Public parks play important roles in conserving biodiversity, promoting environmental sustainability, fostering community engagement, and enhancing the overall well-being of residents in urban areas. Nevertheless, finance is needed to maintain and expand the greenspaces in the parks. The current study aims to examine how perceptions of biodiversity loss consequences and park visitation frequency influence the residents’ willingness to contribute financially to tree-planting projects in public parks. Employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework analytics on a dataset of 535 Vietnamese urban (...) residents, we discovered that perceived health loss and knowledge erosion as consequences of biodiversity loss and park visitation frequency are directly positively associated with financial donation willingness. Meanwhile, the perceived economic growth loss was found to be indirectly positively associated with donation willingness through park visitation frequency, whereas the perceived loss of nature-based recreation opportunities exhibits the opposite indirect association. Based on these results, communication strategies focusing on the multifaceted benefits of biodiversity preservation and investments in public parks are recommended to improve urban residents’ financial support to park panting initiatives, accessibility to greenspaces, and connections with nature. These are crucial for promoting an eco-surplus culture that enhances biodiversity conservation and human well-being. (shrink)

This paper reports on action research that evaluated local perceptions and knowledge of indigenous tree planting and management in the Romwe catchment, Chivi District, southern Zimbabwe. The species tested were the overexploited Afzelia quanzensis, important for timber and carvings of sculptures and utensils; Sclerocarya birrea, the marula tree used for wood, bark, and fruit; and Brachystegia glaucescens, the dominant miombo tree species, used for firewood, fiber, and fodder. Participants volunteered to plant and manage the test seeds, (...) while a research team monitored their activities and results for 26 months. For Afzelia quanzensis, the germination rate was 81%, and 69% of the seedlings were still alive after one year. In the case of Sclerocarya birrea, the germination rate was 69%, and the one-year survival rate was 50%. For Brachystegia glaucescens, the germination rate was only 30%, and the survival rate was 31%. The main reasons for planting were to provide shade, to serve as a windbreak, and to conserve and gain individual control over dwindling natural resources, particularly Afzelia quanzensis. Women were generally more active and innovative than men. For instance, they searched for their own seeds or seedlings in the bush when there weren’t sufficient plants. Some participants tried out various indigenous methods of pest and disease control, water conservation, and moisture retention. Group feedback sessions and informal interactions provided the opportunity to share experiences. The participants learned that indigenous trees can be purposefully planted and were not simply a gift from God. Despite the droughts and political instability of recent years, a growing number of people became involved in tree planting during 2002–2003. As a result, there is now greater awareness among the local population of dwindling resources and their future potential. (shrink)

Plant succession is a phenomenon ascribed to vegetation dynamics at the scale of the plant community. The study of plant succession implies the analysis of the species involved and their relationships. Depending on the research done, the characteristics of trees have been studied according to either static, dimensional or partial approaches. We have revised the principal theories of succession, the methods of describing structure and development of tree and relationship established between tree species' attributes and their successional status. (...) During studies of succession, we propose that the profile of plant species be completed by including the organizational attributes of their structure as well as their development dynamics. We suggest an approach to the architecture that gives a general overview of the mode of development, revealing, among other things, that a limited number of architectural models may be found in nature. We hypothesize that community dynamics, in succession, may to a certain degree arise from the dynamic nature of plant development. This line of reasoning is in accordance with the current school of thought on process structuralism. (shrink)

This project explores the extent to which trees can be seen as a solution to global environmental crisis. The physical component of this project involved growing over 300 fruit trees from seed and planting them throughout Mora county, Costa Rica. This report represents the theoretical component of the project, in which the author reflects on the lessons that can be drawn from the act of planting a tree, in order to add complexity to what is often used (...) as cultural shorthand for an uncontroversial environmental virtue. Originally conceived as an opportunity to offset the author’s carbon emissions from a lifetime of airline travel, an examination of the literature reveals the practical ambiguity of this short-term goal. The author concludes that while trees do provide many physical benefits for their surrounding microclimate, including their ability to promote the flow of water, air and carbon, they cannot address our planetary crisis without larger cultural change. The metaphors that trees convey may therefore be just as vital as the physical services they provide. Among these are the necessity of addressing the root causes of environmental crisis, how small microclimatic changes create resilient plant communities, and the way planting a seed offers an alternative to the insatiable search for an action that is “good enough” to save the planet. (shrink)

