On Vegetal Geography: Perspectives on Critical Plant Studies, Placism, and Resilience

Abstract

This study contributes to the emerging subdiscipline of geography, defined as vegetal geography, expanding beyond Critical Plant Studies’ focus on place-based interactions with and adaptations to human systems and ecologies. In this sense, vegetal geography covers political and cultural ecologies and psychogeography of events, highlighted by the recent pandemic, the ongoing threat of anthropogenic climate change, and the re-emergence of global diseases in recent years amid unrestrained consumerism and human niche constructions. These so-called Anthropocene proliferations tend to ramify the relation of place to organic entanglement with the non-organic, human with the nonhuman, which implicates species trade-offs, uncanny alliances, and affinities, via a series of differential synthesis, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, amid increasing climate anomalies. In the process, they engender emergent ecologies where vegetal life, a key Deleuzean concept, provides a critical pivot to interspecies relations in times of crisis and emergency.

Keywords

• critical plant studies
• multispecies justice
• pandemic
• placism
• resilience
• vegetal geography