Confronting Plant Blindness: the Carbon Dating Project

'phyto' - a word-forming element meaning 'plant', from Greek phyton 'plant', literally 'that which has grown'; from phyein 'to bring forth, make grow'; from PIE root *bheue - to be, exist, grow'.

Plants are so very different to humans in their physiology, in the way they source and metabolise energy, germinate and interact. Western scientific knowledge has classed plants as life forms without intelligence or feelings, and they are generally understood as living organisms, which react automatically to external stimuli.

Claims of agency - and other forms of (human) behaviour like anticipation, will and desire - is something that many in the scientific community are wary of ascribing to plant life. This is because plants do not have direct equivalents of brains or nervous systems, and so drawing parallels to creatures in the animal kingdom, especially sentient mammals, may not do their extraordinary capacities justice.

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However, with contemporary research teams investigating the rich sensory world that plants inhabit in new ways, fresh insights are emerging that extend today’s limited conceptions and mechanistic models of plant life. There is now an expanding vocabulary used by certain scientists to describe the brilliance of plant behaviour that is allowing for nuance, capturing aspects of the: ‘vegetal sensorium as open, responsive, excitable, and attuned to a world full of other interested bodies’¹. This expanding knowledge base and new language sheds light on what plants get up to in their complex interactions with each other, with soil, sunlight, water, and with us. This understanding of aliveness, that is germane to many First Nations understandings, is now also becoming slowly recognised by scientists who choose to examine plants from ‘a plant’s perspective’ - i.e. one not biased by what we value in humans or limited by concerns about the anthropomorphising of plant behaviours².

Such new ways of thinking about plant life are also emerging from the humanities and social sciences with sub-disciplines like vegetal geography and Critical Plant Studies (CPS)³ now challenging assumptions, demanding theoretical re-evaluations of agency, questioning plant-human co-evolution, and broadening debates about the biopolitical management of life⁴. This work is calling for plant life, fungi and microorganisms to become rooted in our ethical and theoretical imaginations⁵.

Despite the commonality of what Wandersee and Schussler (1999)⁶ called plant blindness⁷ many of us can also appreciate the central importance of plants in the evolutionary story of life on this planet. Plants are a vital part of the biodiversity that sustains life on earth.

Grasses alone “cover around 40% of Earth’s land surface and provide over one-half (51%) of all dietary energy”⁸.

Plants, as we are taught in school at an early age, are the great chemical engineers. Students learn about the oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange that occurs between plants and animals, which is often framed as a marvelous ‘ecological match’ where both parties equally gain. However, in fact plants are our ‘metabolic superiors’ because not only do they produce oxygen through photosynthesis, but they also use oxygen as we do. Plants ingest oxygen at night when sunlight is not available as a source of energy, and they can do it because they incorporate mitochondria into their cells⁹. Despite the ubiquity of photosynthesis, occurring in a constant, irreplaceable rhythm with the breathwork of humans, there has been a tendency in modern times to dissociate from such ecological dependencies. Indeed those life forms have existed for billions of years and have infinite experience and perhaps wisdom in the art of adaptation¹⁰. Anthropologist Natasha Meyers reminds us that plants literally breathe culture and political economies into being, and that we each thoroughly depend upon plants' metabolic rhythms¹¹.

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With such plant-people intimacies in mind, might Carbon Dating enable a new kind of photosynthetic reckoning? Experimental media artist and project instigator Keith Armstrong’s longstanding project has been to frame his practice within the realm of political ecology, in the understanding that biological, economic, social and political factors are deeply entangled and co-dependent. Armstrong plays with the affective register of scientific data, probing methods and collaborating on ecological fieldwork, in order to productively reframe scientific thinking in ways that elicit moral questions, such as:

‍How can people become more open to the richness of the living world; how can humans learn to conspire¹² with plants; and how perhaps can we learn from the plant a way of being, in order to do willfully what it does organically?

‍This requires an active wakefulness on our part to “be there” alongside another species, and to upend our thinking, interrupting the order of things as they are commonly understood. Akin to new forms of art and experiment that allow individuals and collectives to learn different ways to feel, relate and know the world, Carbon Dating provides an opportunity for participants and the wider community to get to know grasses on their own terms; to tap into their rhythms and needs. It also provides the grounds to reconfigure relations, and to encourage greater reverence for their life-giving forces.

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The interactive modality of this practice, and the way it encourages reflexive circling around complex questions, generates work that acts as warning, political protest and as an epistemic variation toward a new (& in fact old) way of knowing the world.

‍Carbon Dating brings together plants, ecologists, sound designers, visual artists, writers, gardeners and socially-engaged practitioners, working across registers, as both an exercise in awareness raising - and as memorialisation to what is broadly an extraordinary change of plant makeup in Australia since settler contact. By developing close encounters with endangered native grasses, Carbon Dating seeks to emphasise how singular animals and plants have unique characteristics, as Cheryl Lousley argues ‘pre-existing affective entanglements […] and political claims.’

