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The distinctive capacities of plants: Re-thinking difference via invasive species

July 2015
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40(3):399-413

DOI:10.1111/tran.12077

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Authors:

Lesley Head

University of Wollongong

Jennifer Atchison

University of Wollongong

Catherine Phillips

University of Melbourne

The lower status of plants relative to animals, one of the defining characteristics of Western thought, is under challenge from diverse research in botany, philosophy and the more-than-human social sciences including geography. Although the agency of plants is increasingly demonstrated, scholars have yet to fully respond, for plants, to Lulka's call to attend more carefully to the details of nonhuman difference (Lulka D 2009 The residual humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 34 378–93). This paper advances the concept of the shared capacities of plants, in order to take them seriously in their own terms, and to consider what that means for human–plant relations more generally. We identify four capacities illustrated through plant lives: distinctive materialities; moving independent of humans; sensing and communicating; and taking shape as flexible bodies. Together these provide a sense of plant worlds in which distinct but highly variable plant forms have their own lives, interacting with humans and others in contingent ways. As empirical illustration we explore the adversarial relationship between rubber vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora) and invasive plant managers in northern Australia. In this case biosecurity strategies are affected by and affecting of rubber vine, assembling plants (as individuals and collectives), feral and stock animals, fire and helicopters, human skills and legislation. Recognition of plant capacities challenges us to rethink several concepts often framed against a human norm, including agency, subjectivity and the ethics of killing.

The Western Australian (WA), Northern Territory (NT) border zone. Management focus is on rubber vine outbreaks in the headwaters of Lake Argyle Source: Prepared by Peter Johnson based on 1:100 000 topographic maps

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Rubber vine management zones within Queensland showing the outlier or outbreak targets, the containment line and infestation areas Source: Prepared by Peter Johnson, based on National WoNs Management Groups (2008–2011) and Pest Information Group, Biosecurity Queensland (2008)

…

View from the helicopter after aerial ignition burning, Einasleigh River, Queensland, 2012 (Photo: Jennifer Atchison)

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Figures - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Content may be subject to copyright.

Available via license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Content may be subject to copyright.

The distinctive capacities of plants: re-thinking

difference via invasive species

Lesley Head

, Jennifer Atchison

and Catherine Phillips

The lower status of plants relative to animals, one of the defining characteristics of Western thought, is under

challenge from diverse research in botany, philosophy and the more-than-human social sciences including

geography. Although the agency of plants is increasingly demonstrated, scholars have yet to fully respond, for

plants, to Lulka’s call to attend more carefully to the details of nonhuman difference (Lulka D 2009 The residual

humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 34 378–

93). This paper advances the concept of the shared capacities of plants, in order to take them seriously in their own

terms, and to consider what that means for human–plant relations more generally. We identify four capacities

illustrated through plant lives: distinctive materialities; moving independent of humans; sensing and communi-

cating; and taking shape as flexible bodies. Together these provide a sense of plant worlds in which distinct but

highly variable plant forms have their own lives, interacting with humans and others in contingent ways. As

empirical illustration we explore the adversarial relationship between rubber vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora) and

invasive plant managers in northern Australia. In this case biosecurity strategies are affected by and affecting of

rubber vine, assembling plants (as individuals and collectives), feral and stock animals, fire and helicopters, human

skills and legislation. Recognition of plant capacities challenges us to rethink several concepts often framed against

a human norm, including agency, subjectivity and the ethics of killing.

Key words plants; biosecurity; agency; invasive; more-than-human; Cryptostegia grandiflora

Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research, The University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia

Email: lhead@uow.edu.au

Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (CCCS), University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia.

Revised manuscript received 13 August 2014

[The copyright line for this article was changed on 19 November 2015 after original online publication.]

Introduction

Plants and humans are influential co-producers of the

biosphere, and their mutual futures depend on collab-

orations and conflicts of many kinds, not least in the

significant land management issue of invasive species

control (McGeoch et al. 2010; Mooney et al. 2005).

The need for diverse scholarship on our relationships

with plants has never been greater, but we are

hampered by an entrenched intellectual heritage. The

difference between animals and plants, and the lower

status of the latter, has been one of the defining

characteristics of Western thought since Aristotle

defined animals as those who move and plants as those

who do not (Hall 2011). That heritage is being

challenged in various disciplines, and a body of

botanical and philosophical research now makes the

case for plants to be engaged with as subjects, rather

than objects (Hall 2011; Marder 2011a 2011b 2012).

Geography is an important place to extend these

conversations because of its heritage of approaching

human–plant relations from various perspectives.

This paper conceptualises the distinctive capacities of

plants with the aim of advancing understanding within

more-than-human geography and extending conversa-

tions between human geography and biogeography.

Engaging with human geography, we start from

Lulka’s (2009) argument that there is a residual

humanism in the use of the hybridity concept when

‘nonhumans’are lumped as a singular entity. He called

for a ‘thick hybridity’in which an adequate sense of

difference is maintained. While more-than-human

geographies have demonstrated the agency of plants in

contexts that include trees (Jones and Cloke 2002),

gardens (Hitchings 2003; Power 2005), invasion (Barker

2008; Ginn 2008), crops (Head et al. 2012) and seeds

(Phillips 2013), there has been insufficient attention in

this literature to the category ‘plant’. We draw on new

research involving scientific sensing to conceptualise

plant capacities: the shared capacities of one grouping of

beings called plants, and the differences they bring to

relations with humans and others. We understand plant

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of

the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2015 40 399–413 doi: 10.1111/tran.12077

Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers)

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License,

which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial

and no modifications or adaptations are made.

capacities as relational achievements, the relations in

question enacted with the sun, water and soil, and also

often with humans and other animals. These are

contingent relationships in which categories and forms

should not be reified, even though they may congeal and

be stabilised for very long periods of time.

From biogeography and ecology, we draw particular

attention to recent concepts of anthropogenic biomes

(or anthromes) (Ellis and Ramankutty 2008) and novel

ecosystems (Hobbs et al. 2006 2013a) that, in contrast

to mainstream biogeographic approaches, have explic-

itly brought the human into the system under consid-

eration. The profound transformations and future

uncertainties in the landscapes of the Anthropocene

require such consideration (Lorimer 2012; Robbins and

Moore 2013), but much of the relevant action is

happening at much more local scales than, for example,

seen in anthromes.

The issue of invasive plant management is a signa-

ture challenge of the Anthropocene, and one to which

both human geography and biogeography are making

important contributions (Warren 2007; Webber and

Scott 2012). In this paper we develop a particular case

of rubber vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora), managed as an

invasive species in northern Australia. Presenting a new

empirical study on rubber vine management, we show

how the distinctive capacities of plants are expressed in

particular ways in rubber vine and its relations with

humans, animals and a host of others. Our ethno-

graphic focus on the practice of an adversarial rela-

tionship provides new perspectives on such relations.

As Lorimer has argued, most work in more-than-

human geographies

has tended towards affirmative relations and has yet to focus

on examples in which the interested parties –human and

nonhuman –are engaged in lethal and antagonistic rela-

tions. (2012, 604–5)

Ginn (2013) has recently used the concept of

detachment in considering gardener–slug relationships

in British gardens. As with slugs, many human inter-

actions with plants involve the death of the latter, thus

invoking questions of ethics and responsibility, whether

towards individuals, species or landscapes. The policy

rhetoric of invasive plant management is very much

about human control; however, the experience is often

rather different on the ground, where no practitioner

doubts the agency of plants.

We understand questions of ontology and biopolitics

as ‘a deeply empirical affair’(Hinchliffe and Bingham

2008, 1541), emergent from contingent relations. As

such, we explore one attempt to manage, or live with/

out, plants: rubber vine biosecurity in northern

Australia. Questions of how our conceptualisation of

plant capacities might manifest in other spaces and

times remains critical, but open. The case included in

this paper demonstrates how the capacities of plants,

enacted by rubber vine in relation with others (includ-

ing humans, animals, helicopter, fire and legislation),

challenge us to rethink how agency and subjectivity are

conceptualised.

Plant subjects in human geography

Human geographers and others have contested the

idea and practice of human exceptionalism, and used

this to rethink human and nonhuman identity and

subjectivity (Anderson 1995 2007; Emel et al. 2002;

Haraway 2008; Plumwood 1993; Whatmore 1997).

