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Ayana Young  Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking to Dr. Natasha Myers, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, convener of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, co-founder of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and accomplice to Toronto’s Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle.

Natasha Myers  So the planthropos, which sort of decenters the human, but actually centers the human-plant hybrid as the figure that should ground our actions moving forward. It allows us to take action in an alliance, in a form of solidarity that would seed livable worlds. And so in fact, we can't leave. In fact, we should not dream about apocalypse. We need to thwart that as thoroughly as possible so we can actually begin to aspire to something livable.

Ayana Young  Natasha’s current ethnographic projects speculate on the contours of the Planthroposcene, with investigations spanning the arts and sciences of vegetal sensing and sentience, the politics of gardens, and the enduring colonial violence of restoration ecology. Since 2015 she has been working with dancer and filmmaker Ayelen Liberona on Becoming Sensor, a research creation project to invent protocols for an ungrid-able ecology of the happenings taking shape across ancient and urban lands in Toronto.

Well, Natasha, thank you so much for joining me today in conversation. I'm really looking forward to it. 

Natasha Myers  Thank you so much for having me on the show. 

Ayana Young  I’d like to begin by asking you about your imagining of the Planthroposcene. In “How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene” you instruct to to “refuse calls to design for the Anthropocene. Such designs are precisely the “technological fixes” that will keep us locked into the same rhythms of extraction and dispossession. Refuse to be lured into those climate change edutainment complexes, those gleaming glass, metal and concrete infrastructures whose capital- and labour-intensive designs exquisitely expose the ruse of sustainability as an aesthetic manoeuvre grounded in Edenic visions of nature. That is not the kind of green that will save us.” ...You call us to recognize that the Anthropocene is no home, it is a dangerous place in which we must escape from, and so the question becomes, where do we escape to? Can you speak to the “misguidedness” of designing for the Anthropocene, and the importance of recognizing and cultivating the Planthroposcene?

Natasha Myers  Thanks so much for this question. And so of course, the Planthroposcene could only be imagined once we'd already imagined what the Anthropocene was. So it is a derivative concept, we needed the concept of the Anthropocene before we could think about anything other. But one of the impetuses for me and many other people who are sitting with this concept of the Anthropocene as we look around the world and wondering, is this the concept that is going to liberate our thought, is this the concept that is going to transform our practices? And what I started to realize is that this concept describes the horror we're inside of. And this concept of the Anthropocene, a world that has been terraformed by humans, that is in the throes of destruction, a world in which consumer pleasures have trumped every element of support for a thriving more than human world. I wonder to myself, how could we, how could we move forward for an Anthropocene and so I've seen so many books about, you know, "Art in the Anthropocene" and "Designing for the Anthropocene." And precisely this imaginary of a world in which humans really are the rulers and destroyers. As we hail ourselves at the sort of the helm of this disastrous world that we've built for ourselves. We'd have to sort of pull back and say, wait a second, what can we lead with? What can we aspire, to what can we hope for, out of these ruins? And so the concept of the Planthroposcene emerged for me out of an assignment, in a sense, I was invited to join a panel at a conference thinking about force and power in the Anthropocene. And it just struck me that the forces and powers of non human beings are precisely what are being eclipsed in the concept of the Anthropocene. As the anthropos, or the human, is elevated and recognized as the agent terraforming the planet, we forget about all the other beings and the plants, those magical beings that do this incredible practice of conjuring worlds from sunlight, sort of eating sunlight to matter, the compost to build the soil to nourish the world around them and thinking, "Oh, these are the forces and powers we need to reckon with." And so it's not a question about "Oh, need to center plants as the agents that will terraform the planet". No, the planthropos is the figure at the helm of the Planthroposcene. And in that you can hear the collectivity collecting up of plants and people into a kind of collective, a hybrid collective of beings. 

And the aim with this concept is to center the plants and the people simultaneously. There is no way to extract human life from plant life or to separate human life from plant life. And once we begin to recognize our alliances with plants, then we are in a place to begin to recognize our power to ally with the plants in the work of growing livable worlds. And so the playful work of coming up with another concept - a concept that could deflect us from the tragic apocalyptic thinking of the Anthropocene, which is about our dire situation. If our goal is to get out of that, then we really do need a different guiding figure, we do need a different conceptual formation, one that's built on us, framing our alliances with other beings rather than framing ourselves as alone, isolated, as if saving the planet is really up to us alone. And so the call for the Planthroposcene is to really to begin to recognize how we could conspire with the plants, how we could learn to breathe with them. Conspire has this wonderful multiple registers in which it oscillates, and I've learned from my colleague, Timothy Choy, an anthropologist who studies breathing and air and air pollution, and his concept of conspiracy, a way of collecting up the people together to learn to breathe together, I want to expand that to include the plants to expand that to include a kind of justice for people and their plants, for plants and their people, as we all search for ways to breathe together more deeply, more powerfully, and in more transformative ways. 