By marking what has been lost, Carbon Dating also celebrates the beauty of remnant native grasses, making them visible within the contemporary cultural and ecological fabric. It also seeks to generate affective interspecies relationships: caring, empathy, an ‘attentiveness’ or ‘attentive love’, connecting to those bits of science that elsewhere are reduced to impersonal codified data. Echoing the view of geographer Owain Jones, who recognises ‘the ethical invisibility of the individual nonhuman other’, and who proposes creating human-nonhuman encounters that are ethically charged.’ Elevating native grasses in this way allows us to see them anew, both in terms of an ethical engagement and in developing new relations. It is an opportunity to register the different tempos and temporalities that condition plant and human life, and remember afresh how plants and people co-evolved, pointing us toward how we may con-spire¹³ to shape our shared futures.

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Footnotes

^{[1] Myers, N. (2015). Conversations on plant sensing: notes from the field. Nature Culture, 3, pp. 35-66, p. 41.}

^{[2] For example see the seminal work of scientist Monica Gagliano in the book Thus Spoke The Plant, 2018 or biologist Daniel Chamovitz, What a plant knows. A field guide to the senses, 2017. See at publisher here.}

^{[3] Critical plant studies (CPS) is an interdisciplinary area of scholarship that straddles and conjoins environmental humanities, the sciences of plants as well as philosophy, and art. Natasha Myers (2021) writes that CPS is “a broad framework for re-evaluating plants and human-plant interactions informed by principles of agency, ethics, cognition and language”. “Literature within CPS is wide-ranging, but coheres around the imperatives to carefully re-assess the specificities of plant behaviour and assert the centrality of plants to human life and thought”. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325211062167}

^{4] Natasha Myers (2014) writes of the diversity of thinking now in this area. She cites, “a recent swerve in attention to the fascinating lives of plants among philosophers, anthropologists, popular science writers, and their widely distributed, electronically-mediated publics. Very recently, a suite of new works has appeared, including philosopher Michael Marder’s Plant thinking: a philosophy of vegetal life (2013), philosopher Matthew Hall’s, Plants as persons: a philosophical botany (2011), scientist and educator Craig Holdrege’s Thinking like a plant: a living science for life, scientist Daniel Chamovitz’s What a plant knows: a field guide to the senses (2012), and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s How forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human (2013). These extraordinary texts have been followed up by articles, the most notable of which are Pollan’s essay in The New Yorker Magazine, and a 2014 article in the New York Review of Books by Oliver Sacks, The Mental Life of Plants and Worms, Among Others. Many of these texts encourage their readers to consider the extension of the concepts of intelligence, thought, communication, and cognition to plants, organisms that have hitherto seemed so passive, so mute, so still”http://topologicalmedialab.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MyersConversationsOnPlantSensingAugust31Distribution1.pdf}

^{[5] Lawrence, A. M. (2022). Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography. Progress in Human Geography, 46(2), 629-651.}

^{[6] Wandersee, J. H., and Schussler, E. E. (1999). Preventing plant blindness. Am. Biol. Teach. 61, 82–86. doi: 10.2307/4450624}

^{[7] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2022.963448/full#:~:text=Human%20inability%20to%20see%20or,Schussler%2C%201999%2C%202001).}

^{[8] https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/35376/adaptive-evolution-of-grasses}

^{[9] Sagan, D. (2011). Moonage daydreams and space oddities: Musings on the future of life in space. Invited Lecture, Bethune College, York University, Canada, January 27.}

^{[10] Natasha Myers (2015) notes about scientists’ engagement with the new science of plants that “they seemed to be pulled between near-numinous stories of the marvelous sensory dexterities of plants and the disenchantments enforced by a reductionist and mechanistic ‘thought style’ that resists imputing any agency to nonhuman organisms“.}

^{[11] https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548}

^{[12]  The original name of the ‘Interweaver’ artwork deployed in the Carbon_Dating was the ‘Conspirator’. This earlier name was inspired by Natasha Myer’s writings. Myers writes, “Anthropologist Tim Choy makes a powerful call for the formation of a conspiracy of breathers. His is an aspirational politics in which people learn how to con-spire, that is to breathe together, in order to fight against the atmospheric effects of what Michelle Murphy calls industrial exuberance. He helps us to think conspiracy otherwise, not as a sinister association, but as the grounds for a liveable politics. It is time to extend his call for a conspiracy of breathers to include the plants. That is, we need to learn not just how to collaborate, but also how to conspire with the plants, to breathe with them. Remember, they breathed us into being”. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548}

References

^{Choy, T. (2016). Breathers Conspire – On Drawing Breath Together. Presentation on the Elements Thinking Panel at the Society for Social Studies of Science, Annual Meeting. (Co-organised by N. Myers, M. Puig de la Bellacasa, and D. Papadopoulos) at the Society for Social Studies of Science, Annual Meeting, Barcelona Spain, September 2016}

^{Lawrence, A. M. (2022). Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography. Progress in Human Geography, 46(2), Page 629, DOI: 10.1177/03091325211062167}

^{Myers, N. (2017). From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution, History and Anthropology, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2017.1289934}

^{Myers, N. (2018). How to grow livable worlds: ten not-so-easy steps. In K. O. Smith (ed.) The World to Come, Harn Museum of Art, Florida, pp. 53-63.}

^{Solnit, R. (2021). Orwell’s roses. Granta.}

^{Walker, J. (2020). More heat than life: the tangled roots of ecology, energy and economics. Springer.}

^{Pollan, M. Plant perspectives, TED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p54VVLSS6Qk}

^{‍Holdrege, Craig (2013). Thinking like a plant, ‎Lindisfarne Books}

^{Richard Powers (2018). The Overstory, W. W. Norton & Company}

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