Feminist thought has been an important part of this

challenge to the constitution of the autonomous,

rational Cartesian subject (Plumwood 1993). If the

human cannot be privileged in ways long assumed,

there are many challenging discussions to be had

around how we develop more ethical relationships with

animals (Whatmore and Thorne 1998), bacteria (Hird

2010) and the indifferent earth itself (Clark 2011). A

somewhat parallel conversation has been happening in

anthropology. Notwithstanding its rich heritage of

ethnographic study of the ways human societies engage

with and conceptualise plants (Geissler and Prince

2009; Mosko 2009; Nazarea 2006), multispecies eth-

nography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) now attempts

to recognise the plants themselves, along with other

nonhumans, as key players.

Recognising the value of such an approach with

plants, Jones and Cloke argue that there is ‘considerable

scope for widening discussions of non-human agency to

embrace beings or entities which are more markedly

different than animals from the human’(2002, 8).

They examined trees to provide a ‘detailed and grounded

account of the non-human agency of particular beings,

things and materials’(2002, 48). In doing so, they

cautioned that a purely relational formulation of agency

risks losing the analytic possibilities of understanding

differences within networks, in the abilities and agencies

of particular beings/things. For Jones and Cloke, this

meant the possible loss of the tree-ness of trees, and

therefore their specific agentic possibilities;

the failure to articulate non-human agency within its own

ecological time-scales as well as in its own places has made it

difficult to grasp the notion of non-human agency within

extant and more anthropocentric views of agency. (2008, 82)

There are connections here to Hird’s (2010, 37)

argument that since bacteria sustain life on earth

through their production of key chemicals (oxygen,

nitrogen, phosphorous, sulphur, carbon), and that

because ‘symbioses are obligate for animals but not

bacteria’,‘these species-defying organisms do precede

relating’. In Hird’s case, relationality seems to include

only relations with humans; however, it is presumably

400 Lesley Head et al.

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possible to conceptualise bacteria –or other nonhu-

mans –as relational achievements without humans

necessarily being involved.

A number of geographers have recently analysed

vernacular human experiences of the agency of plants

(Cloke and Jones 2001; Hitchings 2003; Hitchings and

Jones 2004; Power 2005). Such experiences are char-

acterised by people in both positive and negative terms.

Plants display individual liveliness and beauty (Hitch-

ings 2003), exert calming influences (Hitchings 2006)

and draw (and are drawn into) patterns of care with

people (Power 2005). On the other hand, plants have

lives of their own beyond human control, which can

lead to uneasiness and ‘awkward encounters’when

‘plants are perhaps no longer often thought about in

terms of their capacities and behaviours’(Hitchings

2007a, 372). For Ginn (2008) animals and plants are

both active participants and subversive agents in the

colonial landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand, the

context in which Barker discusses contemporary agency

and changeability of gorse and its management. Barker

argues that ‘gorse itself has interjected’(2008, 1609) in

the way conceptual boundaries are constructed, for

example by acting as a nursery crop for native species.

It may be that Australasian practice has been somewhat

ahead of social theory in its pragmatic engagement with

exuberant life (Clark 2013), yet as our empirical case

shows, much Australian legislation and policy are

distinctly less comfortable with such exuberance.

Like Jones and Cloke (2008), Lulka was keen to ask

whether a purely relational hybridity had gone too far:

‘There has been, it seems, considerable equivocation

about the place of nonhuman corporeality in geograph-

ical writings that has yet to be fully resolved’(2009,

381). He argued that ‘there is currently no depth to the

term ‘nonhuman’. And because there is no depth to the

term, there is no way of conceiving that nonhumans

may act in hybrid ways, largely out of reach of society,

that have nothing to do with humans’(2009, 383).

Adding depth to how we conceive of plants and their

relations, in his close engagement with forest ethnog-

raphy, Staddon found that

At virtually every turn ... forest resources are not just

objects of human intention and action but also subjects in a

much more fully dynamic and fascinating relationship –and

indeed ...the very language of subjects and objects began to

break down. (2009, 72)

It is notable that these independent nonhuman lives

are always easier to imagine with animals than plants

(see for example Risan (2005) on the subjectivity of

cows). Engaging deeply with beings such as plants is

easier said than done. Most of us profoundly back-

ground plants. There are distinctive methodological

challenges in accessing some of the more subtle aspects

of plant agency (Hitchings and Jones 2004). However,

contradicting this approach, it is not difficult to accept

that plants move, assess, evoke, grow, adjust, spread,

use, limit and resist as they enact their own worlds, and

ones shared with we humans (Latour 2005, 72). By

conceptualising the capacities of plants as we do, we

hope to highlight some of these possibilities and

stimulate further conversations about how to consider

plants more fully. Following Haraway’s (2011) advice of

‘staying with the trouble’, we need to spend more time

with plants –differentiating the nonhuman and deep-

ening our studies of them.

The human in biogeography

If human geographies have been rather slow to

specifically consider plants, within biogeography there

has until recently been a converse gap on the question

of humans. Although biogeography would in theory

claim a holistic remit that includes humans as part of

earth’s biota, its usual practice has reinforced humans

as different from and separate to the rest of nature.

Most biogeographers now recognise that the vegetation

patterns they are studying reflect both deep time

evolutionary pathways and the ‘muddy and indecipher-

able blur’of human influence (Mackey 2008, 392), but

‘an outdated view of the world as “natural ecosystems

with humans disturbing them”... remains the main-

stream view’(Ellis and Ramankutty 2008, 445). Palae-

oecological evidence of long-term human impacts

was among the first to challenge that view (Kershaw

1986; Willis et al. 2007; for other exceptions see

Atchison 2009; Ladle and Jepson 2008; Laris 2011;

Pickett et al. 2011).

Two influential bodies of recent work have recon-

figured biogeography and ecology to systematically

include humans, and are particularly relevant to the

discussion of invasive plants. Ellis and Ramankutty

(2008) revised global biomes –a key analytical unit of

conventional biogeography –to explicitly include

human agency in vegetation systems. They character-

ised 18 ‘anthropogenic biomes’(2008, 440) (later

‘anthromes’), based on empirical analysis of popula-

tion, land use and land cover at a spatial resolution of

~86 km

. Examples included ‘rice villages’,‘residential

irrigated cropland’and ‘populated forests’(Ellis and

Ramankutty 2008, figure 1). This is the first systematic

attempt to render visible the extent to which human

presence and processes have become embedded in the

structure of biomes. It has been driven by the bottom

up empirical evidence of a transformed earth, albeit as

the authors acknowledge, there is still much to find in

the human–plant relationship below their smallest pixel

size. Indeed anthromes are understood as mosaic

formations that contain considerable variability

(Ellis 2013). Anthropogenic loss of native species and

anthropogenic introductions interact to increase

The distinctive capacities of plants 401

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species richness in many regional landscapes, even

while global biodiversity is thinning (Ellis et al. 2012).

The second, related body of work advances the

concept of the novel ecosystem:

a system of abiotic, biotic and social components (and their

interactions) that, by virtue of human influence, differ from

those that prevailed historically, having a tendency to self-

organize and manifest novel qualities without intensive

human management. (Hobbs et al. 2013b, 58)

Here the presence and influence of people is

recognised, but within a framework characterised by

uncertainty and surprise, that humans do not control.

That such a perspective is still considered controversial

in mainstream biogeography and ecology can be seen in

the vociferous debates over applying these perspectives

to questions of invasive plant management (Davis et al.

2011; Simberloff 2011). Our empirical focus in this

paper on practices of engagement between plants,

people and others, at very fine-grained scales, draws

both these bodies of literature into conversation.

The lively capacities of plants

In this section we draw mainly on recent biological

research to conceptualise what we call the capacities of

plants. Given the diverse ways in which the concept of

relationality is understood in the literature, we empha-

sise three ways in which we see such capacities as

relational. First, we do not assume humans have to be

part of the relations, although they often are. Second,

relationality can be intra-organism, referring to the

Lake

Argyle

JOSEPH B ONAPART E GULF

Wyndham

Kununurra

Adolphus

Island

reat

ort

Great

Northern

‘El Questro’

quarantine

check point

agricultural

quarantine

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cto

ria

02040 km

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

NORTHERN TERRITORY

Cambridge

Gulf

DARWIN

W. A.

S. A.

N.T.

Qld

N.S.W.

Vic.

Tas.

Figure 1 The Western Australian (WA), Northern Territory (NT) border zone.