Michael Marder, a well-known specialist in environmental philosophy and political theory, studied at universities in Canada and the United States, received a Ph. D. from the New School of Social Research in New York, and taught at the Universities of Georgetown, Saskatchewan, and Washington. He conducted research at the University of Lisbon and served as an associate professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh before becoming a research professor at the University of the Basque Country. M. Marder is a (...) member of the editorial board of journal «Telos» (New York), as well as the editor of four book series: «Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy», «Critical Plant Studies», «Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics, and Cultural Studies» and «Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought». Michael Marder works in the phenomenological tradition of continental philosophy. He is the author of books «Grafts: Writings on Plants» (2016), «The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness» (2016), «Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics» (2018) и «Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation» (2020). Most of his philosophical works are focused on constructing a concept in which plants are viewed as beings with their own form of subjectivity. He is best known for the monograph «Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life» (2013). Marder's book «The Philosopher’s Plant (Intellectual Herbarium)» (2014), from which the prologue «Philosophical Herbarium» and the first chapter «Plato's Plane Tree» are taken for translation, is devoted to the relationship between philosophy and plants. The author believes that philosophy did not pay due attention to plants, and seeks to fill this gap. The book contains twelve stories, each of which relates a famous philosopher to a plant or flower (Plato’s Plane Tree, Avicenna’s Celery, Kant’s Tulip etc.), which, according to Marder, allows a deeper understanding of his philosophical ideas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing Without a Head:Plant Respirations in John Gerrard's Smoke TreesOrchid Tierney (bio)About two hours from where I grew up in Invercargill, Aotearoa New Zealand, is a large finger lake called Lake Wakatipu. The lake is nested in the Southern Alps of the South Island and, at the extremes, its body measures three miles wide and fifty-two miles long. The surrounding mountains are haunting in the evenings when the coniferous (...) wildlife is silent, and for as long as I can remember, Wakatipu has been called the breathing lake. I must have read this moniker on a brochure or travel poster in a hotel or a restaurant—I used to visit the area around the lake regularly during the winter months as a child—but according to local legend, it is the beating heart of a taniwha—an ogre called Matau—that causes the lake's respirations. Matakauri, the hero of this particular myth, set alight the ogre whilst he slept in order to rescue his beloved Manata, the beautiful daughter of a local chief, whom the taniwha had kidnapped. As Matau burned, he left behind his heart, which continued to beat rhythmically in the years that followed Matakauri's daring rescue. The myth brilliantly invokes the scientific expertise of the local Indigenous people, for the lake really does rise and fall regularly throughout the day. Despite being landlocked, Wakatipu has an observable seiche, or standing wave, that occurs every 26.7 minutes and results in a tide that rises and falls almost eight inches. Of course, the seiche is the Western scientific explanation for the lake's regular aquatic behavior. The lake breathes because Matau's heart is still beating.Wakatipu's origin myth proposes a respiration that is both wonderfully metaphorical and scientific, but it also raises questions about the embodiments of breath itself. Namely, I'm curious here as to who is an agent of breath? Who and what breathes? Who can breathe easily in the Anthropocene? Who can breathe easily at all? And yet: what an unnecessarily [End Page 14] cruel question this is when so many people nowadays cannot breathe fluently or joyfully in a global pandemic. Over the course of the past two years, the ventilator has become a vexed symbol of the persistence of life, of political incompetence. Of medicalized racial injustice. The lungs that strain against the COVID-19 virus are sometimes the same lungs that have historically struggled against anthropogenic non-viral forms of air pollution. Industrial air pollutants are indicators of systemic racism, imperialism, colonialism, and the uneven urban distributions of risk. Indeed, in December 2020, a British coroner ruled, for the first time in legal history of the United Kingdom, that emissions of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter on the South Circular Road of London were the cause of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah's acute respiratory failure in February 2013 (Laville). Toxic airborne pollution is vile matter that forcibly connects gentle lungs with racialized environments. As Timothy Choy notes, "Air muddies the distinction between subjects and environments, and between subjects. This thickness and porosity rendered by air is part of what makes the air and the airborne such deeply felt elements" (157). We, human animals, are too porous for the heavy industry and traffic routes that fill the air and the softness of our lungs. And so: we know the matter of the air by the smoothness of respiration; we feel the keen politics of the air when breathing is labored.I can point to numerous examples where respiration in the context of human life is fraught. Indeed, the act of breathing foregrounds the buoyancy of humanity and the formations of life. I want to acknowledge and hold those complexities because breathing in relation to human life, especially for populations of color, disabled people, and transgender communities, is not yet guaranteed. And I want to consider additionally, who and what has been excluded from the formulations of breathing more generally, and how breathing itself has been anthropomorphized at the expense of other forms of more-than-human life. As Jane Bennett suggests, "humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky... (shrink)

Urban environmental stewardship and civic engagement -- Several million trees : how planting trees is changing our civic landscape -- Digging together : understanding environmental stewardship in New York City -- Seriously digging : why engaged stewards are different and why it matters -- Tangled roots : how volunteer stewards intertwine local environmental stewardship and democratic citizenship -- Implications for urban environmentalism, the environmental movement, and civic engagement in America.

