Catriona Sandilands: Botanical colonialism and biocultural histories (ep362)
“We sometimes forget that the knowledge systems we use to conceptualize the world are not necessarily exactly the same thing as the world that we’re conceptualizing. We mistake the model of the model for the thing that is being modeled. We mistake the map for the territory. We mistake the word for the thing.”
In this episode, we welcome Catriona Sandilands, a professor of environmental arts and justice at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University. Having written, edited, or co-edited four books and close to 100 essays and articles, her research areas include queer and feminist posthumanities, critical plant studies, biocultural histories, ecocriticism, and public environmental engagement through literature and storytelling.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include cultivating plurality within the stories we tell, remembering histories of reciprocity coming from Western traditions, the connection between how we relate to the more-than-human world and our views of and experiences with sexuality, and more.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Luna Bec
Episode-inspired artwork by Ellie Yanagisawa
Episode references:
Vis à Vis: Field notes on Poetry & Wilderness, a book by Don McKay
Toward a Queer Ecofeminism, a journal article by Greta Gaard
The Vegetarian, a novel by Han Kang
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Cate Sandilands: I'm fairly sure I did not invent the term botanical colonialism. I apologize to any listener who might consider that they invented the term. I'm not aware of the term’s origin. It just seems to be an apt way of thinking about colonialism as a multi-species process.
As many Indigenous scholars have pointed out, the colonization of the Americas and also Australia and also South Africa, and many other colonized, settler-colonial places in the world, have involved settler-colonists both taking away natural resources plants, animals, and fungi from the putative colony and taking them back to Europe or Japan or China, depending on the power in question.
The process of settlement has involved settlers bringing stuff with them, both intentionally and unintentionally. Settlers brought with them to North America, for example, apples. They brought wheat, they brought other staple crops. But they also brought ornamentals. They brought species of agricultural plants, ornamental plants, and also accidental plants, plants that might have arrived in packing material or seeds that arrived in ships’ ballasts. (Animals are clearly also involved.)
These plants were part of the way in which settler-colonists created landscapes in the Americas that were conducive to the kinds of settlements that the colonists wanted to have. Certain kinds of garden plants, certain kinds of aesthetics... I'm thinking particularly about an essay that I wrote relatively recently on Scotch Broom. I know that a lot of people up and down the west coast of North America will consider Scotch Broom to be a bit of a scourge. It's considered one of the top ten invasive plants in the Cascadia Bioregion.
Scotch Broom was brought to North America as ornamental. For listeners who aren't familiar with it, it's a lovely bright yellow color. It's reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands. There's also gorse, which is also a non-native species. But gorse doesn't behave quite as invasively as Scotch Broom. It’s useful as a ground stabilizer. It was not just planted as an attractive ornamental that was romantically connected to Scots settlers—it was also planted as a ground stabilizer in and around things like hydro-roads and hydro-corridors and places that were damaged by various kinds of extractive industries, logging, and mining, particularly.
The idea of botanical colonialism is premised on the fact that colonization by humans would not have been possible without the plants that they brought with them.
Certainly, other scholars have spoken very powerfully about the ways in which viruses and bacteria were agents of colonialism in pursuing their own viral interests and bacterial interests. They were a key part of the colonization of the Americas through the dissemination of horrifically fatal diseases that decimated the Indigenous human populations.
Plants perhaps didn't participate quite so dramatically and horrendously, but plants have definitely helped to solidify colonial infrastructures, spread colonial property relations and aesthetics, transformed the landscape away from certain Indigenous forms of cultivation towards settler forms of cultivation, and also transformed the diet, and, I would argue, the microbiome of Indigenous people.
Kamea Chayne: This framing of botanical colonialism in and of itself speaks to how much more to invasive plants there is beyond just the decontextualized ecological aspect because it forces us to consider the relationship between these invasive plants and deeper colonial histories and infrastructures.
On this note, what do you find really important to highlight about this relationship? Critically, what are the limitations of what's called “plant purification” or maybe simply killing off invasive plants as a pathway towards healing our communities and lands, and the planet?
Cate Sandilands: There's a fair bit of attention paid to the preservation of native plants, and also to the eradication of so-called invasive plants.