Management focus is on rubber vine outbreaks in the headwaters of Lake Argyle

Source: Prepared by Peter Johnson based on 1:100 000 topographic maps

402 Lesley Head et al.

ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2015 40 399–413 doi: 10.1111/tran.12077

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processes constituting that organism. It is not only

about external relations. Third, relationality is not a

synonym for dynamism and fluidity. It can congeal and

solidify in forms and processes that persist over long

periods of time –in the case of plants, extremely long

periods of evolutionary time.

Particular plant species or individuals may have

additional capacities –such as rubber vine’s facility to

burn or to manifest in varied form –but this concep-

tualisation offers a sense of what plants can do,

providing a basis for further exploration. These are

shared capacities that constitute their liveliness and

difference from other beings, and provide the basis

from which we go on to understand their agency and

subjectivity.

Distinctive materialities

Plants are considered by scientists to (usually) share a

set of five capacities or practices that distinguish them

from other beings. First, performing photosynthesis,

plants enacting their capacity to ‘eat the sun’(Morton

2009), is the most profound difference between plants

and animals. All living organisms require carbon in one

form or another for essential life processes like growth

and metabolism, and since photosynthesis is the only

way to convert carbon from inorganic (non-available)

to organic (available) forms, life depends on this

process that –most of the time –is done by plants.

In carrying out photosynthesis, plants trophically

underpin terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems.

They also maintain stable oxygenation of the atmo-

sphere and water availability. Over geological time-

scales, plants drive the carbon cycles of the planet.

Photosynthesis also produces complex sugars and

other compounds, allowing plants to store starch and

form cellulose cell walls –abilities dependent on

multicellular generation. Starch provides energy for

growth while cellulose becomes fibrous, giving structure

and strength to plants. Finally, plants alternate gener-

ations in their lifecycles –or perform sporic meioisis –

during reproduction.

In taxonomy, this set of five

capacities –clearly tied to material forms and relations

–differentiate plants from other beings.

These capacities came together in evolutionary time

long before humans, and consequent plant materialities

have implications for human–plant relations. Plants’

capacity to photosynthesise affords humans the oppor-

tunity to live and breathe, eat and thrive. Plants have

affected the ways our bodies evolved, and continue to

be fundamental to our daily bodily relations. Morton

(2009) argues that we are not so much embedded in the

earth as in the relationship between the earth and the

sun, a notion worthy of consideration in efforts to

decentre humans in human–plant studies. These mate-

rialities also pervade and help shape the capacities in

the following sections.

Moving without humans

As mentioned, Aristotle defined animals as those who

move and plants as those who do not. Immobility

continues to be a widely accepted defining criterion for

plants, including in geography (see Lorimer 2010, 493;

Lulka 2009, 386). However, Hall (2011) has shown

many faults with this logic, founded mostly on failures

to observe actual plants, for instance contrasting

Aristotle’s practices with those of his pupil Theophra-

stus. In geographic discussions of plant mobility, agency

is usually attributed to people, for example in discus-

sions of portmanteau biota and colonial plant move-

ments (Crosby 1986) and in the definition of native

species (Chew and Hamilton 2011). Our point is not to

ignore the significance of human movements of plants,

but rather to also consider the mobility of plants that is

independent of humans (albeit relational with such

things as wind, internal water pressure and angles of

the sun).

To see plants as immobile is to have a very partial view

of what constitutes mobility. Compensating for the

limits of sessile living, some parts of plants move. For

example, mobility during the reproductive phase relates

with the capacity of plants to alternate generations

during their lifecycles. Protective sporopollenin enables

the spores and pollen of terrestrial plants to widely

disperse away from the rooted parent organism, allow-

ing future generations to overcome potentially restric-

tive or difficult local conditions (Kinlan and Gaines

2003). Although the movements of plant parts (fruit,

pollen, seeds) are widely considered to be at the ‘mercy’

of other agents of dispersal (animals, wind, water),

plants capitalise on the movements of others to their

own advantage (Clark 2000). Plants use animal mobil-

ities for purposes of reproduction and more. When lima

bean plants are attacked by herbivorous spider mites, for

instance, they excrete a substance that attracts predatory

spider mites, which then eat the herbivores (Huey et al.

2002, 417). In this move, lima bean plants act, with and

against spider mites, to stop their own destruction.

Even as they are rooted in place, plants move. Since

Charles and Francis Darwin (1881) postulated that plant

movements might be due to turgescence (osmotic

pressure relationships as plant cells respond to environ-

mental stimulus), changing technologies have allowed

scientific knowledge of plant mobilities to become more

detailed. Edwards and Moles (2009) define three cate-

gories of plant movement: circumnutation, tropic

responses and nastic responses. Circumnutation

describes the corkscrew-like radial twining motion of

the growing tips of plants, which all plants do (though at

different rates and for various lifespans). The questing

and grasping movements of pea tendrils, for example, are

well known and easily observed. Response movements,

whether tropic or nastic, can be rapid or gradual,

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rhythmic or irregular. In tropic responses, sensing plants

move toward potentially beneficial and away from

potentially problematic encounters with light, gravity,

structures or water. The mimosa plant, which quickly

collapses its leaves from where it is disturbed, is known

for this kind of response. In contrast, nastic responses

occur when plants react in a non-directional way.

Examples of this kind of plant mobility include the

folding in of leaves at night as part of ‘sleep movements’

(Kiss 2006) or the rhythmic opening and closing of guard

cells around stomatal pores in leaves.

Sensing and communicating

The facilitation of the above kinds of movement

depends on plants sensing and communicating. Inter-

nally, plants communicate through assemblages of

proteins, minerals and chemicals, carrying complex

signals to various cells and tissues (Trewavas 2002).

Over time and through such processes, learning and

memory may develop (Trewavas 2005). The Venus fly

trap, for example, can be said to have sensory memory

similar to animals in its ability to detect, react to and

trap its prey. The rapid closing of leaves (or trap)

occurs when at least two sensor hairs respond to

stimulus and chemicals are released, signalling speci-

fied leaves to close (Ueda et al. 2007 2010). Debates

about chemical signalling challenge our ideas about

passivity, by suggesting that plants perceive, process

and react to environmental information.

In part, plant responses are considered passive rather

than active because human lifetimes provide the refer-

ential framework (Edwards and Moles 2009). At human

timescales, the multiple dimensions of plant agency are

obscured, ‘both more intimate and more abstract than

with any animal’(Morton 2009, 231). If, however, plants

are considered within their own lifetimes and scales,

their responses become active (in sometimes quite

sophisticated ways) rather than passive.

Trewavas (2002 2005) has argued specifically for

plant intelligence to be recognised, referencing plants’

many reproductive, adaptive, communicative, planning

and predictive capacities (see Firn 2004 for a contrary

argument). This debate is significant for showing how

botanists are currently thinking about plant lives and

provides productive connection to social science efforts

to recognise nature’s‘active voice’(see Plumwood

2009). The concept of intelligence has such a strong

connection to human-centred concepts of mind and

consciousness that it is hard to attribute it to other

beings without resorting to a human yardstick. We note

two ways in which plants may stimulate further thought

in this area. First, intelligence is arguably an essential

characteristic rather than a relational one. In our

relational analysis of capacities we are trying to

attend to what plants do rather than what they are

(e.g. intelligent or not). Second, the disagreement

between Trewavas and Firn is partly over whether

plants are individuals, with Firn arguing that plants

cannot be intelligent because they are not individuals.

Animals again provide the reference for what it means

to be an individual. Plants, however, challenge this

sense of individuality, as we now discuss.

Flexible bodies

The fact that plants take many different, fascinating

and sometimes seemingly bizarre forms is a staple of

natural history books and documentaries. Here we are

concerned not so much with differences of form, but

with what this allows us to infer about the plant self or

individual. The way in which understanding of the body

is bound up in understanding the self has been

extensively discussed in feminist analyses, and a num-

ber of authors have extended this thinking to other-

than-human bodies (Atchison and Head 2013; Hitch-

ings 2003; Marder 2012; Rayner 1997).

Plants confront understandings of the body that use

the human or even animal body as reference point.

Plant identity stretches across what Rayner (1997) calls

‘dynamic boundaries’. These boundaries include those

between self and non-self, fixture and indeterminacy,

and individual and collective form. Growth in animals

constitutes the enlargement of juveniles, leading to a

relatively clear delineation of the bodily self. For plants,

however, growth involves reconfiguration of cell ‘con-

federations’(Firn 2004). These dynamic boundaries of

plants often lead to uncertainty in human engagements

with plants, for example discomfort in a London garden

(Hitchings 2007b) or indecision in invasive species

eradication (Atchison and Head 2013).

