn to our conversation about plants and all things photosynthetic and chlorophyll filled and green and wonderful with Natasha Meyers.

Speaker2: [00:05:42] And let's not forget the roots. Go Natasha. Natasha Myers, welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast. We're so happy to have you here with us. Deep underneath the Earth, where there are not many plants actually designed for this is this is a remarkably plant free studio which I'm not proud of, but I just felt like everyone should know and we should try to get some plants in here.

Speaker3: [00:06:10] We're surrounded by roots.

Speaker2: [00:06:11] Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker3: [00:06:13] So surrounded by most of the tree is underground and you guys have incredible oak here, which are doing some pretty deep digging. So, OK,

Speaker2: [00:06:21] Well, you've just made me feel a lot better. I'm going to pass the mic over to Simone, who's going to get us started today.

Speaker1: [00:06:26] There is actually a decorative plant outside the door, but I don't know how it survives because there is no natural light in here at all. And that's actually a nice lead into our first question that we have for you about the recent project. The work that you're doing now on plants and in a Toronto park and that space of wilderness, there's been a lot of sort of coverage in the media recently about something that's being called nature deficit disorder as a kind of pathologizing of human conditions where humans aren't interacting enough in terms of the duration of time or the quality of time that they spend and natural, quote unquote natural spaces. And so they're calling this actually a kind of deficiency of vitamin N as in capital, in nature. And of course, I'm sure you've heard about these school programs now. They have some of them in the United States and quite a few of them in Europe, where the kids spend the entire day outside. And if it's cold, they just bundle them up and they go, do all of their learning outdoors. And they've actually proven that the mind is stimulated more powerfully and that children and others are more open to learning and innovation and creative thought when they're in these natural spaces. So I think you're really you're really onto something here in terms of how human beings interact with these kinds of environments. And so I wonder if you could tell our listeners a little bit about this super cool plant project.

Speaker3: [00:07:59] Hmm. So it's a kind of new foray for me in some senses. So it's a very new project as a project, but it's a space that I've been wandering in since I was a child. So this is the high park oak savanna in Toronto, which is a 400 acre urban pleasure park in the middle of the city. But it is also simultaneously a remnant of a really rare ecosystem, which is a which is a black oak savanna, which is we only have something like one percent of these ecosystems left in Ontario, and they're really, really special places. And so for me, as someone who grew up wandering these woods who I was sort of made by this space in really interesting way, the term pneumophila list was introduced to me recently.

Speaker1: [00:08:45] Wow, that's a real word.

Speaker3: [00:08:46] The wanderer of the woods, a hunter, a hunter of the woods. And I was like, Oh, this is this is really what I'm up to. And so I go to this place for a because it's an incredibly healing space. It's incredibly healing to be moving through a woodland where the the path is undulating, rich and thick with roots, where you're constantly shifting your weight and transforming your body and your comportment to meet that space. There's something really powerful and special about being that space in it. It's not an inaccessible space. I've seen there's this incredibly elderly lady who walks there with her walker on these really thickly twisted Rudy paths. And so there's something really remarkable, and people do seek a kind of healing in this space. One of the things that many people don't realize is what makes this park so special is how ancient it is. And so it's it's, you know, sort of this pretty space by lots of folks. But it turns out it's a it's an ecology 10000 years in the making and its presence in the city is sort of this sort of freak situation where the land happened to be settled in a particular way. It happened to be appropriated in a particular way from the First Nations communities who'd cared for it for millennia.

Speaker3: [00:10:05] And so it's a land that cannot thrive without its people. It cannot thrive without a kind of land care practice that includes controlled burns and fire. So an ongoing kind of practice of bringing kind of. This incredible force of sort of undoing into a space that is otherwise thriving, and so this dance between sort of life and death isn't is kind of a necessary part of this space. And so the place is only there today because of the people who cared for it for millennia. But then it was transferred to when that piece of land was sold for a meager sum and taken up by kind of settler populations. Sheep were put out on pasture on these beautiful wide open, these open canopied woodland with wide spaced oak trees, prairie grasses and woodland wildflowers. And so there's this totally incredible mix. The sheep loved it, ate everything, kept the woodland open in the same way that a savannah needs to be open and over time. Then the lawnmowers moved in and also kept it open. So it's it's precarity in this space is remarkable. But one thing that's happened is that now we have 250 year old oak trees and nothing in between.

Speaker3: [00:11:20] So the youngest trees now are the next generation are 15 years old. And so it's this place that's in the process of dying and in the process of unbecoming. And it cannot remain an oak savanna and even in spite of all these best efforts, but it is continues to be a place where people are learning how to live in and with a nature that is not separate from humans. So it's a place for practicing a kind of collaboration with plants. And so I'm really interested in the ways that all the people who move through this park on a daily basis, hundreds of you know, over the course of the year, hundreds of thousands of people are moving through this park. It's lived in. It's richly engaged. There's dog walkers, there's runners, there's, you know, cyclists, there's nature center, there's a zoo, there's all these incredible like features. But people are coming to this place for something special and they're not sure what many of the people are starting to learn. Oh my gosh, this is a ten thousand year old ecosystem, and they're starting to grapple with what it is, what this place is made of and in that process, coming to terms with a different kind of nature.

