Matthew Hall

It has recently been asserted that legislative moves to consider plants as ethical subjects are philosophically foolish because plants lack autonomy. While by no means the sole basis or driving criterion for moral behavior, it is possible to directly challenge skeptical attitudes by constructing a human-plant ethics centered on fundamental notions of autonomy. Autonomous beings are agents who rule themselves, principally for their own purposes. A considerable body of evidence in the plant sciences is increasingly recognizing the capacity of plants to assess, perceive, and act on their environment. The primary purpose of their doing so is to generate the conditions for their own flourishing. With these plant purposes in mind, it is evidentially inappropriate to treat plants purely as instruments. In this age of environmental crisis, knowledge of plant intelligence and autonomy opens up a new debate on respecting and promoting the well-being of the plants that make life on Earth possible.

The philosopher Michael Marder has asserted that animist engagement with plants involves a projection of human purposes and goals leading to veneration. He has also argued that an extension of a categorical concept of personhood underpins my previous work on plant personhood. This paper draws on the growing scholarship of animist traditions following the work of Hallowell to reject Marder’s characterization of a naïve animist approach to plants. It draws on these insights from animist traditions to outline a relational plant personhood, which is fully realized only in grounded, situated relationships of care that seek to enable the flourishing of plants.

Empathy, and its role in human-human and human-animal relationships has been discussed at length in recent years. Empathy for plants has received little to no attention. In this essay I briefly examine existing theory about human-plant empathy, primarily Marder’s account of a projective empathy. I use contemporary scholarship by Dan Zahavi, as well as phenomenological accounts of empathy, to query this understanding of empathy and to lay the conceptual groundwork for developing an account of empathy for plants in line with Max Scheler’s embodied empathy. In doing so, I sketch an account of the basis for human-plant empathy, including the gestures and behaviors that an empathy for plants may pay particular heed to. The essay concludes by outlining how such an empathy for plants may be developed.

The recent proliferation of human-plant studies are informed by understandings of how plants live. Philosopher Michael Marder has developed a philosophy of plant ontology, founded on notions of modular independence, radical openness and ontological indifference. This paper critiques, and ultimately rejects, Marder’s key concepts, using a swathe of empirical evidence and theory from the plant sciences and evolutionary ecology. It posits a number of positive statements about these aspects of plant being that better align with the scientific evidence base. The implications for plant ethics are also briefly explored.

This essay will examine the polemic and poetic means through which three Indigenous Australian writers discuss the repercussions and risks associated with nuclear power, waste and weaponry as an existential and material threat to the mythopoeic creation stories, totemic systems and landforms which sustain Indigenous Australian belief. This essay will follow the establishment of a media ecology through which discourses of technological harm in Oodgeroo Noonuccal's “No More Boomerang” lay the foundation for Australian Indigenous anti-nuclear activist poetics and highlights the relationship between language, belief and technology. Oodgeroo's [Kath Walker] “No More Boomerang” will be read as a precursor to the experimental expression of Lionel Fogarty's “Foot Walking and Talking – Atomic Confusion” as well as the procedural methodologies behind Natalie Harkin's “Zero Tolerance.” It will be argued that Indigenous-led representations of nuclear weaponry as an ontologic-existential threat can only be properly critiqued when framed through the constructs of race, nationhood and the history of colonization in Australia.

Plants form the basis of life on earth and constitute the bulk of the visible biomass in the biosphere. Exploring cultural relationships with plants is therefore important for understanding the relationship between human cultures and the wider ecosystems and landscapes in which they live. In the “old animism” of Tylor and Frazer, the relationships between animistic cultures and the natural world were characterized as childish, savage and primitive, a stance which many of the chapters in the current volume explicitly reject. In this chapter I wish to complement this work by specifically reappraising similar characterizations of animistic interactions with the plant kingdom. I do so using more current anthropological evidence of human-plant relationships, as well as a substantial body of pioneering research in the plant sciences which demonstrates a remarkable convergence with indigenous animist knowledges of plant …