To summarise then, our argument is not only that

plants have agency (a point well made by others) and

subjectivity (a more controversial proposition) but also

that focusing on plant worlds shows how human-

centred our conceptualisations of agency and subjec-

tivity have been. Thinking more broadly about alterna-

tive modes of mobility, communication and the

individual self, as expressed in plants, challenges us to

open up those larger concepts. These movements,

senses and flexibilities come together to give a general

sense of what it means to live as a plant, but though

these are (mostly) shared by plants, each species, even

each plant, has its own dynamic manifestations of form

and relations –with humans and otherwise. Engaging

with different categories of plant (trees, wheat, seeds,

food) gives researchers different insights. In the

following case, our focus falls on rubber vine.

Living with/out rubber vine in northern

Australia

We focus on the being/s named by scientific taxonomy

as Cryptostegia grandiflora (Roxb) R. Brown (rubber

404 Lesley Head et al.

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vine), a woody perennial in the Apocynaceae. In

biogeographic terms rubber vine is endemic to Mada-

gascar; however, its current distribution is attributed to

human agency, particularly as part of colonial experi-

ments in rubber plantations (Brockway 1979; Meve and

Liede 2002). Like other milkweeds of the Apocynaceae

and Asclepidiaceae families (Farrell 2001), rubber vine

produces latex, an aqueous alkaloid suspension made

in living plant cells. More than 20 000 species of

(mostly) tropical plants create latex, which acts to

‘chemically mediate ecological interactions’(Lewin-

sohn 1991, 64). Providing a coordinated defence

mechanism, rubber vine’s latex –and its secondary

metabolite, rubber –work to reduce herbivory, entrap

insects in stickiness, and seal wounds preventing

infection (Agrawal and Konno 2009). Colonial efforts

to turn rubber vine’s latex to human purposes for

rubber production proved commercially unviable. After

experimental sites were abandoned, rubber vine na-

turalised, spreading across extensive areas including

Haiti and southern Florida (Findlay 2009). Several

factors contribute to rubber vine’s successful spreading.

First, it adapts reproduction to conditions. Rubber vine

flowers opportunistically with rainfall, producing more

pods per vine and more flowering events in wetter years

(Grice 1996). Second, it is prolific, producing large seed

pods with up to 8000 seeds per mature plant per

reproductive event (Grice 1996). And third, it uses

multiple dispersal methods –floating pods disperse

widely in collaboration with flows of water or wind.

In Australia, rubber vine has been recorded since

1875, probably introduced as a garden ornamental into

mining camps in Queensland. It quickly became estab-

lished in areas such as the river systems of the Gulf of

Carpentaria (Palmer and Vogler 2012). It grows on a

wide variety of soil types including saline soils and

across savannah, riparian and coastal habitats with

rainfall between 400 and 1400 mm a year (Palmer and

Vogler 2012). In northern Australia rubber vine has two

growth habits: it grows as free-standing but also

interconnected bushes (or shrubs) where water is

scarce; and along riparian corridors it forms towers of

vine from ‘prehensile’-like whips (ARMCANZ 2001),

climbing and smothering other plants as its vines

intertwine to create thick mats spreading across kilo-

metres of canopy.

Australian biosecurity strategies target rubber vine

as a ‘weed of national significance’(WoNS). With its

dense growth habit, it is considered a threat to

biodiversity in woodland and subtropical rainforest

environments, including Ramsar wetlands and World

Heritage Areas in Queensland (ARMCANZ 2001).

Rubber vine also poses significant costs and risks to the

pastoral (increasing the cost of mustering and reducing

pastoral productivity) and tourism industries, perhaps

the real reason for the resources it attracts under

invasive species governance programmes. Under the

WoNS programme (NRMMC 2007), a national priority

action framework for each species (including rubber

vine) directs funding and guides planning across

jurisdictions, for example in the designation of eradi-

cation, containment and control zones (see Figures 1

and 2). The nature of Australian federalism, in which

natural resource management is a state rather than

federal responsibility, increases the complexity of the

governance challenge and leads to multiple state

classifications and regulatory frameworks for rubber

vine and other invasives.

We are not necessarily arguing that rubber vine-

invaded landscapes constitute novel ecosystems as

defined by Hobbs et al. (2006). There are many

tensions inherent in the concept of novel ecosystems

(Marris et al. 2013), including debate around the issue

of invasives’inclusion. Richardson and Gaertner (2013)

argue that invasive plants and novel ecosystems have

been too loosely conflated, the former not necessarily

producing the threshold changes necessary for the

latter. Nevertheless, many widely discussed examples of

novel ecosystems contain invasive plants, and there is a

live discussion in northern Australian savanna bioge-

ography about whether invasives such as Gamba grass

(Andropogon gayanus) are on the verge of triggering a

shift to fundamentally transformed ecosystems through

their influence on fire regimes (Setterfield et al. 2010).

We do argue, however, that rubber vine and other

invasives must now be understood –both conceptually

and in practice –as part of the ecology of northern

Australia.

Rubber vine now covers an estimated 700 000 ha

across Australia’s tropical north and manifests within 35

million hectares, or 20 per cent, of Queensland (ARM-

CANZ 2001); however, the scale of its distribution

means that it does not show up in either biome or

anthrome analyses. This region of northern Australia is

part of the ‘tropical grassland, savanna and shrubland’

biome and the ‘remote rangelands’anthrome (Ellis et al.

2013, Appendix S3). Invasive species are mapped as

comprising a relatively small (less than 2.5) percentage of

native species (Ellis 2013, figure 1J). Clearly the scale of

such analysis needs to be complemented by more fine-

grained analyses of how the people and the plants

interact on the ground, particularly for a plant like rubber

vine, which is considered highly problematic.

In the following sections we report results from

ethnographic fieldwork with invasive species managers

in northern Australia in the dry seasons of 2011 and

2012, extending from eradication sites in northern

Western Australia (Figure 1), across the Northern

Territory to containment zones in North Queensland

(Figure 2). Interviews were undertaken in Kununurra,

Darwin, Mackay and near Georgetown in the Gulf of

Carpentaria, with government weed officers, scientists,

The distinctive capacities of plants 405

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indigenous rangers, local and state community envi-

ronment groups, and two pastoral station managers.

Both men and women were well represented. Partici-

pant observation of surveillance, monitoring, eradica-

tion and control processes was also undertaken at

several sites. The three following sub-sections reflect

themes that emerged from our analyses of field

observations and interviews. The capacities we have

outlined above as shared among plants are threaded

through these relations of biosecurity, displaying

shifting levels of influence as well as combining with

additional capacities of rubber vine.

Figure 2 Rubber vine management zones within Queensland showing the outlier or outbreak targets, the containment

line and infestation areas

Source: Prepared by Peter Johnson, based on National WoNs Management Groups (2008–2011) and Pest

Information Group, Biosecurity Queensland (2008)

406 Lesley Head et al.

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Appearing, seeing and sensing

Whereas rubber vine senses its surroundings to move

into and around suitable habitats, so managers need to

see and sense these movements. Paul has been a federal

weed officer for the past 20 years, focusing on rubber

vine eradication at the edge of outlying occurrences

within Queensland (Figure 2). Part of his job has been

to help state weed officers coordinate their efforts

across different jurisdictions. He has also played a

significant role in communicating knowledge about

rubber vine management to landholder groups. As Paul

explains, a rubber vine seed takes about 18 months to

germinate and grow to reproductive age, when it can

flower and set seed again. On the very large properties

of the area, this short window of time provides little

opportunity for pastoralists to take notice, let alone

mobilise resources to manage rubber vine. As Paul puts

it, ‘they can’t see it at the moment’. The combination of

relatively quick reproductive capacity and remote

location makes it difficult for Paul to undertake an

effective weed awareness programme. In most cases,

once landholders or managers detect plants rubber vine

has exceeded the ‘outbreak’or outlier category. It

‘suddenly creeps up on you’, and then can only be

managed under more pragmatic ‘control’programmes.

Conversely, climbing vine entanglement takes place

over a longer timescale. Daryl, previously a district

agronomist in Victoria, made his ‘tree change’to the

Queensland Gulf with his family over 30 years ago.

Daryl’s description illustrates the slow process of

rubber vine growing in, and then over, standing trees

and other vegetation. This process is so insidious that it

took his ‘fresh’eyes to really notice.

