This Books is a Plant: How to Grow, Learn and Radically Engage with the Natural World

Description

Essays from Climate Activists, Plant Scientists, Philosophers and Indigenous Thinkers

“In the soil, we are all the same, merely bodies, merely water, merely cells becoming other cells…”
– Rebecca Tamás

We’ve become used to thinking of plants as things for us to use: as food, tools, resources, or just as an attractive background to our own lives. But it’s time to change our minds.

New research shows that plants can think, plan – and may even have memories. We share our planet with beings whose potential we have only glimpsed. This Book is a Plant is made from paper: it was once part of a tree. But it’s also a seed: the first shoots of a radical new way of seeing the world around you.

Featuring illustrations by Eduardo Navarro. This anthology was produced to accompany the 2022 Wellcome Collection exhibition, Rooted Beings.

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Contents:

• Eduardo Navarro and Michael Marder – Vegetal Transmutation
• Merlin Sheldrake – Before Roots
• Abi Palmer – Self-Portrait as a Mushroom in the Damp and Leafy Forest
• Rebecca Tamás – Strange Soil
• Emanuele Coccia – Plants Know
• Rowan Hisayo Buchanan – Wilder Flowers
• Kim Walker and Nataly Allasi Canales – Bitter Barks: Legacies and Futures of the Famous Fever Tree
• Jessica J. Lee – How to Study the Mosses
• Sumana Roy – A Planet Without Flowers
• Susie Orbach – Eco Revenge
• Araceli Camargo – Nature as Health
• Amanda Thomson – What the Wind Can Bring
• Sheila Watt-Cloutier – Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)
• Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass

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Hardback, 208 pages
Wellcome Collection anthology
ISBN : 9781788166911