Hi all,
I thought this might interest some - and perhaps stir some debate. Chris
Perley
http://www.geocities.com/organdi_revue/December2002/Schneekloth01.html
Abstract and first para below.
ALIEN KIN:
Humans and the Forest
By Lynda H. Schneekloth
School of Architecture and Planning
State University of New York
Buffalo, United States
about the author:
Lynda H. Schneekloth, ASLA, is a Professor in the School of Architecture and
Planning, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. She is author with
Robert Shibley of Placemaking: The Arts and Practice of Building Communities
(1995); Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design with Karen Franck
(1994); and Changing Places: ReMaking Institutional Buildings (1992). She
has written and published extensively in her area of scholarship, namely,
how humans construct their relationship with the world.
Abstract
This paper explores western culture's imagination of vegetation and the
forest through an examination of two science fiction stories by Ursula Le
Guin, The Word for World is Forest and "Vaster than Empires and More." The
review of these texts provides the opportunity to reveal the varied
constructions of the human relationships with vegetation, questioning our
imagination of the plant world as passive and offering thoughts on
vegetative sentience, agency and intentionality. The paper both confirms and
challenges current conceptions of humans as separate from the earth and
attempts, through the power of stories, to demonstrate that plants are our
kin, and that the forest has been/can be our home.
How do we imagine ourselves in relationship to other forms of life? Humans
have always struggled with this question, knowing and not knowing during our
tenure as a species that otherness is one of our makings and that there is
only one vast interconnected world. The response to the question of
relationship has shifted across cultures and over time, but seems especially
critical today with the current ecological crises. Of particular importance
is the question of relationship with beings that are familiar, yet alien to
us, beings like trees, vegetation, and communities of plants such as
forests.
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