In the riparian zones at 2 metres [high] there’s a tree it

[rubber vine] can climb ...It might take 10 to 15 years to get

up there and it’s just slowly climbing and not doing much, and

then eventually it gets to the top, because it loves sunlight,

needs sunlight, and it might be two or three little vines that

have done this over time ...Now once they get up there and

they’ve got their castle to sit on, then they just explode and

the weight of the rubber vine plant starts to break the little

branches out of the tree, the top of the tree, then it takes out

the bigger branches and then it starts to seriously damage the

crown of the tree and that’s usually, I say it’s around the

40 year mark, from experience ... There’s nothing clever

about it, it’s just the fresh eyes I think, and I would see

changes occurring and the people that lived there would go,

‘oh yeah, maybe it’s changed a bit’. And I’m thinking, no,

when we came up here in ‘82 I know that that river system

was clean, you know, there was no fringing vegetation. And

10 years later it’s gone 2 or 300 yards out into the open land.

(Daryl, weed manager, land owner, Queensland)

In the north of Western Australia, weed officers

have been (so far successfully) eradicating small

outbreaks of rubber vine for more than 15 years. The

latest detection was made by pastoral station manager

Bob, who noticed the purple flowers and arching whips

of a lone plant just 200 metres from the homestead

yards. Bob’s vigilance for rubber vine was honed during

previous work in Queensland. His keen eyes and a few

phone calls quickly mobilised weed officer Trudy, as

well as Paul from Queensland and the multi-agency

team of weed management staff and rangers. During

our go-along interview Bob plunged into chest-high

grass to show us the single plant. In fact, the vine he

was to show us had been dead (after treatment) for

over a month. It was shrivelled and barely discernible

from the shrub it had been growing over, except to Bob,

who pointed out its distinctive spotted purplish stem.

Humans need a particular kind of mobility to do

their sensing of rubber vine well. Although 4WD

vehicles, quad bikes and boats are all used in weed

management, in some areas helicopters are the only

means of gaining access. In particularly remote areas,

provisions for a number of days or weeks are flown to a

surveillance base location. Although there are partic-

ular risks and higher costs with helicopter biosecurity,

the areas that can be covered by a small group make it a

cost-effective option. Moreover particular weeds –

including rubber vine –are more easily seen from

above (from a low flying helicopter) than from below

(in a vehicle). It is from the air that the characteristic

towers of rubber vine are most easily seen as showy

displays of purple flowers and/or shiny new leaves

against duller background vegetation. However, this is

not a straightforward task: younger plants may not

flower heavily for the first two to three years, and so

may not be visible until they have matured and already

set seed; very large areas may need to be assessed if

infestations are sparsely distributed; and it takes an

experienced set of eyes to know what to look for.

Spotting rubber vine from helicopters is a learned

skill that takes practice in different light conditions.

Paul described this process:

you get a feel for things and at certain times, [if] the sun was

coming from behind you shining on through that canopy,

you’d be able to pick out, well, you’d be able to go and say,

‘hang on, yeah, shiny leaf, yeah, it looks characteristic, let’s

go, yeah, let’s come over this site.’

Interviewer: So there’s nothing else that might be confused

with it?

Oh, there’s quite a few other native species that you can

get very confused with but the distinct characteristics, I

guess this is what we sort of picked up, was about timing in

terms of the seasonal conditions. You’d time your surveys

to suit the conditions on site. For instance if they had rain

now, ... you might do a survey in ... 6 weeks or 8 weeks

time and then obviously the leaf arrangement and that leaf

display, just being a plain green leaf and quite glossy, and

how it sits on that canopy as well. (Paul, weed officer,

Queensland)

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Digital devices operated in the air by the weed

spotters allow for detected plants to be mapped and

gridded. Weed officer Trudy commonly uses the soft-

ware ‘Aussie explorer’to chart each rubber vine

location, aided by a GPS running in the helicopter

cabin. After locating the plant(s), a surrounding area is

‘gridded’and checked to ensure it is rubber vine-free.

Once the plant has been identified, a plan for managing

and surveillance of each outbreak is quickly put into

place. Weed officers now manage –visit and treat –24

sites along these river systems as part of their annual

workplan (running until 2017).

Using various devices to enhance their own seeing

and sensing capacities, these plant managers are thus

responding to the particular materiality and mobilities

of rubber vine –the creeping presence in the landscape,

the gloss on a leaf. These responses involve consider-

able skill, and accumulation of detailed knowledge of

the plant as well as the broader landscape. They must

be maintained over temporal cycles that intersect with

the plant’s life cycle to be effective.

Entangling with others

In the process of embedding itself among other plants,

and eventually becoming the locally dominant vegeta-

tion, rubber vine forms relationships with other nonhu-

mans, including animals. Arthur, a local district weed

officer in the containment zone in Queensland,

described at length how feral pigs and wallabies forage

out on the grassy plains during the day and then shelter

underneath the matted vines at night. According to

Arthur the wallabies have now successfully bred into

very large populations, completely displacing smaller

mammals such bandicoots and pademelon. Additionally

pigs, numbering in their millions, root around beneath

the vines during the wet season when the ground is soft,

discouraging grass growth. These constant disturbance

processes promote the spread of rubber vine together

with other weed species such as Neem (Azadirachta

indica), creating new forest associations among remnant

Eucalyptus open woodland –associations that can slow

the movement of water and promote sediment deposi-

tion along the Gilbert and Einasleigh Rivers.

Stock have also changed their behaviour with rubber

vine’s presence, keenly aware that it helps them elude

mustering. Bob recounted tales of his rubber vine

experiences in Queensland, herding cattle on horse-

back under massive infestations so dense that it was

impossible to herd stock by helicopter. Bob described

to us a number of times when he had chased cattle into

the rubber vine only to be pulled from the saddle to the

ground by the thick twisting mass of whipping stems.

Daryl had similar experiences:

we don’t like to admit it but sometimes they [the cattle]

don’t like us and they disappear into the rubber vine and it’s

virtually impossible to push a horse through it, and if you’ve

got scrubber bulls it’s dangerous. Well, yeah, it is dangerous

on the ground. The boys can get them out but they’ve got to

know what they’re doing and they need to be experienced.

So yes, it can create mustering problems. (Daryl, weed

manager, land owner, Queensland)

In the tangle of vines, where does one plant begin

and another end? For these managers, the mass of

individual plants becomes the collective they have to

deal with, in contrast with other experiences in the

eradication zone where spotting rubber vine individuals

provides the management focus.

Latex as shifting mediator

Depending on the density of infestation, different

combinations of chemical, mechanical, biological and

fire control techniques are used to manage rubber vine.

It is possible to burn rubber vine from the ground, but

for large and remote properties burning can also be

done from the air. We observed aerial burning

demonstrations on two properties in the control zone

in the Gulf of Carpentaria in late June 2012. The

targets for the burn were rubber vine towers on inter-

channel islands along a seven-kilometre stretch of the

Einasleigh River, each tower a once mature eucalypt

tree now standing dead, or collapsing under the weight

of smothering vine. Arthur explained that the aims of

these demonstrations were to restore river access for

the owners’cattle, as well as to convince landholders of

the cost and labour efficiencies of this technique.

Aerial ignition burning allows managers to target

rubber vine towers and is an adaptation of a bushfire

management technique whereby a helitorch is used to

backburn ahead of an unmanaged fire front (ESC

2011). For burning, gelling agents are mixed with

petroleum to create a ‘low flash point, highly volatile

fuel’slung in a helitorch below a helicopter (ESC

2011). This gelled petroleum ignites at about 320°C,

but for rubber vine management the aim is to burn

when vegetation fuel loads and weather conditions will

heat the fire to above 600°C–the point at which the

latex in the rubber vine will ignite and kill the plant.

Early in the morning, we met Arthur and Craig, the

helicopter pilot, on Arthur’s back veranda over coffee.

Annotated topographic maps were spread across the

table; the entrance gates and mixing site were circled,

and the sites to be treated along the river channel

noted. Arthur had checked the weather forecast and

judged it to be pretty good –30°C and a light breeze.

The relative humidity was just lower than the temper-

ature (27%), making it safe enough to burn.

There was no mention of eradication. The bushy

rubber vine sitting away from the river was not to be

targeted; their more open structure makes them

difficult to burn, and setting fire to those further from

408 Lesley Head et al.

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the river also runs the risk that the fire will escape and

burn valuable pasture. Preparation work for the burn

began a few weeks before. Arthur and the owner did

reconnaissance along the various treatment sites to

check vehicular access, mark out a ‘mixing site’for the

helicopter to land and refuel safely, and assess the ‘fuel’

load (or grass cover) underneath the rubber vine

towers. Enough grass cover helps to get the fire started,

but too much will allow fire to escape into surrounding

country. For this burn, the property owner had taken

the cattle out of the paddocks 12 months previously to

get decent grass cover. In the previous week, with the

weather forecast available, a burning permit from the

local fire warden was arranged through the local police

station.

