Professor Cheryl Mcewan cheryl.mcewan@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Multispecies storytelling in botanical worlds: the creative agencies of plants in contested ecologies
McEwan, C.
Authors
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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