Speaker1: [00:12:26] Mm hmm. I know that you've been doing or are preparing to do these multi-sensory walks, which sound amazing, and it sounds like a way, you know, like this woman with her walker, but also just being there for the smells and the tactile sensation and the different qualities of light that happen in these spaces. And I think that's a really nice way of of thinking about it. One of the ways in which you've described this space and and others is uncredible ecology, which is a fantastic term for thinking about the kind of wildness and, you know, the roots kind of popping in and out of our our consciousness and awareness. We were talking a little bit earlier about kind of the the boundaries of of of the park space, right? And you know that there's sort of concrete that surrounds it and that day limits, you know what, where nature is and where quote-unquote civilization or human occupation begins. And we were also then taking that a little bit further and thinking about the boundaries of nature and natural spaces, right? Or the boundaries of the uncredible ecologies that you're studying. And one of the things that came up in that conversation was this question about chemicals as boundary marker. So not just in kind of lateral spatial terms that we can think of a piece of of of grasslands or savanna as bounded by fences. But we can also see them as bounded by different forms of pesticides that come in and do their work to either keep plants in a certain place or keep them at a certain height or keep out certain, you know, bad species, right? These invasive species that are, you know, terrorizing the the native species so that use of chemicals.

Speaker1: [00:14:12] And there's an interesting piece, actually, that's that's people may be interested in that. It came out pretty recently in the journal Cultural Anthropology that talks about the chemical sublime. And so it's a it's a fascinating kind of discussion, very different space. But yeah, Nick Shapiro. So it's great. I mean, he's talking about FEMA trailers, not parks, but it's a it's a it's a really interesting correspondence, I think. So anyway, so, you know, thinking about these kind of the fourth wall of of chemicals, right? That kind of the chemistry that keeps certain organic forms in place or stunted or growing in different ways. I was thinking about my own sort of wandering through through woods. What's the word again in the muffled pneumophila? Yeah, my own time as a minimalist in redwood forests, and I could identify several kinds of edible plants in the one I remember most was called miner's lettuce. And it was a really delicious little lettuce that I would pick off the trail and eat. And you know, the other day I was walking down the street here in Houston, and my neighbor has an orange tree. And I thought I wouldn't eat the orange off of that tree because of the chemical potential in it, because of the history of this particular terrain. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about something you've talked about as sort of sniffing out spaces and encountering worlds in that way. And if that has any kind of relationship with the sort of chemistry that that we have or don't have with plants,

Speaker3: [00:15:47] So you've raised so many wonderful sort of threads here, which I think are really crucial to think about. So one is the notion of the boundary. And what's so important here is that there there is the boundary is sort of illusory. So we, you know, the park is circled by concrete, right? So there are incredible, incredibly large motorways moving through incredible amount of traffic. So the concrete does a certain kind of boundary work, and I'm really interested in in the forms of enclosure that's circular that encircle all kinds of garden spaces, all kinds of plant spaces, the ways that those spaces are demarcated. But those boundaries are porous in really important ways, and they're porous to to all kinds of flows. And so you're interested in this sort of the chemical flows in these spaces. So we have to think carefully about sort of these incredibly vertical space. So the entire sort of ecology, the atmospheric ecology that that that contours well beyond the kind of the the the the physical perimeter of the tree. It's this incredible bundle of kind of atmospheric volatile compounds of the tree is creatively, you know, synthesizing in its ongoing dance with and responding to all kinds of other phenomena. So they're drinking in the sunlight and they're releasing atmospheric vapors, but they're also kind of synthesizing all kinds of chemical compounds to participate in this incredibly loquacious sort of chemical ecology of all these kinds of utterances that are being made.

Speaker3: [00:17:18] Part of that sort of atmosphere is the petrochemicals that are a part of the the atmosphere that we're breathing in, that they're breathing in, that they're participating in. And 90 years ago, when Ernest Hemingway of All People was a a reporter at the Toronto Star, he was reporting 90 years ago about how the Oaks were dying from being choked out by the by these vapors of the city. Now we have a new chemical soup. In a sense, we have a new we have a whole new set of petrochemicals and all kinds of different kinds of metals and heavy metals, moving through both the atmospheric space, but also through the waterways. So the salt coming off the roads, we have the stormwater runoff and the catchment ponds and all this incredible sort of soupy ness of our, you know, the herbicides and the pesticides that have run off our lawns, et cetera. Plus, we have the conservation ecologists who are applying very carefully. They think in Toronto, herbicides and pesticides are illegal except by use, by permit. So there's permits and the permits to use them in the park. They actually paint on very by hand so that there is no kind of atmospheric release.

Speaker3: [00:18:32] They paint on pesticides and herbicides specifically to deal with some of the invasive plants. So things that they've decided should not be living there, things that they've decided are crowding out what is. I have scare quotes around the native, the original. What is meant to be there. So there's an ongoing kind of use of chemistry to modulate sort of who lives and who dies in this space, and that those bounded uses are also create certain kinds of enclosures, certain kinds of boundaries between what lives and dies. And so I'm very fascinated with a kind of moral economy that shapes who lives and dies. But then simultaneously, there's this creative kind of chemical ecology being made by the plants and trees. And so part of what's the what's unbridgeable about the ecology that I'm interested in practicing is that it does not reproduce the kind of the the often very militarized economizing logics of an environmental monitoring regime that might already know what they think should be monitored and quantified, and a monitoring regime that would come and sort of have one sensor and attached. You know that as if we already knew what to be paying attention to, if we already knew what mattered to that place. And so I'm very interested in a practice of ecology that does not reproduce any of the moralizing discourses of who should you know, who you know, who needs to be the reproductive logic.

Speaker3: [00:19:57] So how to queer key ecology becomes like a really important project for me, how to do it, otherwise how to do ecology otherwise in a way that doesn't produce the same kinds of legible normalizing tropes and stories. And so the sniffing out of these chemical ecology is is a way of getting interested and involved. In the the creative capacities of these plants to to produce these incredible volatile chemistries, so as I go around sniffing out these chemical ecology, I'm interested not in bringing my, you know, a kit that can monitor the specific chemical compounds, but I'm learning how to be a nose. I'm learning to become a nose in a space attuned to the kind of that specific chemistry and feel. So I'm using a lot of kinesthetic sensibilities through my training as a dancer and movement practitioner, using gesture drawings, trying to evoke an a at the qualities of this place. So for me, smell has formed speed, height, depth movement to it. And so I'm generating these sort of gestural diagrams that effect that are that move with and are moved by the the phenomena of smell that I'm encountering. And so the my documentation of in this chemical ecology looks nothing like what we thought in naturalist notebook would look like.