In the following days we watched Craig manoeuvre

the chopper around the towers of vine, angling it so the

ignited fuel dripped from the swinging helitorch onto

the towers below. Plumes of smoke rose steadily, and

within minutes of ignition brown kites came circling in

for a look, posing an additional danger for the

helicopter. Craig flew in widening circles over each

inter-channel island, keeping the helicopter out of the

smoke plume and maintaining visibility. The fuel

canister, filled with a two-part gelling agent mixture

adjusted for heat and humidity, was reloaded three

times during an afternoon’s work.

After burning was complete, we flew with Craig

along the river line –visible in the distance by rising

smoke threaded along it (Figure 3). Although still

smoking, the fires were essentially out. Very little

surrounding vegetation had burnt, but the thick basal

stems of targeted rubber vine were burnt through and

everything on top would now die off. A helicopter and

hundreds of litres of potentially explosive fuel initially

seemed like a very blunt instrument, but we were left

with strong impressions of the targeted and controlled

nature of the burn, and of Craig’s calmness and skill.

William, an ecologist who has been studying the

effects of this burning approach over the past three

years, explained later that the key is understanding the

conditions and how they will interact with the latex.

It’s just burning. But what happens is that when you get sort

of mass destruction it starts igniting, it gets hot enough to ...

ignite ... the latex ... and if you get that ... green rubber

vine will just burn through that, but it’s getting it to that

point in the wet season that was a problem. But you can kill

rubber vine with quite a slow fire. You don’t need a raging

inferno to kill it. So at this time or later in the dry season you

can kill it with a very steady backburn and it will just run

through and the flame heights will be really low and quite

manageable. And really that may not even burn the canopy

at all. (William, government weed ecologist)

The demonstration burns we witnessed will kill as

much as 80 per cent of the vine biomass that was

ignited, which pleases Arthur. He has struggled to

convince the bureaucrats that new methods, more maps

or more meetings are not needed –instead, what is

required are people on the ground and consistent

funding. We learn later that the owner was also happy

with the aerial burning. On his property –average for

the district at approximately 480 km

–a seven-

kilometre stretch of river was done in just three to

four hours, work that might otherwise have taken three

or four men a week of burning from the ground. The

longer term aim of opening up spaces among the vines

to improve pasture grass cover will depend on follow-

up burns in the years to come. A successful demon-

stration then, but managing rubber vine requires

ongoing vigilance.

Rubber vine: capacities and agencies

Rubber vine illustrates the lively capacities shared by

plants, and it does so in its own specific ways. It takes

varied bodily forms, energised by its capacity (and

need) to eat the sun. It lives and takes shapes in ways

beyond relations with humans –for example, in

producing latex that protects from herbivory, enlisting

wind and water to aid its dispersal, or creating the

branching whips by which it grows, entwines and

spreads. Rubber vine moves without humans at scales

from the landscape to individual branches; it spreads

across zones, pulls people off horses, provides refuge

for animals. It senses and responds with various parts of

its bodies. The agency of the plant is clear; rubber vine

is not passive.

The variety of practices demonstrated here show

that people already engage with rubber vine as a

subject. It is read as a threat, and is implicitly

recognised through the need to legislate, both as part

of a group (invasive plants) and as a named individual

species (in WoNS). Humans and other animals live with

rubber vine, adjusting their lives and strategies while

also working to affect rubber vine manifestations. This

Figure 3 View from the helicopter after aerial ignition

burning, Einasleigh River, Queensland, 2012 (Photo:

Jennifer Atchison)

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particular plant has transformed biosecurity practices

in very specific ways, urging on the use of helicopter

searches and fire for instance. From the human

perspective, this management strategy is also only

possible with exceptional skill and technology, in very

particular places. These practices are not used against

other weeds because they would not be effective. The

differences of rubber vine from other plants are clear.

Burning as a management practice is only effective and

possible in this way due to the combustibility of latex

within the plant, in combination with its habit of

climbing and forming dense ‘fuel’concentrated towers

that can be seen and targeted from above. So the

materiality of latex, which evolved in a particular

context, is now used by humans against the plant as part

of their relationship with it –in fact in order to kill it.

The pragmatic human response to the relationship also

recognises that long-term victory is not possible if

conceived only as eradication. Rather, the plant’s

resistance to invasive plant management is acknowl-

edged. Instead, from the human point of view the

relationship is about setting priorities, protecting assets

and adapting to the plants.

Our argument is not that rubber vine stands for all

invasive plants, nor that invasive plants stand for all

plants in discussing relations with humans. We have

drawn attention to the differences of rubber vine from

other plants, and how these differences have drawn

specific human biosecurity responses. However there

are some consistent trends; as an assignee to the

category invasive plants, rubber vine illustrates some of

the contradictions these plants pose to human under-

standings of plant mobility and sensing. When acting as

‘invasives’, plants are understood to be not only mobile

but aggressively so, marching across whole landscapes.

In the process, they marshall a range of sensing and

communicative capacities. Their agency is clear but

unwelcome, and resisted using practices of killing.

Further, our account of rubber vine’s capacities

demonstrates the interplay between a sense of plants

as objects (things to kill/burn/study) and subjects (active

participants in the landscape and in biosecurity) that

reflects challenges to the subject-object dualism in

some more-than-human work. There is much scope for

that thinking to further consider plants.

Conclusions

We have argued that it is timely for geographers to

more systematically explore the differences and simi-

larities of plants enacted with other beings. Drawing on

recent botanical understanding, we have conceptua-

lised the capacities of plants as shared and differenti-

ating, pre-dating humans and changing in interaction

with them. We outlined these capacities as including a

particular materiality; mobility (without human inter-

vention); sensing and communicating; and taking shape

as flexible bodies. To be clear, we do not consider these

or any other qualities to be intrinsic; they are them-

selves relational. Relations can solidify into particular

forms and processes and endure over evolutionary and

shorter timescales. They can also be disrupted, fall

apart and be reconfigured.

These points apply to humans just as much as plants,

so part of the value of such an approach is that it helps

us reflect on our ways of living and knowing. As Kohn

argued, the reason this work matters is not just that it

gives

voice, agency or subjectivity to the nonhuman –to recognize

them as others, visible in their difference –but [that it

forces] us to radically rethink these categories of our analysis

as they pertain to all beings. (Kohn quoted in Kirksey and

Helmreich 201, 562–3)

Plants challenge thinking about agency and subjec-

tivity against a human norm; in contrast to many

animals, plants are so different from us that we are not

at risk of confusion. The point is not that plants possess

agency, but that they enact distinctive agencies –sun

eating, mobile, communicative and flexibly collective.

So far, in the context of invasive plants, human

engagement with such agencies shows an interplay

between object and subject, depending on the circum-

stance.

Rubber vine has helped ground our conceptualisa-

tion –not that each capacity is highlighted in a way that

can be listed, but each is involved and several are

particularly prominent. Rubber vine forces us to

rethink the individual –in a tangle of vines, where

one plant begins and another ends is not always

obvious. It manifests as two very different bodily

collectives and demonstrates strong agency in both. It

is highly mobile –spreading unseen or undetected,

adapting its reproduction and overtaking other plants.

People interact with it as an adversary; a problem to be

eradicated, a species to be regulated, an impediment to

mustering and a non-native.

Smaller categories under the umbrella of plant (tree,

species, seed, invasive) also have ‘unshared’capacities

that must be examined in empirical specifics. We have

shown how they are brought to bear in the wider set of

relations that constitute the management of rubber

vine as an invasive plant in northern Australia. We have

traced the difference that non-human difference makes

in the environmental governance of biosecurity. If

plants were understood not just as things that can or

should be ‘done to’, but rather things that act back –in

partnership and conflict –policy would (and should)

look rather different. Policymakers could first learn

from the experience of practitioners on the ground

where, as our empirical results showed, people are very

conscious of plant capacities and affordances.

410 Lesley Head et al.

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We have extended previous work on conviviality and

mutual flourishing by focusing on an adversarial

example. In fact the ethics of death and killing are

never far from human–plant relations, whether it is

weeding, eating, biosecuring or harvesting. In this way

planty capacities have much to offer ethical discussions

by taking us beyond the avoidance of death as the

preferred baseline. In the rubber vine example, humans

have become very attentive to the ways in which these

plants live and proliferate, as well as altering their own

practices in order to become more effective killers.