‘Now that all parts and members of the mortal creature had been fashioned into one, seeing that it must be the creature's lot for reasons of necessity to spend its life in the domain of fire and air and that it was like to waste away being continually melted and emptied by their onslaught, the gods contrived reinforcement for it. Blending a being kindred to man's being but with different shapes and senses, they brought it into life, a second kind (...) of living creature. Trees, plants, and seeds are these, and those among them which are cultivated types to-day have arrived at their mild benevolence to man only because they have been civilized by his husbandry; formerly only the wild kinds existed, for these are older than the cultivated. Now everything that is alive, whatever it be, may perfectly correctly and of right be termed ‘a living creature’. The creature now in question has at any rate the third kind of soul which our discourse told us is situated between the midriff and the navel. This kind of soul has nothing of opining or of reasoning mind, but it has sensation of pleasant and painful with attendant desires. For continually it is subject to every impression. Its manner of birth has not granted it the power to revolve by itself in itself upon itself rejecting outside motion and asserting its own and thus by beholding all things by native endowment of soull to reason out aught of its own concerns. So it has life and is not some second being other than a living creature, but it stays fixed, rooted, motionless, for it has never been granted movement of its own initiation.’. (shrink)

This paper delves into the intricate connections between the Abrahamic religions and the ancient mystery cults, reaching as far back as to Neolithic shamanism. They all unite in a shared pursuit: the quest for divine knowledge. Long before the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the biblical Genesis took on its profound symbolic meaning, shamanic initiation held a distinctly different view of botany. Indeed, It regarded plants primarily for their psychedelic properties, as a medium to perceive “reality” (...) with heightened intensity. However, the sacred Tree has a uniquely numinous character, and their consumption is sternly prohibited by God, in both, the Bible and the Quran. Therefore, this effectively positions all monotheistic religions in an unequivocal distance from their prehistoric origins. More precisely, we can argue that these mythologies are in fact constructed as counternarratives, advocating, primarily for a social ethic (based on the holy writings of the Bible), and evoking secondly a fundamental gnostic quest. (shrink)

Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of plants-in lived experience; in landscape (...) painting; in cultivation and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities? Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey's phenomenology of place and Michael Marder's plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic constitution of plant edges or a child's engagement with moss and the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees. This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our understanding and experience of place more broadly. (shrink)

Plant ethics is a field of philosophy that discusses the moral value of plants, and individual responsibilities toward them. As anthropogenic climate change is likely to have devastating effects on plants, a plant ethics analysis of climate change is crucial to fully understand the extent of people’s responsibilities toward plants. However, surprisingly little has been written on this topic. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the main positions in plant ethics as well as an initial exploration of the (...) following three salient questions concerning plant ethics and climate change. First, how stringent are people’s responsibilities to preserve plants? Second, do people have responsibilities to plant trees? Third, do people have responsibilities to help plant migration? Plant ethics theories struggle to different extent with each of these questions. On all theories, people have great responsibilities to preserve, if not individual plants, at least large forests, and on most theories people have some responsibility to help plant migration. On whether there are responsibilities to plant trees, different plant ethics theories deliver widely different results, from there being no responsibility to plant any tree to there being responsibility to plant as many trees as possible. All three questions are venues for future research in plant ethics. (shrink)

Views of ‘plant consciousness’ in the literature are classified on a scale ranging from descriptions of plant phenomena using consciousness as a metaphor, to explicit statements that plants are conscious beings. The idea of plant consciousness is far from new, but it has received a new impetus from recent claims by psychics to communicate with plants. The literature surveyed is widely scattered and very diverse, but it can teach us much about the views that various segments of society hold on (...) plant consciousness. (shrink)

Tree-chopping in the Aeneid has long been seen as a disturbingly violent symbol of the Trojans' colonization of Italy. The paper proposes a new reading of the poem which sees Aeneas as progressive extirpator not just of foreign rivals but also of his own Trojan relatives. Although the Romans had no family “trees” as such, their genealogical stemmata (“garlands”) had “branches” (rami) and “stock” (stirps), and their vocabulary of family relationships takes many of its metaphors from planting, adoption, (...) and uprooting, while plant life is often described in human metaphors. Imperial historians use the growth and collapse of trees to mark the rise and fall of dynasties; natural historians like Columella and Pliny use metaphors of adoption, abortion, and adultery to characterize the perversions of agriculture and horticulture. It is thus no coincidence that Aeneas' encounters with Hector, Priam, Deiphobus, and others often take place against a background of real or metaphorical trees (tree similes, headless or mutilated human trunks, ancient trees and woods). These encourage us to see an element of dynastic encroachment in scenes that look pious and peaceable but confirm Aeneas' ascendancy and claim to Trojan succession. The Polydorus episode in particular can be read not just as a grotesque interlude but as a nightmare about endlessly reproducing heirs; one loose strand from Priam's house is allowed to remain, while Virgil deals imperfectly with the problem of Aeneas' own successors. The paper ends by re-examining Virgil's account of grafting in Georgics 2 and arguing that it is viewed positively, perhaps in order to cast Augustus' adoption of heirs as a miracle solution. (shrink)

The wasteland and the wilding: the aesthetic of abandoned and reclaimed green spaces -- Green man: human-plant hybrids -- Robotany and aesthetics -- Bio rights: earth of agonies and eco-punks -- Eco-feminism: plants as becoming-woman -- Ungrounding plant life: the after-effects -- On rhizomes and dead trees.

