Vegetal Futures

Bringing together a diverse interdisciplinary team of academics and artists, this book reveals how plants shape future-making practices across cultures, societies, and technologies, and explores why this matters now.The future cannot be thought of without considering the material contexts in which it is produced, particularly in the context of the climate crisis. This book argues that anticipating and planning for the future needs to be more inclusive of nonhuman work. By focusing on plants and asking what happens when we platform plants as partners in making the future, this explores how vegetal powers support, boycott, or supplant human-centred ventures. Bringing together a global team of authors, Vegetal Futures examines how different forms of governance, technology, practice, and thought associated with plants intervene in the world to shape the future. From fieldwork with Muslim beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to houseplant bio capitalism, chapters cover a diverse range of vegetal subjects across time and place, asking critical questions throughout, such as what resources might be necessary to rethink power relations inherent in species hierarchy, democratising plant and human life? What kinds of institutions would be necessary for such a project, and what are the impacts of such conceptions?This book explains why we cannot attempt to envision the future without plants.