Ayana Young  Mmhmm. Gosh, that just put me in such a good space. Thank you for explaining that. And I've had an interesting relationship with the Anthropocene, or at least that term because when I first realized that it was being used more, there was an excitement, thinking, "Okay, people are awakening, people are aware, people are thinking about the dramatic terraforming and shifting that humans are doing to this planet." But when I started looking into your work, I saw the limitations and in a way, how it actually can be harmful to be thinking about the Anthropocene and the way that we are and like you said, designing for the Anthropocene and how to really shift our way of relating to this time that we're in and how to move forward. And I'm really somebody who also is really exhausted of false solutions and techno-fixes. And so I just love how you're bringing it back to the Earth in this way. And yeah, I've also been thinking, what succeeds the Anthropocene will be materialized from the thoughts and the actions and the relations of today. And so in describing the Planthroposcene, you cite the necessity of seeding plant people conspiracies, which I love. So I'd love if you could also share what these conspiracies are, as well as, what are their practices, spells and meditations, should we be attuning ourselves to? How do these small shifts in orientation and understanding radically impact how we understand change?

Natasha Myers  Beautiful, yeah, so this plant people conspiracy, the seeding of the Planthroposcene or imagining us rooting the Planthroposcene really does hinge on us getting on side with the plants, forming our solidarity projects with the plants. You know, I think about this in a way that our entire planet has already been gridded, it's been cordoned off, we have lands that have been enclosed through private property. We have lands that have been enclosed by nation states we have pretty much every square inch of the planet has already been commanded and controlled by humans. And instead of sort of giving up and saying, "Oh, right, so humans start getting control." This is an opportunity to say, "Ah what is our responsibility? How are we accountable, in this way? How does this actually put us into a place of responsibility? And what would our responsibility, what could our responsibilities to land to the Earth look like and part of that with the responsibility to make room for plants, to make space for them to express their unfettered powers?” 

To photosynthesize, or as I like to say, practice a form of cosmic mattering, where they call up the energy of the sun to matter, matter the worlds around them. And so if we shifted our understanding of human responsibility from being the center of command and control to ceding our control and giving some of that over to the plants, and our control is really about giving them space and time, expanding the spaces available to the plants that's within our responsibility. These are things that we could very easily do, make more space for plants to grow, create better conditions for them, cleanse the waters, clean the airs, allow them to exercise their responsibilities to the Earth as they terraform it with their remarkable practices. And this is sort of a way of saying, "Ah, like to conspire with them, to allow them to breathe more deeply, allow us to breathe more deeply. In a sense, it's a social justice project that would create more profound connections between people. So it's not just about changing our relationship to plants. It's actually also about food security and food justice, where people can have this opportunity to get acquainted with the plants to make room for them in their cities to make room for them in their lawns to make room for them in their daily lives and their practice. And learn what plants need, learn what plants love, what their pleasures are, we should all learn to talk to the plants learn to listen to them. And so when I think about these plant peoples conspiracies and seeding them, it is like growing a garden. Right? It is like building a world in which they can thrive and so if we thought about our responsibilities on the planet as gardeners, right gardeners tending a living world that would shift our sense of relationship and allow us to be accountable to this world. 

So a plant people conspiracy could take any kind of shape, whether it's creating a place for a tree where there wasn't one before creating spaces for trees to nourish the more than human beings around them, so to be in relationship with the pollinators, to facilitate their access to their animal allies, to their microbial allies, to their fungal allies. And so that's this kind of practice of tending would be a new kind of responsibility for us in this imagined world of the Planthroposcene. But of course, the Planthroposcene has already been taking place all over the world. So I want us to think about this not as an aspirational epoch, something that can only happen after apocalypse, after the Anthropocene, but rather, the Planthroposcene, these plant people conspiracies have been what traditionally, Indigenous people and all the people living locally on the land- this is what they've been doing all along. And so it's about both recognizing the deep time of plant people conspiracies, and being at the forefront of inventing new ways for us to conspire with the plants. So that's one way that we can think about that. 