That invasive plant eradication is a multibillion-dollar industry, the largest proportion of which goes into the pockets of companies like Bayer and Monsanto. Roundup is actually one of the most popularly used chemicals to get rid of a variety of different species of so-called invasive plants. Dog strangling vine. Garlic mustard. Norway maple. Most likely Scotch Broom as well, though I think not as commonly.
Just getting rid of so-called invasive plants, without thinking about the relationships that brought those plants to North America is like treating the symptom and not the cause of the problem.
As Indigenous authors such as Robin Kimmerer have pointed out very articulately, the problem is not just that there are plants out of place, or perhaps plants that people have not figured out good relationships with. The problem is the relationships that brought the plants to North America. So the problem, as Nicholas Reo and Laura Ogden have argued based on their research with Anishnaabe elders, is not so much any given invasive plant, or the presence or absence of said plant, it's the invasive land ethic, which includes the widespread use of chemicals to eradicate invasive plants.
I am not an Indigenous person. I am of Scottish, English, and Welsh heritage. My parents came to the west coast of Canada in the 1950s. I am Scottsboro and I am a relatively new import, and I am also trying to figure out my place in a colonized landscape. With the work that I do and the kinship that I make with the plants and animals around me, how can I not participate in an invasive land ethic and also not imagine that my presence in the land is somehow innocent? It's not like I can just get rid of the native plants, and then I'm okay. I actually need to think ethically and politically about the network of relationships that I have with the plants and animals and Indigenous peoples around me.
Kamea Chayne: There's something I want to bring to the forefront based on what we've just talked about so far, which is this idea of bio-cultural histories, because the scientific fields of biology or ecology, for example, tend to take on a more reductive and specific lens, often using certain measurable numbers and data in order to help us understand a landscape or specific species, for example, and then, what might need to be done in order to see improvements in the figures that indicate the health of set species or ecosystems.
But that can leave out the context of the power dynamics and shift in social relations or even linguistic and cultural transformations that we might learn about more so in general and cultural history? What do you see as the significance of not separating social and cultural history from the biological and ecological lens, and instead, having this more holistic and integrated look at bio-cultural histories altogether?
Cate Sandilands: In my view of the world, you can't separate—I'm not sure if one ever could, but one certainly cannot now—social from biological history.
The two have shaped each other for four millennia. There is a little bit of an idea about nature with a capital “N”, that the best thing that humans can do for “Nature” is just to leave it alone. That's a bit of a hangover from the idea of wilderness preservation that inaugurated a lot of environmental activism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and still goes on in the 21st century.
In fact, as a lot of Indigenous scholars have shown with great patience and great eloquence, humans and plants have been carrying on reciprocal, respectful relations for millennia. The problem is not that there are relations between biological and social history. The problem is that the particular social histories are completely out of whack. I blame settler colonialism. I also have to name capitalism. People treat plants and indeed all of nature as a site for profit and accumulation, rather than as a place in which to enact respectful, reciprocal relations.
This brings me full circle back to some of the early work that I did in the nineties, about ecofeminism, which in some cases, draws on Indigenous traditions globally, argues for relations of mutual care, respect, mutuality, and an acknowledgment of the fundamental entanglement of human lives with more-than-human lives and vice versa.
I do not want to slag the natural sciences. Some of my best friends are ecologists. They do amazing work in both field and laboratory settings. I have enormous respect for ecological scientists. But in order to really understand how to live well in the natural environment, we need to remember that we are part of nature and not separate from it, and that we can enact respectful, mutual, enriching relationships with other species. We are not only destroyers and eaters, although eating is a very natural thing to do.
We are not only destroyers and exploiters. That is part of [a] particular cultural and social formation, and not inherent to human relations with the more-than-human world.
Kamea Chayne: It's certainly important for us to learn from people who specialize in particular fields so we can have a true depth of understanding and at the same time, take a step back to look at things in more holistic ways as well. There's a lot to learn from just trying to look at things in a more multi-disciplinary and holistic way and connecting the dots between different fields of study.
A core focus of your work has been this theme of cultivating plurality. Assuming that this could be the first time many of our listeners are hearing about this, or at least how it's framed, what does cultivating plurality mean to you, and how could this potentially shift the ways that we relate to the world and how we approach the work of regenerating the health of our communities and the earth?
Cate Sandilands: I find a lot of meaning and depth in both the metaphor and the practice of cultivation. I often think in and through the garden. People who spend a lot of time tending to and cultivating plants particularly have a rich understanding of that mutuality that I was just speaking about.