The secondary vascular tissues (xylem and phloem) of woody plants originate from a vascular cambium and develop as radially oriented files of cells. The secondary phloem is composed of three or four cell types, which are organised into characteristic recurrent cellular sequences within the radial cell files of this tissue. There is a gradient of auxin (indole acetic acid) across both the cambium and the immediately postmitotic cells within the xylem and phloem domains, and it is believed that this morphogen, (...) probably in concert with other morphogenic factors, is closely associated with the determination and differentiation of the different cells types in each tissue. A hypothesis is developed that, in conjunction with the positional values conferred by the graded radial distribution of morphogen, cell divisions at particular positions within the cambium are sufficient to determine not only each of the phloem cell types but also their recurrent pattern of differentiation within each radial cell file. BioEssays 27: 533–541, 2005. © 2005 Wiley periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Recent arguments in plant biology that claim to be uncovering the scientific basis for sentience in plants are grounded on assumptions that have not been sufficiently scrutinized. This paper focuses on two assumptions in particular – the semantic assumption that psychological predicates are non-rigid and hence can be extended to plants, and the assumption that Darwinian gradualism is inconsistent with consciousness emerging at a specific place on the phylogenetic tree. We interrogate both assumptions, advocating that a careful semantic analysis (...) of psychological predicates does not warrant their extension to plants on the available evidence, and that gradualism and emergentism, properly construed, are not inconsistent. (shrink)

We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us and they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct, elementary connection that life can establish with the world. In this book, philosopher Emanuele Coccia argues that, as the very creator of (...) atmosphere, plants occupy the fundamental position from which we should analyze all elements of life. From this standpoint, we can no longer perceive the world as a simple collection of objects or a universal space containing all things, but as the site of a veritable metaphysical mixture. One implication of Coccia’s claim is that since the atmosphere of life is rendered possible through plants alone, life only perpetuates itself through the very circle of consumption undertaken by plants. In other words, life exists only insofar as it consumes other life, removing any moral or ethical considerations from the equation. In contrast to trends of thought which discuss nature and the cosmos in general terms, Coccia’s account brings the infinitely small together with the infinitely big, offering a radical redefinition of the place of humanity within the realm of life. Faced as we are with ever more complex and urgent ecological questions, this path-breaking account of the life of plants will appeal not only to students and scholars of philosophy but to a wide range of readers interested in our relation to the natural world. (shrink)

Compositionality in Plant Fixed Expressions Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh, Chinfa Lien, Sebastian Meier Abstract This paper examines fixed expressions that contain plant names in Mandarin Chinese and German corpora. It aims to reveal the compositionality of the concepts of the vehicle flower by means of frame semantics, and then popular vehicles (plant names) and underlying conceits (the associations between vehicles and meanings) of plant fixed expressions in these two languages will be explored. The linguistic frames of flowers show that German focuses (...) on function by adopting usability and edibility of plants in their expressions, whereas Mandarin Chinese perceives outer appearance of plants and compile “visualized” Chinese expressions. People observe and perceive plants from different standpoints and thus compose different concepts in their minds and languages. Chinese vehicles fall mainly into the categories of trees and flowers, while German vehicles are fruits and divisions of plants such as seeds and roots. This confirms the functional and visual perspective of the respective languages and further suggests the individualism of the Germans as well as the holism of the Mandarin Chinese speakers. (shrink)

Grafting: do we ever do anything other than that? And are we ever free from vegetal influences when we engage in its operations? For the philosopher Michael Marder, our reflections on vegetal life have a fundamental importance in how we can reflect on our own conceptions of ethics, politics, and philosophy in general. Taking as his starting point the simple vegetal conception of grafting, Marder guides the reader through his concise and numerous reflections on what could be described as a (...) vegetal philosophy. Grafts are transplants either of a shoot inserted into the trunk of another tree or, surgically, of skin (among other living tissues). They are delicate operations intended to preserve, improve, and modify both the grafted materials and the body that receives them. To graft is to create unlikely encounters, hybrid mixes, and novel surfaces. Moving across disciplinary lines, Grafts combines the lessons of plant science with the history of philosophy, semiotics, literary compositions, and political theory. Co-authoring some of the texts with other philosophers, plant scientists and artists, Marder allows their insights to be grafted onto his own, and vice versa. Weighing in on contemporary debates such as the ethics of biotechnology, dietary practices or political organization, Marder inserts an unmistakable vegetal perspective into topics of discussion where it normally wouldnt be found. Transferring the living tissue of his own texts into another context, he helps them live better, more fully, than otherwise. (shrink)

The artist understands his work as intimately connected with the life and symbolism of plants. Art, thus, demands an attunement to life’s elemental operations, the thrust “into dimensions far removed from the conscious process.” The first part of the present essay aims at recovering what is implied in the imagery of trees, delving into ancient archives of dormant collective memories and immemorial imaginal stratifications. The second and third parts, deploying the re-energized figure of the tree, explore the theme of (...) the relation between art and life, indeed, what Klee calls the “art of life.” By reference to Klee’s 1924 Jena lecture and the artist’s diaries, the discussion addresses the intersecting themes of artistic formation, mindful self-formation, the vital importance of worldly roots, and the transcendent fragrance of flowers and fruits. (shrink)

Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction, and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers, trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants. In this book, Michael Marder illuminates the vegetal centerpieces and hidden kernels that have powered theoretical discourse for centuries. Choosing twelve botanical (...) specimens that correspond to twelve significant philosophers, he recasts the development of philosophy through the evolution of human and plant relations. A philosophical history for the postmetaphysical age, The Philosopher's Plant reclaims the organic heritage of human thought. With the help of vegetal images, examples, and metaphors, the book clears a path through philosophy's tangled roots and dense undergrowth, opening up the discipline to all readers. (shrink)

