Cultural geography has a long and proud tradition of research into human–plant relations. However, until recently, that tradition has been somewhat disconnected from conceptual advances in the social sciences, even those to which cultural geographers have made significant contributions. With a number of important exceptions, plant studies have been less explicitly part of more-than-human geographies than have animal studies. This book aims to redress this gap, recognising plants and their multiple engagements with and beyond humans. Plants are not only fundamental to human survival, they play a key role in many of the most important environmental political issues of the century, including biofuels, carbon economies and food security. This innovative collection explores themes of belonging, practices and places. Together, the chapters suggest new kinds of ‘vegetal politics’, documenting both collaborative and conflictual relations between humans, plants and others. They open up new spaces of political action and subjectivity, challenging political frames that are confined to humans. The book also raises methodological questions and challenges for future research. This book was published as a special issue of Social and Economic Geography.

Cartographies of Postcolonial Vegetal Politics takes a deep dive into the stratified and rigidly segmented territorialities of Plant Humanities or Critical Plant Studies. It strikes up an epistemic departure from the arboreal structures of “plant-thinking” and subsequently lays out “plant-becoming” in terms of ontophytological thinking revised in alignment with rhizomatics so as to critically design the discursive edifices of postcolonial vegetal politics—the differential grammatology of which stands wedded to the production of the “new” and thus is understood to be able to position vegetality as event-in-(dis)order. Abhisek Ghosal emphasizes the profound importance of Deleuzo-Guattarian grammatologies in pulling up “plant-becoming” from being subjected to a set of rigidly structured models of vegetality. It is by working out aleatory eventualities of postcolonial haecceities, that the rigid “structures” of vegetality constituting the intellectual terrain of Critical Plant Studies are tenably discarded to foreground “n-1” becomings of vegetality—the multiplicities of which can well be sensed by means of reckoning vegetality as deterritorial vector that can facilitate scholars to map the eventual unfolding of postcolonial vegetal politics afresh.

Critical Plant Studies in Taiwan presents a historical overview of vegetal ecocriticism in Taiwan. Divided into 12 chapters, it examines the human-plant entanglements on the island. Covering a wide spectrum of topics, such as the imperial plant explorations, the military casuarina afforestation, the mangrove conservation movement, the ecofeminist rooftop garden, the Indigenous millet restoration, the underground mycorrhizal network in urban Taipei, etc., it discloses the phyto-politics in the historical context of the vegetal materialist condition of the island. Intersecting the poetics and politics of plant narratives, it presents the multispecies plantscapes of the island. The first of its kind, the collection launches the historical and localized critical plant studies in Taiwan.

The first reader in critical plant studies, exploring a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field—the intersection of philosophy with plant science and the visual arts. In recent years, philosophy and art have testified to how anthropocentrism has culturally impoverished our world, leading to the wide destruction of habitats and ecosystems. In this book, Giovanni Aloi and Michael Marder show that the field of critical plant studies can make an important contribution, offering a slew of possibilities for scientific research, local traditions, Indigenous knowledge, history, geography, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics to intersect, inform one another, and lead interdisciplinary and transcultural dialogues. Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art considers such topics as the presence of plants in the history of philosophy, the shifting status of plants in various traditions, what it means to make art with growing life-forms, and whether or not plants have moral standing. In an experimental vegetal arrangement, the reader presents some of the most influential writing on plants, philosophy, and the arts, together with provocative new contributions, as well as interviews with groundbreaking contemporary artists whose work has greatly enhanced our appreciation of vegetal being. Contributors: Catriona A.H. Sandilands, Giovanni Aloi, Marlene Atleo, Monica Bakke, Emily Blackmer, Jodi Brandt, Teresa Castro, Dan Choffness, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Mark Dion, Elisabeth E. Schussler, Braden Elliott, Monica Gagliano, Elaine Gan, Prudence Gibson, James H. Wandersee, Manuela Infante, Luce Irigaray, Nicholas J. Reo, Jonathon Keats, Zayaan Khan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Eduardo Kohn, Stefano Mancuso, Michael Marder, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Elaine Miller, Samaneh Moafi, Uriel Orlow, Mark Payne, Allegra Pesenti, Špela Petrič, Michael Pollan, Darren Ranco, Angela Roothaan, Marcela Salinas, Diana Scherer, Vandana Shiva, Linda Tegg, Maria Theresa Alves, Krista Tippet, Anthony Trewavas, Alessandra Viola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, B+W, Mathai Wangari, Lois Weinberger, Kyle Whyte, David Wood, Anicka Yi

Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, defines, illustrates, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Featuring contributions from distinguished political scientists working in this field, this volume addresses canonical theorists and contemporary environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial volume focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry, engaging both traditions of political thought and the academy. In the second section, the handbook explores conceptualizations of nature and the environment, as well as the nature of political subjects, communities, and boundaries within our environments. A third section addresses the values that motivate environmental theorists—including justice, responsibility, rights, limits, and flourishing—and the potential conflicts that can emerge within, between, and against these ideals. The final section examines the primary structures that constrain or enable the achievement of environmental ends, as well as theorizations of environmental movements, citizenship, and the potential for on-going environmental action and change.

Whether driven by developments in plant science, bio-philosophy, or broader societal dynamics, plants have to respond to a litany of environmental, social, and economic challenges. This collection explores the `work' that plants do in contemporary capitalism, examining how vegetal life is enrolled in processes of value creation, social reproduction, and capital accumulation. Bringing together insights from geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, the contributors contend that attention to the diverse capacities and agencies of plants can both enrich understandings of capitalist economies, and also catalyze new forms of resistance to their logics.

In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.