You don't grow a successful garden by just forcing it to do what you want it to do. What that ends up doing is depleting the soil. It ends up stressing out the plants. The Green Revolution was not a very good idea. A return to thinking about cultivating and tending as creating and attending to relations of co-flourishing or mutual becoming—that is actually a much more promising way of thinking about how we can be among plants and animals.
That involves paying attention to what the other species in the conversation might be interested in. What are the needs of these peas? What are the needs of these radishes, even though the radishes are going to be eaten by me? Eating is part of living in the world. What do these radishes need from me, and how do I return to the radish? How do I return respect in a way that acknowledges the ongoing needs of the other species involved in the question?
This is the opposite of extractivism. How do I attend generously to the needs of the other in this situation?
The idea of plurality demands that we live in the world acknowledging that we are not the pinnacle of life. We are not the only species that matter, and the other species that we are surrounded by also have worlds, and needs, and are agents. They have desires. They have things that they want and need and require. It is by attending to these plural worlds that we can think about actually having a less exploitive way of being in the world.
Again, many of these ideas around reciprocity and obligation are absolutely central to Indigenous philosophies and worldviews. I am certainly very influenced by thinkers such as Kimmerer. But there are paths to those relationships in our own Western traditions as well.
Colonialism is not the only story in capitalism, in Western cultures. There are histories of mutuality and respectful relationships. It's important for folks who have Euro-Western backgrounds to look to those traditions, and not just the destructive [ones], [while acknowledging] the destructive legacies of capitalism and colonialism.
There are seeds of other possibilities within our own stories as well.
Kamea Chayne: To further humble our role and place as humans, I've been thinking a lot about both the value and the limitations of language, specifically that we use language often to try to conceptualize and frame and better understand this complex and dynamic world.
But oftentimes, we end up giving too much weight to that language and seeing our concepts and social constructs as more rigid and real than the complex and dynamic reality that those words and categories and framings were created based on. That sense of human supremacy and control can get us in trouble and prevent us from seeing the complex world of pluralities for what it is.
As we bring in this idea of queer ecology, how does it highlight the costs of using rigid social constructs in order to understand the world and guide our solutions and actions? How does this lens offer alternate stories that help us to live with plurality in the more-than-human world?
Cate Sandilands: We sometimes forget that the knowledge systems that we use to conceptualize the world are not necessarily the same thing as the world that we're conceptualizing.
So we mistake the model for the thing that is being modeled. We mistake the map for the territory. We mistake the word for the thing. [To approach] the material world with a sense of humility means that we need to be oriented to listening as much as speaking, and to intuiting and divining as much as ordering and controlling.
Or perhaps even more than ordering and controlling… I'm not sure if I've made this connection before, but there's a marvelous Canadian poet named John McKay. He wrote a terrific book some years ago called Vis À Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness. He writes that the task of the nature poet is to use language in a way that brings attention to the limitations of language. So to write about the natural world with the need to listen to the natural world folded into the language itself.
The idea of queer ecology comes both from the origins that I mentioned in thinking about the intersections between institutions in discourses and practices around sexuality and nature so that the intersections between LGBTQ and ecological politics and also in the more interrogative possibilities that are inherent to the idea of queering in the sense that queer means to make strange, to act strange, to go crosswise or against the grain or sideways.
One of the things that queer ecology can do is ask us to question and estrange the ways that we think we know about the more-than-human world, to call them into question, and to imagine what the world would look like if we viewed it otherwise.
If we took certain solid ideas about how the natural world works and look at them sideways to see how they might be viewed otherwise, and whether in that otherwise view, there is something of value.
Kamea Chayne: I'm always especially moved by conversations that inspire me to think about things in a new light. I’m just always curious to connect topics that I had not thought of as being related before.
On this note, I was especially drawn to this other way of looking at queer ecology, which is how people's personal experiences and engagements with gender and sexuality might influence our relationships with and perspectives on the more than human world. It does lead me to ponder, in an open and non-judgmental way, the relationship between cultures that hold more heteronormative views and how rigidly they might hold the social constructs of the binaries of human and nature, culture and ecology, and so forth.
What do you feel most stirred to share at this moment as we think openly about how our experiences with gender and sexuality connect to how we might relate to the more-than-human world?
