PLANTS

My Focus in 2024: Two “Environmental” Narratives that Threaten Living Ecology

Advocating for plants & their homes

Mariposa Lily (Calochortus sp.). A traditional first food of the US West.

As a plant advocate, I am concerned with the health and well-being of the botanical world. My scope encompasses both living ecology — individual plants, plant species, plant habitat, and cross-kingdom plant relationships (with animals, fungi, etc.) — and also human culture, namely, how we relate to plants individually and institutionally, and what narratives define those relationships.

A “narrative” is a story we tell about a subject. Narratives are mixes of facts, omissions, misinformation, disinformation, conventional wisdom, common sense, beliefs and biases. Narratives are products of culture, and as such, though they are sometimes passed off as scientific, this is never true in whole.

In contemporary industrial society, narratives invariably include corporate or political “messaging” intended to shape public opinion in favor of establishment interests. (From the perspective of the capitalist west, such messaging is called “public relations” when it’s homegrown but “propaganda” when it’s produced in the east or the global south.)

Narratives tend to misrepresent complex issues or events through gross oversimplification and by manipulating…