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Radical Botany
Radical Botany uncovers a speculative tradition that conjures new languages to grasp the life of plants in all its specificity and vigor. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. The book traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants within literature and art for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought.
eBook
Radical Botany
It explores the centrality of plants and their mode of life to western modernity.
It reveals the way in which plants have participated in the effort to envision a future for animate life and humankind. It intervenes in the recent field of plant studies by showing the long history informing the contemporary recognition of plant liveliness and vitality.
Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants' liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end,Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity. The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism's manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction. A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos. This book shows the importance of plants and plant life to speculative art, literature, and philosophy.
eBook
The caretaker of Lorne Field
Jack Durkin is the ninth generation of Durkins who have for nearly 300 years weeded Lorne Field. It's an important job, though no one else seems to realize it. For, if the field is left untended, a horrific monster called an Aukowie will grow---a monster capable of taking over the entirety of America in just two weeks. Or so it is said ....
Book
Libertine Botany and Vegetal Modernity
The first western plant fiction appears with the waning of the Renaissance (and may be considered one of the earliest forms of science fiction more generally). While the Aristotelian endorsement of vegetal ensoulment gradually falls out of favor as a natural philosophical approach to plants, this chapter shows that the autonomous liveliness of the plant inherent in the Aristotelian notion of vegetative psūkē is reawakened from its scholastic slumber by two authors: Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641) and Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), both belonging to a circle of libertins érudits. The authors investigate how the botanically oriented texts of La Brosse and Cyrano generate an eclectic combination of proto-scientific ideas, borrowed from traditions spanning atomism to alchemy, to significantly increase the animatedness of the plant. “Freed” from the confines of metaphysics by scientific thought, the plant penetrates into the domain of literature. The plant is thus not only present but takes pride of place at one of the points of origin of science fiction.
Book Chapter
Forest of wonders
When Raffa makes a cure from a rare crimson vine he finds deep in the forbidden forest, the bat he saves transforms into something much more.
Book
The Central Role of Soil Organic Matter in Soil Fertility and Carbon Storage
The aim of the paper is to give an overview on the chemistry of soil organic carbon (SOC) affecting nutrient availability, the emission of greenhouse gases and detoxifying harmful substances in soil. Humic substances represent the stable part of SOC, accounting for between 50 and more than 80% of organically bound carbon in soil. Humic substances strongly affect the soil solution concentration of several plant nutrients and may increase P-, Fe-, and Cu- solubility, thereby increasing their plant availability. Soil organic carbon, mainly humic substances, can detoxify monomeric Al in acid soils, can strongly bind toxic heavy metals, making them unavailable to the plant roots, and may strongly bind a vast variety of harmful organic pollutants. Increasing SOC is an important goal in agriculture. The inclusion of mixtures of semi-perennial plant species and cultivars may strongly increase SOC and humic substance content in soils. To increase SOC, farmyard manure and its rotted or composted forms are superior compared to the separate application of straw and slurry to soil. The storage of carbon, mainly in organic form, in soils is very important in the context of the emission of greenhouse gases. Worldwide, soils release about 10 times more greenhouse gases compared to fossil fuel combustion. Small increments in SOC worldwide will strongly affect the concentration of atmospheric CO2. The public discussion on soil fertility and greenhouse gas emissionshas been politically controlled in a way that leaves the important and positive contribution of soil organic carbon and mainly humic substances partly misinterpreted and partly underestimated.
Journal Article
The garden crew
Develops reading skills through games and a fictional story about a group of students who plant and tend a garden, with the help of their teacher, and finally have a big feast with all the food they have grown.
Book
The Wood Within
The global environmental challenges we face today necessitate a reconciliation between man and all beings that he once labeled monstrous: women, animals, plants. Modern fantasy literature is a potential contact zone with these culturally constructed Others. The paper argues that Robert Holdstock’s Mythago novels offer a redefinition of the human through a corporeal reintegration of the vegetal. Based on Dawn Keetley’s theses of plant horror, vegetal “deathlessness” is defined as a plant’s ability to blur the anthropocentric dichotomy of life and death. Holdstock heavily relies on vegetal deathlessness throughout the Mythago texts: the vegetal physically enters the protagonist’s body, stretching and transforming it beyond the limits of human time and space. The result is a hybrid entity enriched by the more-than-human experience. Through the close reading of the Mythago novels, the paper intends to reveal that despite this mutual trespassing, humans and plants are interdependent in their endeavor to maintain the landscape. (MR)
Journal Article