Speaker3: [00:21:16] And so that sense is also to trouble kind of the representational logics that we would assume would be part of taking note and attending to some of these phenomena. So the upgradability of this space is is about disrupting kind of what we thought environmental monitoring would be, but also disrupting kind of the monitoring plot, which is usually like a grid, one meter square grid that's put down on a plot of land. And you think you know what you're supposed to be looking at in that space. I'm interested in feeling moving, sensing in that place with a kind of full a sensorium fully attuned to the phenomena that are taking shape in that place. And for me, that attunement is a long Doray process. So I really see this as like 100 year long project that requires kind of a deep retraining of even the tendencies we have to slip into a kind of logic that says, Oh, this is, you know, this is, you know, competing that plant and this plant should be there and this plant is should not be there. I'm trying to pay attention in a way that doesn't bring that sort of teleological thinking that ecology is so good at reproducing. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:22:20] I know that that queer theory and feminist theory have been important for you in thinking outside the the kind of regulated forms of pleasure, the allowable forms of pleasure. And so I think it'd be very interesting to hear. Hear your thoughts on that and how that operates and what these what these pleasures can look like, what their potential is. But I also wanted to ask, so I guess this is a compound question. Speaking of chemicals so many times in the social sciences and and maybe particularly in the humanities, when we're talking about non-human beings or objects and things where we have been directed, not to anthropomorphize our subjects or our objects. And you, in fact, are calling for the opposite. In some ways you're saying, you know what, maybe we should start to anthropomorphize even more than we do to see, you know, the limbs of trees very much like our own limbs, to see parallels and congruence as between ourselves, as as human beings and these other creatures and things that we share the world with. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that, like the kind of invocation to yes, let's anthropomorphize a little bit and see what happens.

Speaker3: [00:23:32] So what I'm interested in is is sort of disrupting what we thought anthropomorphism was in the first place, right? And so it turns out that anthropomorphism is not what we thought it was. And the activity of storing a living world that is not us is not always an act of imputing our own ideas or imposing ourselves on others. It's actually very often especially practiced in the sciences and the rigorous way that many scientists get them involved in the phenomenon they're studying. They're the ones in the plant sciences who are getting phyto, morfydd. They are being veggietales by the phenomena they're engaged with, and it's in that process of actually learning how to tell stories about the ways that we might. We might actually be made over by these phenomena. And that's a kind of getting getting sort of closer to the sort of attunement practice that I'm interested in. How do we let ourselves? How do we yield to the other in such a way that we can that we can start to tell our own stories differently from that place? So to begin to sort of see ourselves in others and let others see it themselves in us is inside of that a kind of dance that's happening a kind of mimetic, ongoing recursive practice that we have of like letting ourselves not only participate in storing the world, but letting that world also speak through us. And so that moment when we start to recognize ourselves in the trees, part of that is because they made us too, and we can only start to recognize ourselves in trees as once or plants as once. We've actually we've learned to cultivate our own inner plant. And so there's these practices that I'm interested in doing that that revolve around this kind of undoing anything we thought anthropomorphism was and thinking about it a kind of a metamorphic practice that is. Ongoing transformation of both both parties involved.

Speaker2: [00:25:24] Super cool and just a note to listeners, so many had to had to had to leave. But I want to keep this line of conversation going, and I want to ask you a couple of questions based on some of your terrific recent articles, which I will also shout out now. The one that really connects to what you were just talking about, about sort of anthropol., I'm going to I'm not even going to try to say that's that's a word I'm going to stumble on anthropomorphism versus fight amortization is that the

Speaker3: [00:25:57] Vegetables

Speaker2: [00:25:58] Kind of like digitalization to this great article in nature culture from last year called conversations on plant sensing notes from the field. And I'm imagining this is something that that a lot of folks might be interested in hearing more now. The totally crude way to pose the question would be just how smart are those plans? You know, what is plant intelligence? Let me try to be a little more subtle and say one of the striking things about your article is because it's really your conversations with plant scientists. That's the heart of this, and it's really interesting to see you and them both in some ways, struggle over these questions of how do we talk about plant intelligence? How do we recognize plant agency? How do we develop a language for that? I don't know if you'd be willing to to share a little bit of that experience with with everyone else here. And then maybe if you want to come back around to think to your own opinion about plant intelligence and find agency, that would be great.

Speaker3: [00:26:59] Mm hmm. It might have to start with that because the problem, the the problem that I encounter in in in the space of doing the research that I document in the article is that my own idea is about plant sensing and sentience or the terms that I end up using is what gets me into trouble with my interlocutors and actually creates a creates a bit of a problem because I actually so I was trained in the life sciences and was trained as a plant biologist and very early in the early on in my training, I got whiff of this emerging field of plant plant sensing and the capacities of plants to send out signals to communicate with plants or with other insects, plants to learn, learning how to defend themselves through chemical synthesis. And so I was I was kind of tuned into this world and it started thinking about it in kind of very distinct kinds of ways. And part of the ways in which I was thinking about this was through a kind of sense that of of. I began with the with. I began inside of the the assumption that plants are up to stuff that plants are getting involved in the world. They have the wherewithal to tune in to the phenomena around them that they are conducting inquiry through their growth as they grow and extend their limbs out into the world.