Cate Sandilands: I'm always in favor of doing away with binary thinking. I know that there are some very rich intellectual and philosophical traditions that actually think generatively with ideas of dualism. But I am very drawn to modes of thinking that ask us to think about spectrums and pluralities.
If we think about gender as something other than a binary, if we think about gender as a plurality of possibilities, a plurality of different forms of enactment of genders, sexes, and possibilities of being, I hope that experience of possibility, of fluidity, of not being constrained by a rigid code that divides the world into categories of either this one thing or this other thing will also help us think about the utility of maintaining a clear distinction between humans and the rest of the living world, otherwise known as human exceptionalism. Human exceptionalism is being eroded on all kinds of fronts! Just thinking about the number of species of animals that are clearly recognized as being capable of social learning, as being able to wield their own meaning, systems, and concepts of the world.
So those clear lines between humans and primates, humans and dolphins, humans and bears, humans and dogs, humans and cats… These lines are the dualism, that rigidity of the line between humans and everything else. And that dualism is crumbling. The rigidity of the line between male and female is crumbling. There has always been a spectrum of genders. Some cultures have actually recognized that, just the traditions in which I was born and raised most certainly have not. In that context, the binaries are falling down all over the place.
In the process, I hope that we are able to recognize different forms of relationships, entanglements, connections, kinship, shared experiences, and mutuality, rather than imagining the "other side" as opaque and opposite to our own experience.
Gender is a spectrum. It is no longer useful to think about “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” The idea that there are these two completely different registers of experiences doesn't mean that everything is suddenly the same. It just means that the categories through which those experiences are lived and performed and coded turn out to be a great deal more complex.
The same also holds true for interspecies relations. If my cat, for example, the cat that I live with is not “other,” if she is just different, then there are possibilities for a shared connection and not just misunderstanding and not just domination.
Kamea Chayne: This really goes back to this idea of humbling our relationship with language and, as you said, not mistaking the word for the real thing it was created, if we're not mistaken, in the concept of what that was based on.
This will be entering into new territory for this show. I do hope for there to be no bounds on where our guests might take us. So I want to bring this in. You found Greta Gaard’s article, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism”, to be worthy of noting—specifically as she looks at how Western culture's devaluation of the erotic parallels its devaluation of women and nature, and also Gaard’s emphasis that erotophobia is a key link between heterosexism and ecological degradation.
Beyond that more individualized lens of how our own personal engagements with gender and sexuality might relate to how we look at the more-than-human world, how would you expand upon this broader cultural impact of devaluing the erotic? It might feel abstract to connect that to ecological degradation, but I'd be curious to hear you connect these dots.
Cate Sandilands: There are a number of different ways of thinking about it. One that might be useful would be to remember that the erotic is not just sex. Audre Lorde reminds us of that. The brilliant lesbian poet Audre Lorde, in her utterly groundbreaking essay, “The Uses of the Erotic”—she's speaking about the erotic as the power of the sensual, the power of the body, particularly.
That's one of those dualisms that really persists, mind-body. I think that's also partly what Greta is getting at when she talks about erotophobia. The mind-body dualism is actually one of the ways in which human exceptionalism has been established for millennia, with the understanding that humans are the only living beings who are in possession of the mind and everything else, everybody else only has bodies. That's one way that the justification that the ill-treatment of all other species on the planet has been justified. Because they don't have minds, they're not worthy of moral attention, they're not sentient. They don't think, they don't know, they don't have a language. They don't wield concepts.
Even as the boundaries around that human exceptionalism are being crumbled by the revelation that orcas have very sophisticated social lives and very complex languages, at the same time, thinking with someone like Audre Lorde about the uses of the erotic would say that we also need to think about how we proceed in the world through our bodies and on a bodily level. And I definitely don't mean hedonism. We can live the erotic in very thoughtful ways, which is what Lorde is arguing for.
But what happens if we really deeply understand ourselves as embodied beings, what kinds of ecological understanding emerge from senses other than sight processes, other than conceptualization? The development of relationships based on touch and listening, rather than the ocular-centrism of a lot of Western cultures.
How do we think about the erotic as a force of connection rather than a force of domination and exploitation?
