passive flora reconsidering nature’s agency through human-plant studies (hps)被动植物重新考虑自然的机构通过人类植物研究(hps).pdfVIP

Societies 2012, 2, 101– 121; doi:10.3390/soc2030101 OPEN ACCESS societies ISSN 2075-4698 /journal/societies Article Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies (HPS) John Charles Ryan School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University, 2 Bradford Street, Mount Lawley, Western Australia 6050, Australia; E-Mail: jryan9@.au Received: 5 July 2012; in revised form: 7 August 2012 / Accepted: 10 August 2012 / Published: 14 August 2012 Abstract: Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants— including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intelligence in animals. Yet an emerging body of research in the sciences and humanities challenges animal-centred biases in determining consciousness, intelligence, volition, and complex communication capacities amongst living beings. In light of recent theoretical developments in our understandings of plants, this article proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching flora: human-plant studies (HPS). Building upon the conceptual formation