And I think there's a second part of your question, which is about what are the practices that could facilitate our connection? What are the ways of doing ways of living that would expand the human sensorium in a way that would allow us to meet the world of plants. And so this is something that I've been thinking about a lot over the many, many years as an artist, a dancer, a scientist, and now as an anthropologist, this fluidity of our embodiments, the fluidity of our relationships with other beings and the potential that we have to use our imagination to extend our sensorium, our modes of sensing sensibilities to meet the more than human realm. And with plants, we have this sense that they're so other than us, they don't have eyes, they don't have noses, they don't have the fingers. They don't look like us, like animals do. And so there's this sense that they're this ultimate other to the human. But when we've really attend to their practices, we can actually begin to recognize almost the animal-like qualities that are part of plants and the plant like qualities that are part of humans. And so I spent some time developing meditations that allow us to expand our sensorium, to begin to feel, what it might be like to be a plant, and these conjectural pleasurable practices we could be playing with, to expand our understanding of what the limitations of the human sensorium are, we could learn to sense alongside plants who actually are much more sensitive than humans who can see in a broader range of colors than we can, who could send vibrations and make sounds and actually sing in ways that are well beyond human sensing. So even as we deal with this remarkable difference, there are practices that could bring us closer, meditations that allow us to learn how to root, to learn how to send shoots out of our own lands, to allow us to feel what it might be like to photosynthesize with our own tissues, or to form fruits within our bodies, or even seeds and let them disperse. And so there's pleasures that we could have with our own imagination that would allow us to meet the plants as if they're our allies, as if their kin as if they're friends, as if they're our relations as Indigenous people engage them. And this means a lot of work for humans. This is a lot of work that we need to do. This is part of our responsibility. If we plan to rework the world to rearrange the planet in a way that will allow plants and people to thrive together.

Ayana Young  Gosh, as you're speaking this, I was looking at all of the plants and trees around me feeling their sensitivities, intelligence, their autonomy, just feeling into all of those pieces. And I'm really grateful that you speak like this, because I think we've been so conditioned to think that plants are non sentient, yeah, that they don't feel that they don't have a life of their own. But in so many ways, in this dominant culture, we've been taught to believe that plants live for us. And you know, they're made for us, but that is very untrue. And I feel like the plants are very grateful for everything you're saying, or at least that's what I'm picking up. They're like, "Yes, thank you. Thanks for thinking about us." You also often mentioned that if plants are sun worshipers, then we ought to be plant worshipers. And I would really like to explore worship as a practice with You a little bit further, how can the mentality of worship propel us to radically restage our relationships with the earth?

Natasha Myers  So yes, the question of reverence is so profound and one that is so challenging to bring up in academic circles, which is where I move through a lot of the time, except I'm also an artist. And I'm also a Reiki Master and a dancer and an energy worker. So I'm crossing thresholds between worlds and trying to push the conversation that's happening inside of academia a little bit to change our assumptions about reverence. And so this is a tricky conversation for some people, but it is a space where we begin to recognize and I wonder if this pandemic of ours is changing people's recognition of gratitude, simple practices of gratitude. And when I imagine a mode of reverence that centers the plants, it's one that would necessarily begin in gratitude. This thankfulness, this gratitude we have of just- wow- the capacity we have for breath. That the recognition that plants are breathing us into being that they're exhaling is the possibility of our inhale. Concepts like that begin to stir up I think in us a sense of the more than rational, the more than mechanistic, a world where magic can happen, a world where the numinous, that sense of the Divine can also be present. And so, the question for me is, we can think about there are many, many religions around the world who do center plants, there are many spiritual traditions that do center plants, and I think we have something to learn from them. 

We have something to learn from people who practice gratitude, in relationship to the plants that they harvest. For people who practice the honorable harvest many Indigenous people who recognize that if you are going to take from plants, you first have to ask permission, that if you want to harvest from Cedar, or from the Raspberry Bush, you first begin in ceremony, you begin in a place, first of all of thanking the plant, and of asking if you can take and how much you can take, without assuming that is just there for the taking. And any move in this direction immediately calls up the question for people who are doubting of like, well, how can you know? How can you know if the plant gives consent or not? And for those people who've spent their lifetimes working with plants, they know. They know when a plant says yes or when a plant says no, when a tree gives permission for you to hug it, or to harvest from it and so these are very, very deeply subtle cues that deeply listening people can have access to, and so that there can begin to be that sense of reciprocity. It begins in gratitude. And perhaps in that gesture of gratitude and thankfulness and perhaps even gifting, gifting the plant something that you value as an offering, in exchange for what it is you want to gather from that plant. 