This article aims to demonstrate how the caracteristics creating the image of the dragon are used for the nomination and the definition of plants. To do so, the methodological tools of the science of the imaginary, of litterature and of linguistic are requirred. At first, the article develops the study of the latine etymology of dragon and its derivations showing the persistent links between the image of dragon and the image of some plants. Then, the article studies the french and (...) botanical names of plants evoking the imaginary of dragon such as the common dracunculus, Dracunculus vulgaris Schott, the tarragon, Artemisia dracunculus L. and the dragon tree, representing trees belonging to the genus of Dracaena Vand. ex L. (shrink)

The narratives of plants offered by science, history, poetry, mythology and direct personal experience are often thought to contradict one another and are thus held as separate. Like leaves of a tree, however, the posthumous botanical works of nineteenth-century American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau gather together the diverse stories that give meaning to plants. Drawing from the concept of multiple narrative streams as a method of writing natural history inspired by Thoreau, this article explores many accounts of (...) the flora of the biodiverse Southwest corner of Western Australia. Botanical science, Aboriginal spirituality, nature poetry and colonial histories offer versions that explain the natural histories of Southwest plants using different, though complementary, perspectives. The meandering together of narrative streams ensures the perpetuity of non-scientific stories and the potential for cross-pollination between disciplines and diverse ways of knowing the natural world. (shrink)

1. In this paper I will explore the moral permissibility of a possible genetic intervention to save the ʻōhiʻa lehua tree from fungal pathogens from two different metaphysical perspectives: western...

This article aims to rethink the meaning of “nature” and the human in Plato, more specifically through some examples contained in the _Phaedrus_, a rare dialogue further away from the city. Phaedrus and Socrates leave Athens on a path outside the walls, past the Ilisus stream and the breeze of the woods, and end up sitting in the shadows of trees full of singing cicadas. What is the meaning of this scenario in the construction o the text? Is it possible (...) to learn from oak trees or insects? The philosophizing of this dialogue passes through the coolness of the shadows of the trees in the hot summer noon. This sensuous topography through the text reveals the writer Plato wary of the enveloping meaning of the living drama between Phaedrus and Socrates. The audience and participation of natural elements, trees and cicadas in the dialogue reveals an involvement of the discourse with the surrounding atmosphere, a special concern of Socrates in his palinode and in his final prayer to Pan. In this dialogue, more than distinct and removed from nature, we think the human being (and reason) immersed in it - in an attempt to integrate a mythological and dialogical search between river, rock, plants, animals, humans, gods and demigods. The image of an overly rationalist and humanist Plato finds in this text a perspective of an inspired writer, a hybrid poet and philosopher, with a mission to restore language and the city to animal and cosmic life. (shrink)

