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Among the Drupes (Elegy for a Wasteland)
Full text linkAmong the Drupes (Elegy for a Wasteland) is an exhibition in communion with The West Toronto Railpath, an emergent ecology at the edge of ruin. Over eight months, I came to know the last remaining grove of staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) and their creaturely kin through foraging for and preparation of pigments. In this essay, I interrogate the biopolitics of the Railpath as a site of ongoing forms of displacement, producing mutualisms between Indigenous, queer and marginalised peoples alongside fated more-than-human others. Through harvesting lively colours, I demonstrate flows between ecological agents that antagonise divides between species and their dooming imaginaries. I draw connections between material art practice and forensic-ecology toward environmental justice for eco-assemblages marked for death by settler-colonial hegemonies. Finally, I demonstrate how art can aid us in bearing witness and, through acts of creative and community-based recuperation, provides hope in times of ecosocial grief.
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Research for this publication was supported by the Social Science and Humanities (SSHRC) Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program.
Towards a Philosophic Appraisal of Plants: Their Metaphysical and Moral Significance
Full text linkPlants pose an intriguing challenge to philosophy, both in terms of ontology and ethics. They occupy a zone of affinity with other animals and human beings, but they are radically alien to these other forms of life. So taking metaphysical account of the vegetal kingdom is, to say the least, a tricky endeavour. Nonetheless, I will attempt to do just that, providing an ontological explanation of botanical beings’ quasi-worlded status. Moreover, I shall mount a campaign to canvass plants’ place in the moral order. We will see that they have a proto-considerability when it comes to illuminating their ethical standing. This means that their interests count for more than the non-considerable properties of stones but can be outstripped by those of other animals. In what follows the range of matters treated is wide, as befits the breadth of vegetal philosophy
Shelley’s Arboreal Poetics of Place and Wordsworth’s ‘Woodland State’
Full text linkWilliam Wordsworth, deemed the ‘Poet of Nature’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, is well known for his affinity with trees. This essay directs attention to Shelley’s arboreal poetics of place through Wordsworthian allusions in Alastor and related compositions. Shelley’s trees branch throughout his various forms of composition, from the drawings of trees in his manuscript notebooks, to rhetorical figures within his poems and descriptions of trees observed in letters. Contrary to Shelley’s apparent rejection of Wordsworth in the Preface to Alastor, the ‘woodland state’ of a related poem, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, underscores the persisting importance of Wordsworth’s place in Shelley’s arboreal poetics
Joela Jacobs and Agnes Malinowska (eds), 'Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-Matter'
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A Journey through Soviet and post-Soviet Plant Entanglements
Full text linkThis essay aims at unravelling Soviet and post-Soviet livelihoods and landscapes by looking at plant entanglements. It is about my own journey as an anthropologist and about leitmotifs I encountered across the post-Soviet space in almost two decades of fieldwork in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Caucasus
Beatrix Potter and the 'Timber Question': Arboreal Stewardship in the English Lake District
Full text linkDuring Beatrix Potter’s residency in the English Lake District, trees were vital to her vision for and understanding of this landscape; much more than this, for this author, arboreal stewardship was bound up with being a good landowner and citizen in this region. This article explores Potter’s views regarding, and approaches to, tree planting, felling and the caretaking of timber on her land during the interwar period of the twentieth century, and at a particular time when the cultivation and conservation of this region’s trees were of national importance. Building on this context, and through a close reading of Potter’s tale, The Fairy in the Oak (1911), this study will explore how similar arboricultural impulses can be identified in the environmental ethics of the author’s earlier, fictional, writings too
Nuclear Clay: Prerequisites for Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste in Soviet Lithuania and Russia
Full text linkAmidst a period marked by growing volumes of nuclear waste and ongoing discussions regarding its management, technologies that utilise natural materials for containment are gaining prominence. This article takes a historical view of Russian nuclear waste management practices with a focus on the role of clay as a natural material for containing nuclear waste. In particular, it explores the use of clay in multi-barrier technology, highlighting its dual role as a protective layer and a resource for managing nuclear safety risks. The siting of the liquid nuclear waste disposal at the Ignalina NPP site in Lithuania (1976–1980) and of solid nuclear waste disposal at Leningrad NPP in Sosnovy Bor, Russia (2013–2018) are the main foci of this article. These cases contribute to understanding nuclear waste disposal siting in the USSR and modern Russia and enable analysis of nuclear waste discourses describing the sites’ geology as a static or dynamic environment within active or passive safety systems