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Arboreal Beings: Reading to Redress Plant Blindness
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Journal Article
Arboreal Beings: Reading to Redress Plant Blindness
2019
Overview
To put this in plain terms, as geobiologist Hope Jahren does in her engaging memoir Lab Girl: A Story of Trees, Science and Love, 'since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new [tree] stumps. A 2016 study on plant blindness indicates that not only do biological factors make it difficult for humans to 'detect, recall and appreciate plants' but that cultural processes can also play a role, for 'language and practices affect the ways people develop and organise knowledge of their environments, as well as, as well as the world views and values they express in relation to other species' (Balding and Williams 1195). Plants were ranked above inanimate beings at the lowest end of the scale, and were followed by animals, humans, angels and God (Gangliano, Ryan and Vieira ix), a ladder from which, writes philosopher Michael Marder, 'both the everyday and the scientific ways of thinking have not yet completely emancipated themselves' (3). With this in mind, this essay explores the ways in which three texts-John Wyndham's science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), Peter Wohleben's work of popular science, The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) and Ellen van Neerven's story 'Water' from her collection Heat and Light (2014)-advise readers on plants and plant science.
Publisher
Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL)
Subject
