The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Plant Humanities

The first handbook to map the emerging field of the plant humanities - a rapidly growing area of interdisciplinary enquiry within the environmental humanities - this book provides an accessible overview of the field through a range of contributions from some of the field's leading thinkers.

Plants, long misunderstood as passive and static, have been edging closer to the centre of critical inquiry over the past two decades, reflecting the current interest in more-than-human agents and their social entanglements. Indispensable to all life on earth, plants are ecosystem builders and dynamic planetary agents that have shaped human lives and societies for millennia, and their histories offer unique windows into our current social and environmental predicament.

The Plant Humanities bring together the sciences and humanities to map the cultural histories of plants and their relevance to urgent questions such as biodiversity loss, food security, environmental justice, ecosystem health, and legacies of colonialism and capitalism in the Anthropocene. Assembling biologists, ethnobotanists, curators, literary scholars and historians, this book provides the first roadmap to this new interdisciplinary field. In doing so, it lays out the distinctive approach of plant humanities by focusing on specific plant histories in both deep and historical time, and interrogating and reimagining plant collections, from seedbanks and herbaria to botanical gardens and archives. Essays by established and emerging scholars center plants in rethinking key concepts such as evolution, extinction, refuge, and migration through both scientific and historical perspectives. And by zooming in on specific plant species through a series of case studies, the volume models a wealth of approaches from archeobotany to psychoanalysis that illuminate the deep and vital relationships between people, plants, and place.