Speaker3: [00:28:21] They're actually conducting experiments and they're getting to know a world as they make the world. And so for me, plant life has been a very creative practice. Plans do make the world they materialize, all the forms that we've come to live in and have it around. And so I began my research, you know, moving from plant science to anthropology, I began my research with this assumption that this is what plants are up to. And it posed some significant problems to me when I entered the field and realized, Oh my gosh, I I I've. My ideas are way, way to the foreground of shaping the conversations. And so I was sort of it was kind of great opportunities to sort of kind of get smacked down by my interlocutors. One who refused to speak to me because I might be there to talk about the concept of plant feeling. And for her, you know, the concept of feeling that plants could feel was anathema to the very project she was involved in. She definitely wanted to understand plant sensing, but that feeling was this really strange and very problematic phenomena. And then many

Speaker2: [00:29:31] Of them, I'm sorry, could you just elaborate that a little bit? So what do you think it was about feeling that was

Speaker3: [00:29:37] So feeling has all the connotations of human sensibility for her? And so whereas feeling for me is really about sensing is about what you know, that that that organisms send out feelers into the world to sense the world feeling had an emotive context for her. It was emotional capacity and plant emotions were something she was not interested in talking about. And I had no interest in talking to anyone about plant emotions. But I really wanted to think about affect the effectivity of plant life. And so so this these really remarkable moments where my own kind of really my own sensibilities about plant life, which I had acquired over many, many years of kind of deep engagement with plant. It's not only in the sciences, but also in the arts. I had to sort of I had to find a way to qualify them. I had to find ways to quiet them down so that I can learn how to listen to what these plant scientists cared about. And the real struggle was between a kind of a between a practice of science that and I will set an idealized practice of science that valorize is a mechanical worldview and also a neo Darwinian model of plant life that in which no organism can actually have intentionality because it's the genes that drive. Life, right, so genes are involved in constricting and Mick creating what's potential, the potential for a plant life, not the organism itself. And so I kept bumping up against the sort of the practices and techniques and discourses that these scientists were committed to sharing with me and at the same time, seeing how far I could lure them in these conversations to sort of think with me and in in in slightly different terms.

Speaker3: [00:31:28] And so it became really crucial for me to see sort of the incompleteness of some of their mechanical mechanical worldviews, the incompleteness of of Darwinian formulation. It wasn't a hegemonic logic. And so it actually left them room because so many of them wanted to be able to talk about what plants are up to, how they know what to do, what what they know about the world, how they forage for light, how they anticipate, how they have memory, how they have all these incredible capacities and dexterity, and some of them in different positions and at different moments in their careers. We're able to talk like that and others were not, and it was really lovely to sort of figure out how far I could dance with them to think with this. So the concepts that are popular are propagating through the sort of sciences of plant sensing or plant signaling, which is often are very much locked into a particular logic. And they're they're very often couched in a set of tropes that. That that demand that we think in very cognitive terms, but also like behavioral, cognitive behavioral models, often very impoverished models of communication, very, very human models of of sensing as well. And so part of my part of the work, I feel, is to sort of offer up spaces for these practitioners to have conversations that allow them to tell their stories in different registers such that they might be in a space to invent a way of thinking about sensing that begins with the plant phenomena that they're grappling with. And so these are people who know plants so intimately and actually might be in a place to transform our human models of sensing.

Speaker2: [00:33:13] Yeah, it's and also in the article, too. You talk about how one of the difficulties people had with recognizing this as intelligence was, well, they don't have brains, they don't have neurons, right again, a very sort of human centered idea of what constitutes intelligence, because that's where we think the seed of our intelligence is is in our skull. And also the most important part of our sensory apparatus and all the rest of that, too. But to take it, just take it just a little bit further on this theme, because you do have some great examples in that article. And I'm sure elsewhere in your work to about plants doing exactly that. Plants exploring the world, plants experimenting with plants, tricking other beings in the world into doing things for them, plants communicating. I'm just, you know, are there any particular instances of quote unquote, let's call it plant intelligence now that really blow you away, that were the ones you would say, Well, this obvious, right? This is such an obvious case.

Speaker3: [00:34:16] Hmm. Well, one that I love and I tell in this story. And I guess and I wouldn't I kind of don't want to use the word intelligence. I'm just going to clarify that. And so I'm thinking a lot about the relationship between sensing and sentience as a kind of the that, you know, thinking here, man. Aponte has this lovely formulation that you know in sort of the visible and the invisible where he thinks about sort of sensing is always the promise of sentience. The capacity to sense the world is already we all. We have to be able to imagine that any cell that can that can distinct make a distinction between what's what's inside and outside is already involved in sensing, which is already involved in a kind of sensing. And so I'm interested in being very particular about what, what, what, what that is and what that is about. So one of these beautiful stories that one of the practitioners, a plant, she studies circadian rhythms and plants. And so this is sort of how plants keep pace with the temporal fold and stay inside of a kind of like their seasonality and their sense of the rhythm of the day, but also just the rhythms that take shape over the course of a year.

Speaker3: [00:35:19] And so one of the phenomena that just had moved her so profoundly was the capacity of sunflowers to not just track the course of the sun as it moved over the duration of the day from one horizon to the next. But that that same head of the same head of that sunflower would actually move all night long and be in the right place. Anticipating into use her words, anticipating where the Sun would rise, and so the scientists, you know, in order to figure out that this was actually a kind of knowing practice of the of the plants would in the middle of the night come and rotate the. The Sunflower to try and trick it, but it would actually figure out which side it needed to be on, where it needed to be in order to anticipate that rising sun and so. So that moment when we start to see and I love that story because it also shows us that that plants are deeply sensing mini beings, but they're sensing it. This cosmic level, like they're really tuned in to a whole entire environment.

