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Multispecies storytelling in botanical worlds: the creative agencies of plants in contested ecologies

McEwan, C.

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Abstract

This paper argues for engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants to better conceptualise the ethics and contested ecologies associated with biodiversity loss. It focuses specifically on proteas, the iconic species of South Africa's threatened fynbos biome, to explore the possibilities of an ethical dialogue between human and more-than-human diversities, and to consider what might be gained from understanding plants as both agentic in contested ecologies and as storytelling figures worthy of attention. The paper draws on John Ryan’s conceptualization of phytography as a way of engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants. It teases out interwoven botanic and human histories, and the ways in which iconic proteas have written themselves into the narratives of their human interlocutors in the context of European settler colonialism, conservation, floral nativism and post-apartheid nation-building. The case for phytography is developed through an examination of the corporeal rhetoric of proteas in two examples. The first concerns the Mace Pagoda, a protea that resists narratives of extinction by writing back its percipience, agency, and resilience into human stories of anthropogenic habitat loss. The second focuses on botanical traces that result from absence, specifically the non-appearance in recent years of proteas in the Cederberg area of the Western Cape. The paper suggests that absence is a form of corporeal rhetoric through which plants write themselves into narratives of rapid climate change and multispecies loss. The final section of the paper explores questions of ethics that emerge from engaging with plants as storytellers, reflects on the kinds of human-plant relationships that are possible in the context of environmental catastrophe, and examines the possibilities that phytography provides for more-than-human engagements with plant life.

Citation

McEwan, C. (2023). Multispecies storytelling in botanical worlds: the creative agencies of plants in contested ecologies. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(2), 1114–1137. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221110755

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 14, 2022
Online Publication Date Jul 19, 2022
Publication Date 2023-06
Deposit Date Jun 30, 2022
Publicly Available Date Jul 1, 2022
Journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
Print ISSN 2514-8486
Electronic ISSN 2514-8494
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 6
Issue 2
Pages 1114–1137
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221110755
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1202594

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Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).






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