John C Ryan, "Planting the Eco-Humanities? Climate Change, PoeticNarrati...

Planting the Ecohumanities explores the role of critical plant studies in elucidating, deepening, or challenging aspects of climate change discourse. Plants are our most cherished and precious foods, medicines, fibers, decorations, and totems, accounting for nearly 99.9% of the planet's biomass. However, we often forget that plants have their own lives to lead, including their desires, comforts, and goals. Due to their sessile lifestyles, silences, ubiquities, and uncanny abilities to regenerate and proliferate, plants can be too often dismissed or relegated to the categories of disposable things, mute materials, unsensing automatons, or aesthetic objects.

The emerging interdisciplinary field of critical plant studies asserts the pressing need to devise frameworks for governing the ethics of human interactions with the botanical world. These ethical frameworks counterpoise anthropocentric tendencies to treat, conceive of, and categorize plant life either as speechless material for consumption or as beautiful objects for sensory appreciation. New understandings of plants—as percipient, intelligent beings with the ability to remember, learn, adapt, and behave—problematize the utilitarian paradigm that conceptualizes the lives of plants as having value only in terms of the "ecosystem services" they confer to other, more sentient living beings.

While bringing the intrinsic rights of plants to the fore, the ethical principles forwarded by CPS research can also trigger the restructuring of discourse, leading to new possibilities for the stories we tell about plants and climate change. Hence, rather than focusing on ethics, this discussion postulates how discourse, in the form of poetic narratives, might shift to reflect—and come to be shaped by—the botanical world.

Considering plants both as primeval sources of carbon and as modern carbon sinks, and as beings inextricably linked to human survival in the Anthropocene, why do they seem to languish in the background of the stories we tell about climate change? And do they in fact languish? Has there been a failure to narrativetivize plants and, if so, what are the reasons for these narrative blind spots that privilege the experiences of animals and humans?

The scope of the discussion will be limited to narratives and, more specifically, to climate change poetry through a topical example entitled the "Keep It In the Ground" campaign. Curated by British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy in 2015, this online anthology of climate change poetry was published over twenty consecutive days in the British newspaper The Guardian. Well-known actors, including James Franco and Jeremy Irons, recited some of the poems, lending greater public impact to what was essentially a narratively- and poetically-based campaign.

Climate change has had significant impacts on plants worldwide, but recent scientific analysis indicates that plants exhibit surprising resilience in response to climatic disturbances. A study at the University of Minnesota found that plants can acclimate to rising temperatures while releasing only one-fifth as much additional carbon dioxide than previously believed. This suggests that with enhanced leaf thermal acclimation, plants are more adaptive and contribute less to climate warming than earlier models indicated.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen also showed that plant gases, or biogenic volatiles, can slow the increase of atmospheric temperatures in the Arctic. When biogenic compounds react in the Arctic atmosphere, they extend the lifespan of the potent greenhouse gas methane while prompting the formation and growth of air particles that cool down the atmosphere. This phenomenon is especially important for global sustainability, as the rate of melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is deeply implicated in the climate change patterns of the biosphere.

The pervasive effects of anthropogenic climate change on all aspects of global plant biology are due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, hotter climate conditions, and altered precipitation patterns. Plant life tends to defy conventional models and statistical predictions concerning the biological impacts of increased carbon dioxide and temperatures, and diminished rainfall. The misalignment between theoretical prediction and ecological adaptation is partly due to the unforeseen complexity of interactions between plants, herbivores, symbionts, competitors, and the abiotic environment.

These studies indicate that the resilience and adaptive abilities of individual plants and whole botanical communities ensure that the implications of climate change are often not those anticipated by climate scientists. Multi-faceted knowledge of plants might also facilitate human adaptation to an increasingly bleak climate future. Biologist Stefano Mancuso uses the term bio-inspiration to denote the application of vegetal intelligence and plant-like networks to the design of technologies and social structures, resulting in sustainable systems that are "networked, decentralized, modular, reiterated, redundant, and green." However, the lives of plants also require recognition, respect, and human engagement beyond their utilitarian value as "a goldmine of solutions" to climate change issues.

Critical Plant Studies is a rapidly growing field of scholarship that aims to explore the lives of plants, their intrinsic value, and the possibilities for dialogical relations between humans and plants in an era of climate change and mass global extinction of floristic species. The field critiques long-standing conceptions of plant life in aesthetics, critical theory, ethics, literary studies, metaphysics and ontology, performance and politics, and other areas of culture, society, and philosophy.

Interdisciplinary critical plant studies research focuses on plant signaling and behavior, including "plant neurobiology" and "plant bioacoustics." This body of science demonstrates the long-term memory and behavior of plants in the context of their learning processes. Experimental results acknowledge plants as highly sensitive organisms that perceive, assess, interact, and even facilitate each other's life by actively acquiring information from their environment.

Plant bioacoustics describes the perception and production of sound, indicating that plants emit sonic data and adapt their behaviors in response to received auditory information. Recent bioacoustic research empirically affirms that vocalization in plants is an active process facilitating signaling in a manner perhaps more efficient than the chemical model of plant communication has allowed.

Despite lacking brains and neural tissues, plants possess complex internal signaling networks, including those involving sound. The intentional production of sound serves an ecological function by enhancing the fitness of the plant in terms of its evolutionary makeup. This constitutes what Anthony Trewavas calls "mindless mastery," a networked and distributed form of intelligence specific to plant life.