Speaker2: [00:36:20] Because just as you just mentioned Merlo Ponty, I mean, that's really phenomenological. That's really Ego's orientation to to a world, right? I mean that they you could you could you have to talk about plant ego? I mean, maybe you don't, but you could.

Speaker1: [00:36:32] You don't and you could. And so what if we did a

Speaker3: [00:36:34] Kind of post phenomenology? Because one of the things that that plants do is they throw up and transform entirely our notion of subjectivity. Cool. So that you can't. There is no one of the wonderful things about plant bodies is their rise emphatic form. So even as Julius and Guitar decry the tree, they forget that a tree already is a rhizome, right? Like it already is. And so and plants are rhizomes in thicker ways and that because of their incredibly entangled relations with other bodies and so other beings. And so one of the things that plants help us do is think is is to if you want to begin in a plant body, you're very quickly entirely enmeshed in an ecology. There is no autonomous plant, right? And then plants show us that we have to think about the mycorrhizal fungi that Singh and others help us think so richly about. We have to think about soil microbes. We have to be able to think about the insect pollinators. We have to think about the the all the animal cultivators we have to be able to think about, you know, and the ways that plants actually can be figured as catalysts. They do a lot of work catalyzing ecological relations and we can start to see them as as as a particular kind of agency inside of one kind of agency inside of an ecology. So I. So subjectivity gets really interesting and messy. Especially then when he realized that plants move from million fold centers of in determination, right? So that each branching point each merit system that gives rise to each leaf, each bud, each branch. Is it any root right? Is its own, conducting its own little experiment in the world.

Speaker3: [00:38:09] So a million a body with a million points of million centers of inner determination gives us a rise to the subject that we couldn't possibly have conceived of if we started with a particular particular kind of phenomenology that that presupposes a subject and object. So what I love about plants is it throws open. And then what is sentience? Then what is what? What is intelligence? What is? And then, you know, the question of like, well, intentionality becomes this really awkward and difficult thing to think through for most of the scientists, because it's the genes that have intentionality in a weird way, not the organisms. But again, I'm going to, you know, I want to be able to think about that kind of there is some how do we think about intention and play an improvisation and inquiry and interest in an organism that is already so entangled, right? So it's a collectivized agency. And so I've been thinking a lot about the kinds of becoming with and alongside that are shaped by what I'm calling an evolutionary momentum that organisms involve themselves in one another's lives. And this becomes a point where you can't separate the pollinator and the pollinated right. The insect and the and the plant that are actually Qu- evolving together in these remarkable ways are involving themselves in one another's lives in such ways that you can't separate out that organism. So the play of the play of interest animating agencies become sort of really difficult to pass, but one that we what a lovely place to begin to undo some of those models and yet still think about a world that plants are whirling in this incredibly sentient, responsive entangling way.

Speaker2: [00:39:48] It's so beautifully put. I mean, just to think about the the messy Rudy Ries thematic ecological phenomenology that you would need to develop to really understand plan subjectivity. Beautiful. Ok, let me I want to take maybe this discussion of of plants making the world in a slightly different direction, but it's apropos of your wonderful article on photosynthesis and cultural anthropology that that Simone mentioned a little while ago. And first of all, you know, shout out to the cyanobacteria that were the first species to revolutionize the world. You know, long before humans came along and had their Anthropocene, there was there was another Anthropocene, as you put it, very nicely. And here's a here's a fact that I teach to students in our environmental studies core class that will probably not blow you away, but really blew me away when I thought about its its implications that every year, photosynthesis by marine and terrestrial plants binds three times 10 to the 21st. Our noisy, yeah, No. Three Zeta jewels, and if you're wondering what is Zeta Jewel is it is 10 to the 21st power jewels. Ok, so that's 10 with 21 zeroes behind it. Amazing. Every year of energy, right? And the world's known petroleum reserves are only eight zeta jewels. So, you know, every two and a half years or so, the energy, all the energy that we know is sort of stored under the Earth, the old, you know, our sort of photosynthetic inheritance.

Speaker2: [00:41:29] Right. That's under the Earth. It renews that, you know, and so when people talk about, oh, you know, the only way we can imagine energy abundance is through, you know, fossil fuels, if you go, Whoa, wait. Look at photosynthesis. It all starts in photosynthesis, right? So I'm really curious about about what, whether you think and I have a feeling that. That I don't want to lead you to much of the question, but I am going to lead you with the question, you know, whether you think the recognition of the plant or passin is itself, you know, maybe part of what needs to happen for us to make the kind of revolutionary leap in thinking and behaving that we need to sort of get out of or to divert our trajectory from the Anthropocene? One, because I don't know whether escape is the right metaphor either, but somehow to to to bend it, to bend the trajectory in such a way that it's not pointing towards these relationships of destruction that you talk about in that essay. You know, the paving over of green space everywhere, the absolute lack of attention to the needs and interests of the the plant a sphere. Sorry, that's another plant term that just made up. Yeah, I'm sorry. Let me let me stop, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:42:48] So I love. It was such a pleasure to have the assignment of coming up with a key word for this, for, you know, for this Anthropocene yet unseen. And so I actually it was this opportunity to actually have a neat thought. And it was just this beautiful moment for me where I was like, Oh, am I going to get it? I get why. One of the ways that we could look to plants to to think on you and what we might get from that. And so so it really struck me when I realized that photosynthesis, when I sort of sat with this sort of power of photosynthesis, it's incredible for us. It's incredible power. It's transformative for us. And so in a sense, I was like, Wait a second, we thought we were so great. Here we are as humans, self-aggrandising around our own, you know, capacity just parasites.

Speaker2: [00:43:31] We're parasites on plants when it comes down to it, right?