Rubber vine is also a killer of other plants and animals,

so it is necessary then to think explicitly about killing

and killability, but in very different ways from a ‘moral

extensionism’argument in which human sentience or

consciousness remains the yardstick. (This argument is

already widely considered problematic in relation to

animal ethics (Whatmore 1997; Wolfe 2008).)

The combination of ethnographic approaches and

methods of botanical sensing used in this paper has by no

means broken free of ‘the magnetic attraction of the

human core’(Hitchings and Jones, quoting Jones and

Cloke 2002). We recognise an epistemological tension in

our case study in that we have approached human–

rubber vine relations through the human lens. There is an

important conversation to be had about whether we can

do otherwise, and much more work is needed in this area.

We consider this tension to be a productive one. The

scale of our approaches –bodily, local, grounded –offers

an important way to analyse the intricacies of practices

and relations within anthromes. It thus helps heal the

traditional biogeographic disconnect between the invis-

ibility of invasives within biomes, yet their conceptuali-

sation as continental invaders. We as researchers –like

invasive plant practitioners –need to expand our ways of

sensing in order to gain further insights into plant worlds.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Australian Research

Council (FL0992397). We thank our many participants

for sharing their insights. Thanks to Stephanie Toole for

assistance in the field. Comments from several anon-

ymous reviewers helped us strengthen our arguments.

Notes

1 Some beings other than plants perform photosynthesis –

for instance, algae.

2 For fuller discussion of the evolution of these capacities,

including exceptions, see Head et al. (2012, chapter 2).

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Society (with The Institute of British Geographers)

Desire Lines as Artographic Crafting: Learning-With Wildlife in Rural Canadian Landscapes

Chapter

Nov 2022

With an artographic disposition, we engage alongside wildlife in two distinct rural landscapes, the far west coast and the northern prairie of Canada, to articulate our theory–practice nexus through ‘desire lines’ that map movements in our situated geographies. Desire lines are known as social trails, or colloquially, as a cow path or goat track, where the width and erosion of desire lines can be indicators of how much traffic a path receives. We extend desire lines as more-than-human ‘sculpted circuits’ to explore often overlooked rural patterns of movement, or in our cases, those lines crafted by animals in our situated and changing environments, namely with deer and squirrels. Our entanglements with desire lines begin with a stance that draws upon implicated social, biological, political connectivity, and questions animal and human animal understandings in turn.KeywordsArtographyWildlifeDesire linesEncounters

Examining the role of minor experiments in French and Catalan eco-communities: Between critique and post-capitalist world-building

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2023

Elisa Schramm

This article explores the role of experiments in eco-communities in Southwest France and Catalonia and focuses in particular on the production of post-capitalist natures in experiments with plants. Drawing on Deleuze & Guattari, it first orders experimental practices (around irrigation) in terms of a spectrum from 'minor' to 'major', emphasizing in particular the generativity of 'minor experimentation' that is often exploratory, tentative, and ambiguous. It secondly argues that it is crucial to consider how experimental practices relate to other non-experimental practices on-site, highlighting the relationship between minor experiments evolving into 'majoritized' or stabilized interventions, that may be subject to processes of 'scaling up.' Thirdly, it emphasizes the importance of approaching minor experiments through a careful attention to 'difference' that emerges, rather than directly critiquing such experiments. By contrast, the outgrowth of such experiments merits critical examination, according to more clearly defined, external yardsticks, by which political ecological scholarship can critically adjudicate the value of such experiments. The article does so by examining the ways in which experiments may be 'captured' by capitalist logics, hoping to positively contribute to a political ecology of experiments that fruitfully combines critique with more positive and hopeful experimentation.

Plants out of place: How appreciation of weeds unsettles nature in New Zealand

Article

Jul 2023

Abbi Virens

Weeds are known as ‘plants out of place’, but how do we come to understand what belongs in place and what does not? Organisms that thrive beyond boundaries of control threaten life that is ‘in place’, or nature. As a threat to life and nature, weeds are transformed into objects of hate and elimination. Exploring the collective hate of weeds helps to untangle the affective dimensions of colonisation. Using the story of the blackberry in Dunedin, both through its settler history and contemporary relationship with urban foragers, this paper describes how weeds have become powerful affective objects.

Seven plant capacities to adapt to abiotic stress

Article

Full-text available

May 2023
J EXP BOT

Abiotic stresses like drought and heat continue to impact crop production in a warming world. This paper distinguishes seven inherent capacities that enable plants to respond to abiotic stresses and continue growing, although at a reduced rate, to achieve a productive yield. These are the capacities to selectively take up essential resources, store them and supply them to different plant parts, generate the energy required for cellular functions, conduct repairs to maintain plant tissues, communicate between plant parts, manage existing structural assets in the face of changed circumstances, and shape-shift through development to be efficient in different environments. By illustration we show how all seven plant capacities are important for reproductive success of major crop species during drought, salinity, temperature extremes, flooding, and nutrient stress. Confusion about the term 'oxidative stress' is explained. This allows us to focus on the strategies that enhance plant adaptation by identifying key responses that can be targets for plant breeding.

Allelopathic potential of root and leaf aqueous extracts of invasive alien plant species, Cryptostegia grandiflora, on germination and seedling growth of Linum usitatissimum and Guizotia abyssinica

Article

Full-text available

May 2023

C. grandiflora has been termed the worst invasive alien plant species. However, its allelopathic potential has not been studied yet. The goal of this research was to study the allelopathic potential of C. grandiflora on the germination and seedling growth of L. usitatissimum and G. abyssinica . Plant specimens and samples of C. grandiflora were collected from the Minjar-Shenkora district, North Shewa Zone, Ethiopia. An experimental investigation was conducted to check the impact of its leaf and root extracts on the growth and germination parameters of the indicated test plant species. The root and leaf samples were extracted with water and methanol (99.85%). Leaf and root samples of 25 g were steeped separately in 250 ml of each of the specified solvents to make the stock solutions. The experiment was conducted in 9-cm-diameter Petri-dishes and laid out in completely random designs, replicated thrice with five blocks, each block representing a different concentration of extract (25, 50, 75, and 100%) and control. Twenty-five seeds of each test plant were placed in a petri-dish along with five ml of each extract. Differences between treatments were evaluated using one-way-ANOVA and Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference (HSD) Test. Results revealed that the inhibitory effect of water extracts of roots and leaves samples was concentration-dependent. With leaf extracts as opposed to root, the inhibitory effect was more pronounced. Hence, when L. usitatissimum seeds were treated with 100% concentration of water extracts from leaf samples of C. grandiflora germination-percentage, seedlings dry-weight, plumule, and radicle length were reduced by 80, 79.3, 73.6, and 79.4% respectively compared to the control. The above parameters also dropped considerably when G. abyssinica seeds were treated with the indicated concentrations. Conversely, the germination of seeds from both test plant species was entirely inhibited in methanol extracts. From this study, it can be deduced that these invasive plant extracts have herbicidal properties. Further phytochemical and molecular study is recommended to identify the active ingredients of C. grandiflora and determine their characteristics. Besides, the integration of identified allelopathic substances as a tool in the management of invasive species is proposed as an environment-friendly option to lessen the deterioration of ecosystem services.

Finding Medieval Medicine Through Archaeobotany: An Ontological Approach

Article

Apr 2023

An ontological approach to medieval archaeobotany could assist in uncovering otherwise obscure evidence of complex human-plant interactions. In particular, archaeobotanical remains could contribute more toward research on medieval medicine and understandings of human and environmental health. This article considers ways in which current archaeobotanical methods and practices may be limiting interpretations of medieval plant remains. We argue that increased immersion in both ontological and sedimentary contexts can improve archaeobotanical research by integrating plant remains with other archaeological and textual evidence. We offer an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework toward broadening the interpretative scope of medieval archaeobotanical datasets, with an emphasis on humoral and spiritual ontologies.

