Plant Responsability and the Politics of Vegetal Care

Coco Neuville: Coco Neuville, research notes, _Forêt Pragmatique_, 2021–2026.

The concept of care has become central to work on multispecies relations. In scholarship with vegetal beings, care sometimes involves a situated attunement or encouragement intended for plants in that it is attentive to their interests and desires, but it also supports projects aimed at standardization, control, and culling of plant life in pursuit of agricultural scalability. Caring for plants is thus a world-making practice recognizable in farmers’ fields, home gardens, and seed-saving networks as well as different imperial, capitalist, and nationalist undertakings. This raises a wider question for multispecies ethics: if care can be enacted across such different relational contexts, what does it take to care well for vegetal beings? This series reflects on the multiplicities of plant care by attending to questions of responsability. Approached this way, responsability may index relations of responsibility in which certain beings are seen to possess a capacity to act with intention and discernment, but it may also gesture toward the possibility for dialogic interspecies response, as proposed by Donna Haraway. Contributions to this series explore vegetal responsabilities and the different "caring" practices they subtend, from attunement and endearment to standardization and abandonment, to theorize human-plant relating across various botanical and agricultural worlds. Attending to responsability unravels a politics of vegetal care that insists on fostering possibilities for relating respectfully in this era of ecological destruction and conservationist zeal.

Posts in This Series

Plant Responsability and the Politics of Vegetal Care: An Introduction

Plant Responsability and the Politics of Vegetal Care: An Introduction

The concept of care has become central to understanding multispecies relations (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Mol et al. 2020; Münster et al. 2021). In work on veg... More

Stewardship and the Difficulty of Shared Responsibility

Stewardship and the Difficulty of Shared Responsibility

On July 25, 2024, farmers, scientists, and officials gathered in Nyankpala, Ghana, to debut Songotra T, a genetically modified cowpea. For over a decade, scient... More

Disease Management and Technical Regimes of Care in a Potato Genebank

Disease Management and Technical Regimes of Care in a Potato Genebank

Every summer, potato diversity overwhelms a greenhouse in Dundee, Scotland. At the James Hutton Institute, the curator of the Commonwealth Potato Collection (CP... More

Eating One’s Seeds: Care and Loss in the Mixe Highlands

Eating One’s Seeds: Care and Loss in the Mixe Highlands

(Spanish translation below) ... More

A Technicity of Care: Yams as Co-Actors in “Abelam” Cultivation (Papua New Guinea)

A Technicity of Care: Yams as Co-Actors in “Abelam” Cultivation (Papua New Guinea)

“One doesn’t enter a garden and start working straight away,” explained Robin. “It’d disturb the yams. You have to go first to the baarë [garden shelter], start... More

Politics of Tuberous Regards in Andean Practices of Agricultural Care

Politics of Tuberous Regards in Andean Practices of Agricultural Care

(Spanish translation below)... More

Muted Meadows: Choreographies of Abandonment and Recovery in the Nordic Arctic

Muted Meadows: Choreographies of Abandonment and Recovery in the Nordic Arctic

(Norwegian translation below) ... More

After Care: On How Frozen Seeds Animate Climate Futures

After Care: On How Frozen Seeds Animate Climate Futures

Inside the underground vaults of the Turkish Seed Gene Bank (TSGB), seeds of popular field crop varieties and their wild relatives lie in wait. Kept frozen at -... More

A Caring Predation: The Loving Perils of Plants Among the Kuikuro (Amazonia, Brazil)

A Caring Predation: The Loving Perils of Plants Among the Kuikuro (Amazonia, Brazil)

A few years ago, while surveying backyard plants in a Kuikuro village in the Upper Xingu, I came across a pequi tree (Caryocar brasiliense) with its base stripp... More

Ultracross Collards and Unsettled Practices of Plant Care

Ultracross Collards and Unsettled Practices of Plant Care

“The more trashy your source material is, the longer it takes to make a new variety.” The North Carolina State University crop science professor’s use of “trash... More

Refusal from the Seed Room Floor

Refusal from the Seed Room Floor

A jar originally meant for yogurt now holds a mix of beans, peas, okra, corn, alongside other seeds that I cannot identify. The scribbled note over blue tape hi... More

Vegetal Response-ability on a Plantation Frontier

Vegetal Response-ability on a Plantation Frontier

Plant response-ability and vegetal care offer a rich analytic for reimagining agency and subjecthood beyond the realm of the human and against the fiction of an... More

Responsable Rice and the Silent Voices of Life

Responsable Rice and the Silent Voices of Life

(French translation below) ... More

A Vegetal Apathy for an Asymptotic Taxonomy

A Vegetal Apathy for an Asymptotic Taxonomy

The last plant my dad named he named after me: Shorea kathleeniana. The plant is a species of dipterocarp, one of the many towering trees that can be found in t... More

Thinking with Minorities: Ancient Weeds and Storytelling

Thinking with Minorities: Ancient Weeds and Storytelling

(Spanish translation below)... More