Speaker3: [00:43:34] We could be. And this and this sense that like and now we're naming an era after our own like ability to like, destroy ourselves. Amazing. And so I wanted to point to this moment, this historical moment, you know, which I'd call it the feita scene and which my collaborator Dorian Sagan has. He's independently had called the Ciena scene. So he had he'd named it after the cyanobacteria, and I named it after sort of the the photosynthetic capacity of all of the organisms who were doing it up all that time ago, who totally, I knew, you know, poisoned the atmosphere with oxygen, who totally transformed and terraform the planet and actually made it livable and breathable for us instead of suddenly, photosynthesis can teach us like, wait a second. Our entire political economy is turn around plants. Every aspect of, you know, however we adorn ourselves, everything we build our homes with everything we nourish ourselves, with everything we drug ourselves with is plant is plant derived, and even the plastic itself comes from the petroleum, which is plant drives. So I was like, Wait a second, these are world making beings these plants and they need their due, and they was like, they deserve a little more credit. It also struck me that there's such there is this sort of capacity right now, and I've been doing some activist work in Canada around science policy and trying to intervene in the former Harper government's science policy regime.

Speaker3: [00:44:57] Where where the new the new forest policy was one of a resource grab where forests, if you used, if used, pretty lousy carbon budget models to to think about forests, forests could be seen to become the new single new sources of carbon rather than just sinks. And so people were considering and in fact, forest policy was mandated to get in and cut down all the old growth forests before they go on fire, before the insect pests hit them and replace them with managed forests and managed forests. Would, you know, would absorb more carbon? And I just thought, Oh my God, something is so dramatically problematic here. And I started looking at how some of the other carbon modeling practices and so some of the really sort of reductive and restrictive and constrained thinking. Once you start to fetishize carbon where you can get at and how you lose total, you know, total sense of what what plants are doing on this planet. And so one Yale scientist who thinks that deforestation is going to cool the planet and keep us alive. And I thought, OK, this is not a time to be making enemies with plants. Actually, what if we figure out

Speaker2: [00:46:07] Like bonkers thinking?

Speaker3: [00:46:08] It's bonkers thinking, but it's, you know, it's it's it's it's so it's so it's capitalist logic threaded through and justified through, you know, appeal to to climate matters. And so it's this remarkable thing that's happening. So what I wanted to propose was that we, you know, we're no longer in the cytosine right. We're also, you know, we are in an era where humans do have a certain amount of power, which is to decide who lives and who dies and how that and that moment struck me as like, Oh, what we need is an aspirational era. We certainly need to get ourselves out of the Anthropocene, and we need an aspirational era. An era will actually figure out how to do the collaboration with the plants. And so if people have been theorizing, the capital has seen the plantation is seen, all of these, these these, these dire moments of that continually name the causes of our our impending collapse. I wanted to sort of aspire to something other. I was like, I don't want to want to reproduce the forces that are keeping that are keeping the apocalypse close by, right? So the idea of a philanthropist is an aspirational era where we're humans figure out how to collaborate with plants. We figure out that they have needs that are not that they need a time outside of our capitalist logics, that they need space, that they need that we they need us to attend to their specificities and care. And there are practices on this planet currently by many, many people that that are about that collaboration.

Speaker3: [00:47:39] There are amazing plant practices, amazing ways that people have figured out how to collaborate with plants and how to. Amplify those how to create a space for that, and so I've been thinking a lot about what what after the Anthropocene might be. Once we get over those logics, once we when we realize that we cannot continue to exploit plants in the ways we've been doing because we are only because they are, you know, we are of the plants in this really profound way and they're allowing them to thrive will allow humans to thrive. And so it's like if we care about people, we actually have to take care of the plants. And so we, you know, I always think about plants and their people. You know, plants and their people. Right? Which is which changes everything, and so if we want to take care of the, you know, we want to take those people, we actually have to give room to the plants, which means allowing bogs and wetlands to be, you know, remain unpaved, which means, you know, and unpolluted, which means not, you know, cutting down the forest, which means we cannot continue with, you know, industrial agriculture. We we actually have to change those practices. And it means a kind of a particular kind of reference like these are sun plants, our sun worshippers. We should be plant worshipers.

Speaker2: [00:48:55] Yeah, I mean, oh boy, it's so rich. What you're saying in such a such a lovely antidote. I think so much of of what ails us. I don't know. I don't. Well, I had two questions and they're totally different directions. But let's see if I can stitch them together. One is that we were talking. I was thinking about, you know, this approach that you're talking about as the antidote to. I mean, sometimes we end up talking in the podcast about these, like the way the Anthropocene sort of seeps into the groundwater of popular culture in ways that we can't really wrestle with it, except as nightmare scenarios. So I was thinking, of course, M. Night Shyamalan's movie The Happening, which it probably is a plant scholar you'd be interested in because basically the plants decide they've had enough of us. Ok, it's over humans. We're just going to poison you all. You can't make you kill yourselves in the most ridiculous ways possible. But there is an element of truth in it, right? It's kind of what you're saying in a different way. But yet it's becomes a horror scenario because we can't imagine what the other side of that is, which I think is this different affective relationship that you're talking about. And but in terms of a way to like, touch a lot of people, you know, I'm wondering, you know, at the level of the everyday aspects of how people encounter plants, I have to think that gardening must be really interesting for you because it's something a lot of people do. And it definitely isn't that controlling like human. Here's my little plot of human land, and I'm going to make it look the way I want to. Maybe it goes a little wild from neglect, and maybe that's cool too. Or maybe like it's I'm going to have everything in just the right place. I'm going to be out with my like, you know, Agent Orange Weed Killer getting rid of things. But do you see, like gardening is potentially a redemptive practice, or is it part of the problem too?