Kamea Chayne: Regular listeners of this show will probably recognize this theme having surfaced repeatedly in our conversations from this past year, but in thinking about our paths towards healing our communities and relationships with the Earth, what may feel to be the easiest and most within reach next step could be to further inclusivity politics of trying to expand the same rights within our existing political and legal frameworks and so forth to everyone, and including more and more people and more than human beings in that idea of everyone.
But when you talk about queer ecology, you invite us to distinguish queerness as actually challenging dominant institutions and practices rather than striving for rights-based equality.
What has been your thought process on this, and what do you see as the limitations of inclusion and the expansion of rights?
Cate Sandilands: I think that pursuing rights is a strategy, provided that we understand that the beings that we are giving rights to, force us to understand what the concept of rights means. For example, the idea of the rights of nature, or the idea that a river or an ecosystem has rights—that estranges, that queers, what we understand to be a right. Pursuing rights for non-human beings is actually partly because it causes us to think about what a right actually is not… and it is not necessarily a bad idea, but it is definitely incomplete.
Again, I go back to that very early eco-feminist training that relationships are just as important as rights and that obligations and mutuality end up in many respects being just as important as rights and entitlements.
To live in the world, not with the sense of being a rights-bearing individual, but in the sense of asking what my obligations are to the world—they're very different orientations.
Rights-based discourses can be limiting and individualistic and exclusive. I have rights. You don't have rights. Living in the world with a sense of reciprocity or mutuality or obligation asks not what I can get from you, but what I can do to help, what I can do to care for you, what I can do to understand what your needs are. I think the problem is not rights per se, it's the orientation to individualism and entitlement that they tend to lead to.
Therefore, why not try something else? Why not think about caring, as many eco-feminists have argued? Why not think about obligation, and reciprocity, as many Indigenous scholars have argued?
Kamea Chayne: In terms of some guiding words for our path and the key takeaways from here, how would you invite our listeners to think about queer as a verb, and queering as an exercise in ecological imagination? What would you like for us to keep sitting with and pondering after this conversation, to help us envision and practice more life-affirming ways of being with this world?
Cate Sandilands: It's important to recognize that heterosexuality is unusual in the world. That reproductive heterosexuality is actually a very specific form of reproduction. It's a very specific kind of kinship and family relationship that gets set up. So reproductive heterosexuality is a tiny proportion of all of the sexualities in the world. If we get off our high—I must admit, I'm particularly thinking of the religious right—and stop imagining that other forms of sexuality are unnatural, that's a good place to start with... a little bit of sexual humility.
More broadly, though, I think it's really important for queer ecology to remember that ideas of sex and nature are entwined and that it's actually important to estrange them, to queer them, to look at them otherwise and see what work those discourses do to oppress sexual minorities and also do damage to the way we understand and live in the natural world.
The idea of estrangement, of looking at the world sideways, of understanding the wonders of our conceptual world with humility—that's another really important step to take.
What happens if we always remember that we could be wrong?
What happens if we always remember that looking at the world sideways to the way that we are accustomed to thinking about it might actually give us a different spectrum of concepts, of possibilities, of relationships? I'm not sure that it's specifically queer, but I think it's really important, going back to that earlier conversation about bio-cultural histories, to always think about the human power relations in which relationships and institutions of the natural world are organized.
To remember to think about racism, which is not a word that I brought into the conversation so far, to think about the ways in which our relations to the natural world are racialized as well as gendered, as well as organized by relations of extractive settler-colonialism. To queer is to challenge and upend, [which] I think is crucially related to those other two—challenging and upending those very destructive sets of social relationships.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Cate Sandilands: One book that I've read numerous times and that I'm currently grappling with in my work is a novel called The Vegetarian by Han Kang. She's a South Korean author. The story is about a young woman who wants to become a tree. I think that book really does an absolutely stunning job of both critiquing human exceptionalism and exceptionalism and the violence of patriarchal capitalism and also imagining the possibilities of having these queer lateral connections with other-than-human beings.
Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Cate Sandilands: Pay attention.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Cate Sandilands: I get a lot of inspiration while walking. It's related to the mantra of pay attention, to slow down and walk through the landscape and pay attention to the seasons as they're changing, to what is doing well, to what might not be doing well, to pay attention to the other beings around me as I move slowly, and particularly, to come into the bodily experience of walking.
Walking is not just taking my brain out for travels. It's also moving through the landscape in a particular, embodied way that I think invites active attention and slowness.