The "tree of life" iconography, representing the history of life, dates from at least the latter half of the 18th century, but evolution as the mechanism providing this bifurcating history of life did not appear until the early 19th century. There was also a shift from the straight line, scala naturae view of change in nature to a more bifurcating or tree-like view. Throughout the 19th century authors presented tree-like diagrams, some regarding the Deity as the mechanism (...) of change while others argued for evolution. Straight-line or anagenetic evolution and bifurcating or cladogenetic evolution are known in biology today, but are often misrepresented in popular culture, especially with anagenesis being confounded with scala naturae. Although well known in the mid 19th century, the geologist Edward Hitchcock has been forgotten as an early, if not the first author to publish a paleontologically based "tree of life" beginning in 1840 in the first edition of his popular general geology text Elementary Geology. At least 31 editions were published and those between 1840 and 1859 had this "paleontological chart" showing two trees, one for fossil and living plants and another for animals set within a context of geological time. Although the chart did not vary in later editions, the text explaining the chart did change to reflect newer ideas in paleontology and geology. Whereas Lamarck, Chambers, Bronn, Darwin, and Haeckel saw some form of transmutation as the mechanism that created their "trees of life," Hitchcock, like his contemporaries Agassiz and Miller, who also produced "trees of life," saw a deity as the agent of change. Through each edition of his book Hitchcock denounced the newer transmutationist hypotheses of Lamarck, then Chambers, and finally Darwin in an 1860 edition that no longer presented his tree-like "paleontological chart.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Everything is Breath":Critical Plant Studies' Metaphysics of MixtureElisabeth Weber (bio)In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin W. Kimmerer contrasts two creation stories that are thoroughly incompatible. One starts with an all-powerful male creator calling the world and its vegetation and animals into existence through words, and forming the first human beings from clay; the other starts with Skywoman tumbling through the (...) air with seeds in her fist from the Tree of Life growing in Skyworld. One ends with the condemnation of woman to give birth in "very severe" pains, with the cursing of the ground ordered to "produce thorns and thistles" as punishment for man who will eat his food only after "painful toil," and the expulsion from the garden; the other ends in gratitude for the collective caring of the animals, with the creation of "a garden for the well-being of all." One includes an original fall from grace whose burden will be passed down from generation to generation; the other acknowledges suffering without a trace of the burden of unearned guilt. One predicts death as a return to the dust from whence mankind was created; the other imagines death as becoming plant and fruit, as becoming gift, a rejoining the spirits of all ancestors, human and others, who surround the living in everything that is. The threat of one is the inexorability of a trajectory "from dust to dust" and the latter's association, with Plato, of something so diffuse that it doesn't merit a concept or idea; the promise of the other is an abiding relationship with all that is, the reciprocity of giving and gratitude, and the gladly assumed responsibility for the "inspirited" land.Kimmerer comments:Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road [...].1 [End Page 117]Cosmologies express collective imaginairies that have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years. The Iroquois story recounted and rendered accessible by Kimmerer is one of countless creation stories that constitute an "important genre in many preliterate traditions" (Zolbrod 5). Kimmerer suggests that even though the Judeo-Christian creation story may have receded into the background of Western collective consciousness, it plays a role in the planet's devastation. What strikes the reader in the story of Skywoman is the centrality of reciprocity, of relation, and, as the woman's name indicates, the significance of the sky. While this might mean, on planet Earth, the atmosphere–the Earth's sky is blue because of the surrounding atmosphere–the implications of the sky's preponderance reach beyond the planetary into the cosmological. The "sky is not what is above. The sky is everywhere: it is the space and the reality of mixture and movement, the definite horizon starting from which everything has to draw itself" (Coccia 218-219) in order to breathe and live.In order to continue to breathe, breathe in the long-term, the long-term, that is, as Barbara Kingsolver put it in one of her poems, "from a tree's / way of thinking" (7), non-human kin's "way of thinking" will need to play a role in humans' self-understanding. Kyle Whyte underlines that it is not enough to respond with urgency to specific ecological crises (fires, flooding, etc.) alone, but, rather, "urgency must be aimed at addressing ecological and relational tipping points together":U.S. settler colonialism, for example, in a short period of time, inflicted displacement, drastic ecological changes, and lost or disrupted relationships with hundreds of species that indigenous peoples depended on through kinship ties for generations. These changes are more extreme than what many nonindigenous persons fear most about moving beyond... (shrink)

Dispersal of biota by humans is a hallmark of civilization, but the results are often unforeseen and sometimes costly. Like kudzu vine in the American South, some examples become the stuff of regional folklore. In recent decades, "invasion biology," conservation-motivated scientists and their allies have focused largely on the most negative outcomes and often promoted the perception that introduced species are monsters. However, cases of monstering by scientists preceded the rise of popular environmentalism. The story of tamarisk (Tamarix spp.), flowering (...) trees and shrubs imported to New England sometime before 1818, provides an example of scientific "monstering" and shows how slaying the monster, rather than allaying its impacts, became a goal in itself. Tamarisks' drought and salt tolerance suggested usefulness for both coastal and inland erosion control, and politicians as well as academic and agency scientists promoted planting them in the southern Great Plains and Southwest. But when erosion control efforts in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas became entangled with water shortages, economic development during the Depression and copper mining for national defense during World War Two, federal hydrologists moved quickly to recast tamarisks as water-wasting foreign monsters. Demonstrating significant water salvage was difficult and became subsidiary to focusing on ways to eradicate the plants, and a federal interagency effort devoted specifically to the latter purpose was organized and continued until it, in turn, conflicted with regional environmental concerns in the late 1960s. (shrink)

Some religious groups and trends of thought in the Turkic world, in Asia and Europe, have for several centuries nurtured an unusual vision of nature in which old animistic and shamanistic beliefs, and even nomads’ Buddhist beliefs, are combined with Arab philosophy stemming from Neo-Platonism and Muslim mysticism (Sufism). This vision, which in fact is not homogeneous since it exists in several variants, claims that all animate and inanimate creatures - humans, animals, plants and stones - are receptacles of the (...) same ‘vital energy’ and are consequently intimately bound up with one another, and may even migrate towards each of their respective modes of being, animal, plant or mineral; hence the existence of stone people, tree people and animal people. This article aims to trace the origins of this vision of nature and look at its current influence, paying particular attention to the ‘ethics of the environment’ (çevre ahlakï) it has inspired in recent years in Turkey. (shrink)

How can humanist principles of respect, dignity, and care inform and improve design for non-human lifeforms? This paper uses ageing and dying urban trees to understand how architectural, urban, and landscape design respond to nonhuman concerns. It draws on research in plant sciences, environmental history, ethics, environmental management, and urban design to ask: how can more-than-human ethics improve multispecies cohabitation in urban forests? The paper hypothesises that concepts of dignity and respect can underline the capabilities of nonhuman lifeforms and lead (...) to improved designs for multispecies cohabitation. To investigate the implications of this ethical framework, we 1) indicate injustices of current management in relation to natural and cultural histories of trees; 2) outline a conceptual framework that includes large old trees as stakeholders in urban communities; and 3) use this framework in a thought experiment with urban trees in Melbourne, outlining comparative design outcomes. Our findings show that the expansion of dignity to include nonhuman life is possible and plausible. Such an extension can justify and encourage design innovation for multiple species and sites. The resulting design practices will lead to improvements by supporting communities of trees at all stages of their life-cycles, including old age, death, and rebirth. This approach requires substantial shifts in accepted thinking and practices including history, ethics, aesthetics, regulation, and education. Design can play a significant role in the necessary transitions by demonstrating tangible and positive outcomes. In this context, history emerges as an essential tool that can extend societal imagination by situating possible future places in the context of ancient and ongoing geological, evolutionary, ecological, and cultural processes. (shrink)

Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intelligence in animals. Yet an emerging body of research in the sciences and humanities challenges animal-centred biases in determining consciousness, (...) intelligence, volition, and complex communication capacities amongst living beings. In light of recent theoretical developments in our understandings of plants, this article proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching flora: human-plant studies. Building upon the conceptual formations of the humanities, social sciences, and plant sciences as advanced by Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, Libby Robin, and most importantly Matthew Hall and Anthony Trewavas, as well as precedents in the emerging areas of human-animal studies, I will sketch the conceptual basis for the further consideration and exploration of this interdisciplinary framework. (shrink)

The notion that plants, as well as animals, have a moral status is examined both in general, and with respect to the status of particularly rare plants that may be deemed to be lacking in general instrumentality, such as the Joshua tree. The work of Passmore, Singer and Santos is adduced, and several lines of argument revolving around preservation, sentiency and attractiveness to humans are constructed.

This paper takes Deleuze's idea ‘to green’ as a qualitative predicate which becomes a rhizomatic event where Jesper Hoffmeyer's ‘plant being’ contemplates through waves and rhythms, hence affects and percepts. The article then brings forward an intertwined group of Chinese ideograms which are designed with plant-radicals, making up an ecosystem towards the establishment of a new Chinese ecocriticism under the banner of biosemiotics. Such an effort will, hopefully, widen the scope and dimension of the new field of environmental humanities, with (...) an emphasis on the scenario of affective attuning to the agency of vegetal life. The main purpose is to put Deleuze and Guattari's form-event assemblage within the stratification of regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus, in order to establish a ‘natureculture’ continuity not only between science and art, but also between a Western rethinking of language/culture and a Chinese ecosystem/ecocriticism. (shrink)

Radial growth has long been a subject of interest in tree biology research. Recent studies have brought a significant change in the understanding of some basic processes characteristic to the vascular cambium, a meristem that produces secondary vascular tissues (phloem and xylem) in woody plants. A new hypothesis regarding the mechanism of intrusive growth of the cambial initials, which has been ratified by studies of the arrangement of cambial cells, negates the influence of this apical cell growth on the (...) expansion of the cambial circumference. Instead, it suggests that the tip of the elongating cambial initial intrudes between the tangential (periclinal) walls, rather than the radial (anticlinal) walls, of the initial(s) and its(their) derivative(s) lying ahead of the elongating cell tip. The new concept also explains the hitherto obscure mechanism of the cell event called ‘elimination of initials’. This article evaluates these new concepts of the cambial cell dynamics and offers a new interpretation for some curious events occurring in the cambial meristem in relation to the radial growth in woody plants. (shrink)

The ability of trees to suck water from roots to leaves, sometimes to heights of over a hundred meters, is remarkable given the absence of any mechanical pump. This study deals with a number of issues, of both an historical and conceptual nature, in the orthodox ``Cohesion-Tension'' theory of the ascent of sap in trees. The theory relies chiefly on the exceptional cohesive and adhesive properties of water, the structural properties of trees, and the role of evaporation from leaves. But (...) it is not the whole story. Plant scientists have been aware since the inception of the theory in the late 19th century that further processes are at work in order to “prime” the trees, the main such process -- growth itself -- being so obvious to them that it is often omitted from the story. Other factors depend largely on the type of tree, and are not always fully understood. For physicists, in particular, it may be helpful to see the fuller picture, which is what this study attempts to provide in non-technical terms. (shrink)