Speaker3: [00:50:46] So I have this so a bunch of my new work is on gardening, and I actually think of the oak savanna that I was describing earlier as a garden, precisely as a garden, so of a piece that I'm just finishing right now for a wonderful collection that Craig Hetherington has put together on infrastructures, sort of life, environment and infrastructure in the Anthropocene. And and the identikit apocalypse essay about this garden in Singapore is a really big part of that story and what I talk

Speaker2: [00:51:15] About, because that's what I want to go next. So please do talk about that.

Speaker3: [00:51:17] So I've always been. I've been. It took me a long time to get interested in gardens because I saw gardens as part of the problem. And so and one of those one of the sort of the quintessential moment of encountering the horror of the garden was this unbelievable sort of futuristic garden built in 2012 in Singapore called Gardens by the Bay, which I could only describe as like end of time botanical tourism. This is a site for, you know, this is where this is, where we figure out how we're all going to go down, folks. And it's in the this this unbelievably like enormous some of the largest conservatories ever built cooled, air conditioned conservatories at the equator, no less. And so this unbelievable sort of incredible design, but also sort of absurd siting of the design as kind of inversion of the colonial impulse to bring, you know, the the materials from the plant materials from the periphery into the sort of empire. This is the Singapore's version of that, which is to bring Mediterranean plants to the equator. Anyway, it's this incredibly marvelous, disturbing space which which in itself fashions itself as a climate change education site.

Speaker3: [00:52:35] So the what was so amazing for me was I finally learned how to read this space, and it was only through the artworks of a Viennese artist named Lois Weinberger, who I'm writing about now, whose artwork showed me precisely that the Singapore Gardens are a design for the Anthropocene, a design that leaves intact all the logics the capitalist and colonial exploitation, exploitative forces that produce a kind of by a kind of biosphere that allows that acts as a kind of like mausoleum for a living, for keeping alive just the remnants of what could be. Whereas on the outside of this enclosure, everything else is kind of left to die and you really get that. Palpably, when walking outside in Singapore, the haze from the forest fires that are burning, you know, throughout Indonesia and in through Borneo are absolutely, you know, that is the that is the death that is the death that is permitted to go on when you can actually be. Well, we've got these beautiful plants on inside where you can actually breathe the air because the plants are making the fresh air.

Speaker2: [00:53:43] As long as we stay in this glass jar, we'll be fine. We'll be

Speaker3: [00:53:46] Fine. And so and what's so amazing is that, you know, here's this this garden that's supposed to be a climate change education site. And yet and they're showing these incredible films of ecological destruction and collapse without really ever being able to mitigate that kind of the disaster. And in fact, you realize that inside of this enclosure, it's accelerating the collapse. You actually realize that that this garden is helping us move quicker towards towards these end of times. And so there's a way in which visitors are sort of moving through this unbelievably incredible landscape, but they're taken up to this place called the lost world at the top of the conservatory. And then they're brought down into the space where they're, you know, they're treated to visions of total collapse before they actually exit through the exit through the gift shop is, you know, through an already extinct diorama of an already extinct ecosystem. So death and destruction underwrite all that is made to thrive in these gardens, which is totally amazing. Anyway, it took coming to the work of Lois Weinberger, whose very art practice is to disturb everything we ever thought. We knew about gardens. So he crafts gardens against Eden. And these are gardens that break every context we thought we understood about the notion of an enclosure, his his gardens, you know, take shape in plastic bags and buckets. He'll move, he'll move a kind of a wheelbarrow out into the middle of a city and let it sit there.

Speaker3: [00:55:16] A wheelbarrow full of soil let it sit there until the world cedes itself and produces its own garden and then move that to another city and watch the succession of of of of seeds and plants that take root. He'll rip up concrete and let the weedy subversives come through on. One of his wonderful, most wonderful artworks is this incredible iron cage that he'll put down on different kind of sites. And this, you know, a giant iron cage he puts down on a lawn outside of a university building in Innsbruck, Austria. It, you know. It the entire town freaks out because suddenly they can't get their lawnmowers, you know, underneath, right? Garbage starts piling up. An entire ecology takes root. So he's interested is potentiated ecologies and inverting the infrastructure, disturbing or as disturbing our idea of the enclosure. Who what's kept in, what's kept out 20 years after all the protests and the people who are freaking out about this thing, it's now this lush, beautiful, vibrant, lively space and considered a really important artwork. And so what he's doing is disrupting sort of of the spaces of human control. And so he changes the notion of a garden, his gardens or gardens of disregard gardens that that don't cultivate plants so much as potentiate ecologies and allow plants to grow where they may. And so for me, he his work helps me see what how one might design a garden to stage human relations with plants for a time after the Anthropocene and not a time for, say, and a kind of sequential period, but as a as for a moment when we've got over, when the concept of the Anthropocene has done its work, we've got over ourselves and we actually figure out how to collaborate with the plants.

Speaker3: [00:57:03] And so he's he is the kind of the artist of the Anthropocene for me. And in fact, there are many artists of the Anthropocene. Craig Campbell at UT Austin is currently designing a post socialist garden so where he's interested in gardens in the ruins. Growing up in the ruins of socialism and I've been looking at the ruins of capitalism, he's actually come up with this incredible formation of of a kind of a planting. A garden to produce a new kind of collectivity in his garden is about collectivity, around forming activities, around food growth. And and so it's a beautiful moment where actually we can start to look to artists to disrupt everything we thought we knew about what a garden was. And so the first time I've ever sort of appreciated a garden was I finally finally understood that these are, you know, wild and heartless spaces that we might learn how to live alongside plants and let them dictate some of the terms

Speaker2: [00:57:53] Of that encounter. Yeah, I agree with you. I think what's happening in the arts now is really exciting. You know, one one question I had also about that, you know, end of time botanical thing about or maybe an observation or a curious to know what you think about it. I often feel like, you know, I totally agree with that interpretation of these spaces that are being set aside. As you know, look at what the wonders of modern technology can detect inside a glass jar. And, you know, without our careful, bureaucratic, technocratic and industrial management, you know, everything will what little is left to us will will be destroyed. And I often feel like there's something very disturbing in that as a kind of rationale for, you know, actually and you hear this with China and and, you know, solar energy to, well, it's because it's an authoritarian regime that they can actually make the changes that we need to make to save the planet, right? They because they don't have to convince anyone, you know, they don't have to worry about levying taxes and getting blowback, and that they don't have to worry about an independent energy industry talking back to them.