Climate change narratives, such as climate change fiction or cli-fi, consider the internal, psychological impacts of climate change and the external effects of social and ecological collapse. Cli-fi thematizes the political consequences of climate disturbance and the challenges to human survival instigated by anthropogenic climate change through recognizable literary forms, including parody, satire, and elegy. Additionally, the emergence of climate change theater dramatizes disastrous climate-related events and their aftermaths.

A broad-ranging and encompassing interdisciplinary perspective on vegetal life is especially important, considering the impacts of anthropogenic climate change on both plant and human wellbeing. By integrating the humanities and sciences, plants can be understood more persuasively as agents acting upon and transforming art, culture, literature, politics, and all activities in which human beings engage.

Ecopoetry, an environmental poetry genre, offers a medium for poets to narrate climate change. Alfred Siewers outlines four features of ecopoetry: (1) traidic overlay, (2) metonymic imagery, (3) time-plexity, and (4) environmental ethos. The "Keep It In the Ground" campaign published online in 2015 aims to augment climate change narratives in the public imagination by focusing on the big picture.

Curator Carol Ann Duffy asserts that climate change journalism and the science on which it is based can alienate the public by rendering the issue devoid of emotional or aesthetic content. In response, the 20-day "anthology of poetry on climate change" features lyrical descriptions by twenty different poets promoting an environmental ethos while poetically expressing personal experiences of mourning, loss, and displacement. However, the project bears a distinctly zoocentric imprint, largely neglecting plants.

Duffy's poem "Parliament" is characteristic of the unconscious privileging of the zoological over the botanical in climate change narratives. The poem opens with the lines: "Then in the writers' wood / every bird with a name in the world / crowded the leafless trees." An array of bird voices and affects follow: owls grieve, magpies mock, rooks curse, cormorants speak, woodpeckers heckle, hawks swear, and nightingales intone. The poem concludes with "the golden plover, / and the albatross / telling of Arctic ice / as the cold, hard moon calved from the earth" (Duffy, 2015b, pp. 49–52).

The analysis is not intended as an indictment of Duffy's poem, the campaign, nor the genre of ecopoetry with its vaulted principles of environmental ethics and vision of ecological justice for all beings—floral, fungal, faunal. Rather, the author wishes to call attention to a predisposition in poetic works and the majority of other narrative forms to relegate vegetal life to the background of the stories we tell about climate change—as the somewhat living, somewhat dead setting for animalistic dramas in the tragic context of climate change.

The characterization of plants as secret or cryptic comes with the risk of marginalizing their lives as well as our responsibility for their futures as sentient non-human beings impacted by climate disturbance yet also adapting in ways specific to their vegetality. These narrative patterns persist in poet Alice Oswald's hydrologically attuned "Vertigo," a perceptive, delicate, and imaginative elucidation of the "two minute life of rain."

From a critical plant studies perspective, what is missing from Oswald's poem is a sense for the ecological memories between rain, animals, plants, and other beings where all contribute their percipience to the construction of the narrative. As the science of plant signaling and behavior indicates, it is not a flight of fancy or transgression against Western epistemology for plants to speak, remember, learn, experience excitation, or express pain.

Climate change narratives often neglect the perspective of plants, which is a crucial aspect of understanding the impacts on animals and humans. Poetic narratives and other genres can engage with the climatically altered lives of plants in relation to emerging scientific research into their floristic abilities. However, no single storied instance, such as a poem or novel, should or can do everything, resulting in a communion of subjects. In an era of exponentially intensifying climate change, species loss, and ecocultural disintegration, it is urgent that our narratives begin to intergrade with the agencies of plants and for our environmental consciousness to turn more concertedly toward the vegetal world.

Critical plant studies can shift the peripheral emphasis on the vegetal world in climate change narratives by bringing plants to the foreground as agents with their own modes of adaptation to and subjective experiences of environmental disturbance in the Anthropocene. This can be seen in John Wyndham's post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids (1986), where bioengineered triffid plants exhibit aggressive forms of movement and communication, or Louise Glück's Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, The Wild Iris (1992), presented almost entirely from the perspectives of garden plants who speak in the first person about their lives.

CPS can ground climate change narratives in the substance of the botanical world, transforming the abstracted rhetoric of statistical predictions and scientific models into evocative material realities that affect us on a personal, emotive level. The mediation of the embodiment of plants in narratives can mirror back to us our utter physical, psychological, and spiritual interdependence with vegetal life during the ecologically unstable era we find ourselves in.

Conducted attention to vegetality in narratives can interject sensuous specificity, counterbalancing and bringing down to earth the immense scale and abstract nature of climate change as it is theorized in many forms of discourse. The powers of plant scents, tastes, sensations, sounds, and sights concretize the phenomenological effects of climate change as a hyperobject while evoking our affective states in dialogic relation to other organisms.

Plants compel us to consider the dialectics of climate change and prompt us toward our own forms of social and personal adaptation. As both ancient sources and modern sinks of carbon, the vegetal mode of being can accommodate the messiness of human-plant-earth-animal-biosphere-time entanglements. Such a dialectics can enable us to conceive of climate change in terms that resist monologic practices, rigid categorizations, and unfounded expectations.

In conclusion, critical plant studies can enhance the stories circulating in the public imagination about climate change and provoke debate, action, and reflection through the invigorated understandings of the botanical world offered by CPS. This includes the increased representation of plant life, plant ethics, and vegetal intelligence in climate change narratives, but also involves the intrinsic reshaping of narratives into distinctly vegetal forms.