Paper short abstract:

Contrasting care for plants in a botanical garden and a hi-tech urban farming lab, this paper considers the material semiotic entanglements of plants and humans. On our way to (or away from) a ‘greener’ Earth, this paper will not only reshape our ideas about growing plants, but also about what it can mean to be human in a naturecultural world.

Paper long abstract:

In face of talks about a looming environmental crisis, concerns about desirable ways to live 'together with' nature are spreading widely. Notably, particular consideration is given to practices of food production and environmental management. Within these, and parallel to the current focus on meat production or fishery, forestry and agriculture constitute a field in which much debates, activism, local practices and technological innovations have recently emerged.

Plants have been a bio-geo-chemical force in shaping our planet and our species, while being reciprocally and deeply transformed: like Pollan's apple (2001) that seduced man into being diffused throughout the planet, plants are increasingly intertwining with Earth's 'greener' future. To map different ways of caring for plants, this paper follows the relations between different species, juxtaposing a botanical garden and a techno scientific lab which promises to offer a solution to urban farming through hi-tech environmental chambers and led lights. In the entanglements that care produces, man emerges as an absent/presence: growing plants, humans are hovering as carers, knowers, consumers, masters, and/or eaters. Simultaneously, the plants also stem as critical actors, shaping the ways in which the care (and production) relations afford to grow. In this sense, material semiotics not only allows our ethnographies to have a different grasp of 'naturecultures' and their ongoing entanglements, but also to shape a different understanding of what it is to be human, how and whom with this is or can be done, and what this requires and affords.