Liberation Horticulture

Some folks think cone flowers should have more rights.

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Garden Rights:https://medium.com/@bervogt/how-horticulture-gardening-normalize-human-supremacy-as-wildlife-vanishes-7922192c570b
How Horticulture & Gardening Normalize Human Supremacy as Wildlife Vanishes
Benjamin Vogt

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………..In the end it’s the latter we’re after, to be liberated from a culture of oppression, and to see how the oppression of other species is the oppression of ourselves and each other — and for gardeners our managed spaces out the back door are a daily experience with nature that reflects our core values. The questions that arose while I read Jensen’s excerpt where many:

In what ways does horticulture silence the voices of others? How does horticulture privilege one species over others? How is horticulture a form of colonialism? What tools or language or social constructs (capitalism, freedom, individual rights) do we use to help us feel better or accept the exploitation of other species, especially for purely ornamental reasons? How do we normalize human supremacy in horticulture so we hardly notice it, or when we do notice it, work even harder to defend it because our identity is wrapped up or based on that supremacy? I want to move through some of these ideas step by step based on excerpts from Jensen. Are you ready?…………
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…………We have a horticulture system that tends to celebrate plants like they are designer clothes or shiny new cars — models wearing our desire that’s only skin deep. We manipulate life, we reproduce life, as part of an industrial capitalist machine that sees nature as a commodity and a product.

If we’re making garden choices based on how plants work together to form an ecosystem, considering how plants work with one another and how they support specific fauna, then we’re elevating garden making by fostering greater understanding and appreciation for nature. I don’t think you can plop the newest coneflower hybrid into a landscape and say you’re helping nature because it’s a native plant. Unfortunately, the kind of rewiring and rethinking I’m calling for is hard work — it taxes us to not only read more and be more considerate in our actions, but it means we can’t simply always follow our impulses at the nursery or in a shiny new catalog arriving in January.

Horticulture can and should lead us into an environmental awakening that reconnects us to the web of life and that ends our tendency to exploit nature for our own aesthetic desires only. Gardening is not just about pleasuring or honoring ourselves — it is about addressing human supremacy by redressing wrongs we’ve forced upon the natural world (lawn, impermeable surfaces, CO2, deforestation, mining, climate change, etc). I’m not saying gardens are penance, and I’m not even saying they are necessarily places for social activism — they can be both of those for sure. I’m saying gardens are not paintings, they are not sculptures, they are not composed for just one species. When the practice of horticulture is navigated with critical thinking — what is being impacted when I do x, who am I effecting when I do y — then we become empowered liberators of all life and ultimately ourselves. That’s when horticulture becomes the instrument of hope meeting action that we all wish it to be.

Is that too much to carry or consider? I don’t think so — not in a world of climate change and mass extinction. Not in a world we have now remade as one giant garden we must tend to for the survival of all of us together.