Speaker2: [00:59:01] And I feel like in the Singapore thing, because Singapore really is a model of the future of the city. I mean, maybe not so much here in the U.S., in Canada, but I do think elsewhere in the world, you know, friends tell me, you know, India is not looking to, you know, North American cities for its future as it's rapidly urbanizing industrializing. It's looking towards Singapore and Dubai, you know, and these are like in some ways, really from an ecological standpoint, problematic or spaces. You know, what sustains them is, as you said, precisely all of the assumptions of the capitalist scene and the Anthropocene. They're all right there and sort of elevated to their next level. So I don't know if you had, you know, time to sort of engage with that aspect of it. But I do think that's one of the concerning things is that there's also the resilience of, you know, the Anthropocene forces to reinvent themselves as the guardians of our future, the saviors that will get us there.

Speaker3: [00:59:59] Exactly. And exactly. And so when we think about so I presented this paper on eugenic apocalypse and Gardens against Eden recently at Davis and had a great response from. From someone who knows Singapore well, and he was like, but Singapore is. It's all air conditioned. This is the site of, you know, this is the site of like a human kind of prowess kind of toppling nature's force. You know, let's live in a place that's otherwise uninhabitable. And so I've been actually involved. I'm really interested in thinking about the ways the island of Singapore itself has been really, incredibly profoundly terra formed. And it's so 87 percent of the shoreline of Singapore is concrete. Wow, OK. And so this land reclamation, but also sort of the sort of decimation of all the mangroves and the swamp forests, which actually occurred quite early on. So during sort of, you know, during the kind of plantations that that took shapes of all the different crops that were grown, pineapples and other cane that that land had already been terra formed completely by the 1930s, right? So it was already in an utter transformation. And so the kind of I had a wonderful opportunity to hear a talk by and a naturalist, a Singaporean, a naturalist of Singapore who was trying to reconstruct the deep time of Singapore's past from tiny, vestigial vestiges of like one or two trees growing here or there, and records and accounts of, you know, early travelers and naturalists who happened to document these. He wanted to understand how we could reinterpret the landscape that was totally lost underneath, you know, asphalt and development, how to reconstruct the islands it passed.

Speaker3: [01:01:57] And so one of the things I think through in this paper is this is the is the kind of the, you know, the ecologies of artifice, but also just that that, you know, start, you know, Singapore is a container garden. It already it's a container garden. It's like it's not. It's it's you have to. If you want an ecology, you actually have to build it. You have to build it yourself. So the one of the cloud forests, which is the one of the conservatories at Gardens by the Bay, is a simulation of an ecology inside, right? Instead of being like an herbarium or an that's an herbarium. But instead of just being displaying this piece of orchid and that species of orchid, it's actually tries to hold things together and an ecology. And it's quite a powerful metaphor for really how ecology is dealt with in Singapore. If you want to, if you want to look at nature, you need to simulate it. You need to start from scratch and build it as if you're working in a container garden. So the whole island really operates like that, and it's there's so much work to be done in tons of great work that is coming out of there now. So I'm trying to figure out if I can actually stay in involved in that project as much as I can.

Speaker2: [01:02:58] I think you've got a lot to say about it. So Natasha, where can people find out more about what you're doing? Because we've touched on really only skim the surface. There's a lot more of your work we could talk about, but in the interest of time. Tell us your website. Tell us any relevant websites you think people should go and find out more about your work.

Speaker3: [01:03:17] So I have a website just with my with a lot of my projects on it, and there's some interviews on my book that just came out in 2015. Rendering life molecular. There's there's a video of my talk that I gave at Berkeley on Edenic Apocalypse Meets Gardens against Eden. So you can hear more about this story about Singapore and the artist Lois Weinberger. As I grapple with the idea of kind of imagining a kind of moment after the Anthropocene. I've sort of some just in the process of trying to put out some new pieces and sharing some new pieces, which is wonderful soon. And I have a number of other projects that might be of interest, including the politics of Evidence Working Group where we're trying to. It's a website where that describes how a group of academics, NGOs and activists are kind of convening around trying to figure out ways of of doing kind of an activist based research tuning into making ourselves useful really in all kinds of ways to things that are taking shape worldwide and especially in Canada and some other some other sites that I'm working on with the graduate students. I have a bunch of graduate students doing energy related projects, and they've got the Energy Working Group set up at York University, putting together their first panel this year at the force, which is really exciting, lots of vibrant and exciting things, including the techno science salon, which everyone should come and Toronto to check out.

Speaker2: [01:04:51] All right, excellent. So you've got you, you've got a Ameche Webby Rudy network of your own. You are a powerful rhizome. You are making things happen also, and we will put your website up on the link in the blog notes so people can find it there. Natasha, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for coming to Rice and for engaging with the students and faculty and for sharing this really remarkable work. We hope you're going to keep on doing what you're doing, we hope you'll come back here again to enjoy the live oaks and also to remind us that this little concrete bunker that we're in right now is surrounded by a really vibrant living root system, right that or multiple root systems that we should be mindful of.

Speaker3: [01:05:39] Hmm. Amazing. Such a lovely conversation.

Speaker2: [01:05:41] Ok, great. Take care.