Mehr als Menschen essen – mehr als menschliches Essen. Perspektiven nicht-anthropozentrischer Nahrungsgeographien

Chapter

Jul 2022

More-than-human geographies haben sich im angelsächsischen Raum als wichtiges Forschungsfeld etabliert und in den letzten Jahren auch in der deutschsprachigen Geographie zunehmend an Bedeutung gewonnen. Die Dezentrierung des Menschen wird durch verschiedene Ansätze wie die Phänomenologie, den Pragmatismus, die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, Assemblage-, Affekt- und Mehr-als-repräsentationale Theorien sowie durch praxistheoretische, performative und viszerale Ansätze konzeptionell vorangetrieben. Trotz dieser großen Heterogenität eint die Mehr-als-menschlichen Geographien, dass sie den Menschen als Teil eines größeren Gesamtzusammenhangs begreifen, sich der Welt aus mehr als nur streng rational greifbaren Erfahrungs- und Sinndimensionen nähern und insofern leibliche, affektive, emotionale und sensorische Praktiken, Transaktionen und Intra-Aktionen in den Blick nehmen. Die Autorinnen und Autoren führen in die Entwicklungslinien, Grundzüge und Schlüsselkonzepte der komplexen Debatte ein und tragen so dazu bei, sie systematisch für die deutschsprachige Geographie und interessierte Nachbardisziplinen zu erschließen.

Managing Conflicting Desires in a Garden Plant: Crafting with a Variegated Daylily

Chapter

Nov 2022

In the practical work of managing a garden, one soon finds that gardens are formed through processes that involve actions and strivings of non-humans as well as humans. In this chapter, we approach the relationship between crafting and the more-than-human from the gardener’s point of view. A specific garden plant, the Kwanso Variegata daylily, represents our point of departure. This daylily is known for its white-striped leaves which result from mutations in the plant's gene set. First discovered in Japan in the eighteenth century, it is now found in gardens around the world. However, the daylily is striving to overcome the very qualities that gardeners have found particularly interesting, its variegated foliage. To preserve these qualities, gardeners need to manage the plant, as it slowly strives to return to green. The maintenance of the plant’s appearance requires that humans repeatedly divide and propagate the desirable white-striped shoots. This example shows that crafting with garden plants and maintaining them can include conflict with the plant’s own processes and inclinations. Our discussion is inspired by emergent perspectives on human-plant relations that forefront the capabilities of plants.KeywordsGardening craftsPlant propagationHemerocallis fulva ‘Kwanso Variegata’Co-becomingInvolution

Why Children Need to Read About Plants at a Time of Climate Change

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022
Child Lit Educ

We begin developing our relationship with and for Nature during childhood, and over the last 20 years research has advanced our understanding of human relationships with Nature. However, a focus on human-animal relationships dominates environmental understanding, including through the medium of literature, especially children’s literature. It is critical that children know, engage with and care for plants at this time of climate crisis and this could be facilitated through climate literature. The popularity of children’s climate fiction has increased dramatically in the last few years due to what publishers are calling the ‘Greta Thunberg effect’ – resulting in many more books now available that aim to empower young people to save the planet. However, in these texts, we argue that there is still an emphasis on animal and human consequences of climate change rather than on those of plants and the agency of plants (or lack thereof). We argue it is imperative that children understand not just the importance of human-animal relationships in regard to the climate crisis, but also the fundamental role of botanical life forms in preserving life on Earth. Taking three recently published children’s books of fiction we consider how botanical encounters are represented in these texts, and how this can undermine the perceived environmental importance of plants and people’s relationships with them. Informed by the recent work of Lykke Guanio-Uluru (2020), we consider the position plants play in these examples of contemporary children’s climate literature and encourage a more critical consideration of the place of plants.

Obnoxious Plants and Pestiferous Growths: how figurative language reinforces the management of weeds in Victoria, Australia

Article

Sep 2022

The militaristic metaphors common in public discourses about invasive species have been criticised for promoting combative management approaches and constraining policy responses. But are they really to blame for entrenching a command-and-control approach to managing weeds in Australia? Since 2000, almost every state and territory has introduced new biosecurity legislation encouraging ‘shared responsibility’. Yet, this term remains noticeably absent from new legislation in Victoria. We aim to examine whether public discourses around invasive plants have remained unchanged to better understand how invasive plants have been framed and whether this can provide insight into the lack of engagement with ‘shared responsibility’ in Victorian legislation. This study investigates figurative language used in Victorian newspapers from 1885 to 2020 to describe three invasive plants and their management: Bathurst burr, blackberry and gorse. The figurative language reveals limited acknowledgement of humans' role in the spread of weeds and emphasis on the diverse impacts of weeds on humans. Militaristic metaphors have existed for over 130 years, but are neither the most predominant nor community-mobilising. Overall, figurative language has focused on individual efforts to control weeds, without critical analysis of the inter-relationships between humans and weeds nor having created opportunities for caring or collaborative weed management.

The ecology and management of environmental weeds: foreword

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2000

Invasive alien species: a toolkit of best prevention and management practices

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2001

This toolkit provides an overview, advice by example, and sources for further information on the best management practices for invasive alien species, to assist and direct those involved with biodiversity conservation and land management. An introductory chapter is followed by a chapter on building strategy and policy for national plans. Methods for the prevention of invasive species and the risk-analysis process, and methods for early detection of new invasives are reviewed. Different management approaches are broadly reviewed. The toolkit contains many case studies covering a variety of ecosystems (terrestrial, freshwater, marine), including examples from traditional sectors such as agriculture and forestry, and features many different groups of invasive species: mammals, molluscs, insects, reptiles, amphibians, fish and other aquatic organisms, weeds, trees, and plant pathogens and includes released biological control agents. Whilst the toolkit is global in applicability, there is a small island focus, which recognizes that the impact of invasive alien species on biodiversity is greater in small island systems.

Nature in the Active Voice

Article

May 2009

Val Plumwood

Degrees of Freedom: Living in Dynamic Boundaries

Book

Jan 1997

Alan Rayner

Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in their Place

Book

Jun 2020

Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand

Book

Jan 2001

The traditional image of New Zealand is one of verdant landscapes with sheep grazing on lush green pastures. Yet this landscape is almost entirely an artificial creation. As Britain became increasingly reliant on its overseas territories for supplies of food and raw material, so all over the Empire indigenous plants were replaced with English grasses to provide the worked up products of pasture - meat, butter, cheese, wool, and hides. In New Zealand this process was carried to an extreme, with forest cleared and swamps drained. How, why and with what consequences did the transformation of New Zealand into these empires of grass occur? Seeds of Empire provides both an exciting appraisal of New Zealand's environmental history and a long overdue exploration of the significance of grass in the processes of sowing empire.

Feminism and the mastery of nature

Article

Jan 2004

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900.

Article

Aug 1987

Novel Ecosystems: Intervening in the New Ecological World Order

Book

Jan 2013

Land conversion, climate change and species invasions are contributing to the widespread emergence of novel ecosystems, which demand a shift in how we think about traditional approaches to conservation, restoration and environmental management. They are novel because they exist without historical precedents and are self-sustaining. Traditional approaches emphasizing native species and historical continuity are challenged by novel ecosystems that deliver critical ecosystems services or are simply immune to practical restorative efforts. Some fear that, by raising the issue of novel ecosystems, we are simply paving the way for a more laissez-faire attitude to conservation and restoration. Regardless of the range of views and perceptions about novel ecosystems, their existence is becoming ever more obvious and prevalent in today's rapidly changing world. In this first comprehensive volume to look at the ecological, social, cultural, ethical and policy dimensions of novel ecosystems, the authors argue these altered systems are overdue for careful analysis and that we need to figure out how to intervene in them responsibly. This book brings together researchers from a range of disciplines together with practitioners and policy makers to explore the questions surrounding novel ecosystems. It includes chapters on key concepts and methodologies for deciding when and how to intervene in systems, as well as a rich collection of case studies and perspective pieces. It will be a valuable resource for researchers, managers and policy makers interested in the question of how humanity manages and restores ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.

Re-contemplate an entangled bank: The Power of Movement in Plants revisited

Article

Feb 2010

We review the ways in which two of Charles Darwin's lesser known works, The Movement and Habit of Twining Plants and The Power of Movement in Plants, stimulated 20th and 21st century research findings and philosophies. The legacy of Darwin's work permeates research on plant movement. For example, Darwin's demonstration that coleoptiles and roots fail to bend in response to light or gravity if their tips are removed helped researchers work toward the discovery of auxin and other plant hormones. Darwin's methodical observations on vine twining directions and circumnutation foreshadowed the recent discovery that 92% of vines twine in right-handed helices, regardless of their location on the planet. Finally, Darwin's observation of the similarity between plant responses to stimuli and the responses of lower animals foreshadowed the current debate over whether plants have 'behaviour'. Thus, even Darwin's lesser-known works continue to influence research in the present day. (C) 2009 The Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2009, 160, 111-118.

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