Deciduous trees remobilize the nitrogen in senescing leaves during the process of autumn colouration, which in many species is associated with increased concentrations of anthocyanins. Archetti1 and Hamilton and Brown2 observed that autumn colouration is stronger in tree species facing a high diversity of specialist aphids. They proposed a coevolution theory that the bright colours in autumn might provide an honest signal of defence commitment, thus deterring migrant aphids from settling on the leaves. So far, there have been very (...) few experimental results to support the hypothesis, and tree commitment to phenolics‐based defences has not shown direct protection against aphids. Predators and parasitoids have been found to be the major controllers of arboreal aphids. Indirect defences involve the emission of attractive volatile compounds that enhance the effectiveness of carnivorous enemies. The indirect defence hypothesis is presented to explain low aphid diversity on tree species that are green during autumn. The hypothesis suggests that green foliage can continue to produce herbivore‐inducible plant volatiles and maintain volatile‐based indirect plant defences against aphids until leaf abscission. BioEssays 30:889–896, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The "tree of life" iconography, representing the history of life, dates from at least the latter half of the 18th century, but evolution as the mechanism providing this bifurcating history of life did not appear until the early 19th century. There was also a shift from the straight line, scala naturae view of change in nature to a more bifurcating or tree-like view. Throughout the 19th century authors presented tree-like diagrams, some regarding the Deity as the mechanism (...) of change while others argued for evolution. Straight-line or anagenetic evolution and bifurcating or cladogenetic evolution are known in biology today, but are often misrepresented in popular culture, especially with anagenesis being confounded with scala naturae. Although well known in the mid 19th century, the geologist Edward Hitchcock has been forgotten as an early, if not the first author to publish a paleontologically based "tree of life" beginning in 1840 in the first edition of his popular general geology text Elementary Geology. At least 31 editions were published and those between 1840 and 1859 had this "paleontological chart" showing two trees, one for fossil and living plants and another for animals set within a context of geological time. Although the chart did not vary in later editions, the text explaining the chart did change to reflect newer ideas in paleontology and geology. Whereas Lamarck, Chambers, Bronn, Darwin, and Haeckel saw some form of transmutation as the mechanism that created their "trees of life," Hitchcock, like his contemporaries Agassiz and Miller, who also produced "trees of life," saw a deity as the agent of change. Through each edition of his book Hitchcock denounced the newer transmutationist hypotheses of Lamarck, then Chambers, and finally Darwin in an 1860 edition that no longer presented his tree-like "paleontological chart.". (shrink)

Genetic modification of trees has the potential to change our forests forever, yet there has been little publicly available information or debate on this important topic. Ethical analysis of genetic modification of plants to date has been focussed mainly on food and feed crops and pharmaceutical production. The purpose of this paper is to examine one major ethical issue arising in connection with the genetic modification of trees, the necessity to examine the practice in its full scientific, social, economic, political (...) and environmental context. It is argued that if this is not done, important factors that play a role in a through ethical critique will be overlooked. The analysis focuses mainly on the Canadian situation, but there are implications for other timber-producing nations as well. The paper concludes that a thorough ethical critique must take into account the ends for which biotechnology is being pursued. (shrink)

Climate change and the failure of crops are significant but overlooked events in the history of heredity. Bad weather and dangerously low harvests provided momentum and urgency for answers to questions about how best to improve and acclimatize staple varieties. In the 1790s, a series of crop failures in Britain led to the popularization of and widespread debate over Thomas Andrew Knight’s suggestion that poor weather was in fact largely unconnected to the bad harvests. Rather, Knight argued, Britain’s older varieties—particularly (...) its fruit trees—were coming to the natural end of their lifespans. At a period when Britain was trying to maximize its agricultural land usage, Knight campaigned that his fellow farmers ought to set aside land and resources in order to cultivate new varieties—an expensive and time-consuming procedure—in order to avoid disaster. In this paper, I argue that Knight’s lifelong commitment to his position demonstrates the role played by changes in climate and weather on popular understandings of plant heredity. Further, drawing upon the historiography of Britain’s climate and agriculture, I show that despite reliable weather and good harvests, Knight’s campaign survived for several decades before the continued health of Britain’s trees was finally treated as sufficient evidence to dispense with Knight’s warnings. This case provides a means of thinking about the history of heredity as it is shaped and impacted by changes in climate and local conditions. (shrink)

Where does agency lie in musical performance? How is it expressed? Recent music scholarship has highlighted an increasingly prominent tendency to conceive of agency as not confined to any one individual or type of individual, instead being distributed across diverse individuals that can be found occupying performance situations. . This article uses two ‘percussion’ works from the 1970s by the composer John Cage, Child of Tree (1975) and its multi-performer elaboration Branches (1976), as a foil for engaging with these (...) practical and theoretical musical concerns, and for suggesting some heretofore underappreciated distinctions within the ongoing work on multi-agential performance. (shrink)

Scholars studying the globalization of Australian trees have previously emphasized the rapid natural propagation of Australian trees outside of their native habitats, believing their success to be a reversal of "ecological imperialism" from the "new world" to the "old world." This article argues that the expansion of Australian trees should not be viewed as a biological phenomenon, but as the result of a long-term attempt by powerful states and state-sponsored scientists to select and breed Australian species that could grow in (...) a variety of climates and ecological conditions. Five nonbiological factors largely determined the success of these attempts to grow Australian trees: the abundance or paucity of natural forests, state power, the amount of scientific research directed to planting Australian trees, the cost of labor, and the ability to utilize hardwood timbers and bark. This paper compares the use of Australian trees in Australia, India, and South Africa to demonstrate that biology was not the determining factor in the long-term success of many Australian genera and species. (shrink)

In his recent discussion of Nietzsche’s naturalism, Brian Leiter invokes examples from the world of plants to demonstrate that human behavior and values are causally determined by “heritable psychological and physiological traits,” or what he also refers to as “type-facts.”1 On this view, Nietzsche’s naturalistic project is concerned with explaining how and why a certain type of person comes to bear certain values and ideas just as “one might come to understand things about a certain type of tree by (...) knowing its fruits.”2 Leiter holds that “just as natural facts about the tree explain the fruit it bears, so too type-facts about a person will explain the ideas and values he comes to bear.”3 Nietzsche views the.. (shrink)