Plant Scale and the Anthropocene

In this chapter, I study narratives making visible in startling and subversive ways the life-producing photosynthetic vegetal power that has always fed us and our companion species, provided all land-based breathers with oxygen and altered the planet\u27s climate and ecosystems. Plants have enabled our current ecological circumstances, and we are dismantling them experimentally, blindly even. While human actions are changing the world\u27s biosphere, we gain insights (and horror) when we understand these actions in terms of a multispecies-justice agenda from within the florosphere, to coin a term describing the systems of water, air, weather and life created and altered by plants from the depths of the oceans to the atmosphere\u27s gases. This critical plant studies chapter, guided by Robin Wall Kimmerer\u27s Braiding Sweetgrass, presents the florosphere with studies of the burned Linden trees in Goethe\u27s Faust, who is blinded at the end of the play, and of Sue Burke\u27s 2018 science-fiction novel Semiosis that takes place on a distant, vegetal-dominated planet. Learning to see plants is the challenge let us here consider a vegetal scale as the base reference point for all other scales of the Anthropocene