These are really simple practices that don't require any religious fervor or sentiment. They don't require a belief in a god. They don't even require an institution of sorts, but they are the kind of mundane ways that we could very quickly begin to recognize the beings around us, get to know them, ask them about who they are, and in that way center, these plants and trees that are holding the sky up, that are cleansing our waters that are providing all the nourishment, all the fiber, all of the fuel, all of the materials, all the adornments, the fragrances, the clothing that we're wearing all the plants that make that begin in that gratitude. And that would be a such a profound shift. I think for so many people in their daily life, but it would also mean going over to that tree that's outside of your window and spending a moment with it, putting your hand on the tree, in the subtlest of gestures. And it's in that moment of reaching towards the plants as if they are a being worthy of address, we've changed everything. We've changed the very structure of our social worlds, because we're honoring a being that previously was considered to be in the undergrowth or in the background of our lives.

Ayana Young  Now I'd like to touch on the topic of anthropomorphism a little bit as I'm sure this is an accusation that often gets hurled your way. And I wonder how the fear of engaging in anthropomorphism actually limits our ability to play with the power and fluidity of recognition. How do you balance the presence of animism, as well as our historical tendency to exert supremacy in ecology? When you think about our relationship with plants, or perhaps, how does anthropomorphism hinder our ability to relinquish our rigidly defined human identity?

Natasha Myers  Hmm, absolutely. Yeah, and I think you've mentioned animism as well. And we can think about animism and anthropomorphism, both as the accusations of a colonial thought style, where anthropomorphism and the seeing the a human, in other beings is an accusation, which first and foremost is raised at children and at non-Western, and more often Indigenous peoples. And so we have to recognize that the very concept of anthropomorphism and animism themselves hold in them a threat to a colonial order. They threaten the supremacy of the human by expanding the domain of the sentient being to the more than human realm, or of bringing a kind of sentience and lifeforce to things that were normally thought of as inanimate. And so one of the things I've been thinking about is that the colonial worldview, the colonial formation is maintained in part by denigrating people who practice the art of animism, who see the animistic in the world of inanimate objects, or who extend human practices or human sensibilities to the more than human realm. And so once we start to recognize that as a pattern or a habit of a colonial figure, we have to sort of say "Wait a second." I've spent a lot of time interviewing scientists about anthropomorphism in their work with plants or in their work on molecular formations and molecules. And they police these anthropomorphisms as if they're afraid of that. There's a fear of attribution of agency to something that shouldn't have that. We also recognize the colonial roots of science, the colonial roots of a kind of scientific rationalism, where any other beings other than human if you impute any sentience to it if you impute any senseability to it, it means you've actually broken the system. you've, you've erred in the most serious and egregious of ways. And so I spent a lot of time listening to scientists police themselves. And they'd be able to express the most remarkable, most interesting insights to the world. And then they'd admonish themselves for having anthropomorphize, or having animated something beyond it. And so I watched this dynamic and recognize that, oh, we scientists are using anthropomorphism all the time. They're animating things all the time, with their language, with their bodies with their own curiosities and imagination. And the second thing that they do is police it and say, "Oh, no, I didn't mean it that way." And so I want to allow us to give us more room. And so I think about anthropomorphism and a couple of different ways. One is to say, anthropomorphism isn't what we thought it was. In fact, there's more of a metamorphism happening in our relating with more than human realms. It isn't just that we impute human faculties to non human things, it's that, when we are in a deep relationship with another thing or being that is other than us. There's a profound exchange and I call it a kind of metamorphism morphing between the bodies. So it's sometimes it's not the human animating the plant or anthropomorphizing the plant, it's actually the plant imposing itself on the human. 

And I like to think about this in a couple of contexts. One is a lovely story about Charles Darwin, who was trying to figure out how orchids fling their pollen at such remarkable distances and with such force. And so he has this very elaborate description of an orchid as if it's a man standing at attention with his arms wrapped in a certain configuration. And you realize that, "Actually, no," it's not that he's saying that the plant acts like a command shift in this configuration. If you listen carefully to what he's saying, he's saying "If you move your body into this form, you too can mimic the form of the plant." And so I'm interested in the ways that through passionate inquiry, people find ways to change and alter their bodies and their sensoria to meet the plant world. And so he in a sense, instead of dictating the structure of what a man would look like, if it looked like this flower, we can see Darwin folding his body around the flower, emulating the flower with his own body, allowing the flower to alter his embodiment. So in this sense, he's moving with and being moved by the other being. And that's a real difference. That's a real difference. That's a moment where his willingness to be transformed by the other actually has a metamorphic quality. 

So this is an example of a moment where we would assume that anthropomorphism is happening but in fact, it's a metamorphic practice. In fact, it could be said that he is phytomoralizing, or perhaps vegetalysing his tissues. And so I like to think about ways that instead of the activity of us imputing human form to others, we could actually loosen up our human form and absorb or play with, or try on the habits or compartments or postures of other beings. And that, to me, is a kind of metamorphic practice that allows for an interchange and it's in that interchange between the bodies, this exchange between embodiments that we actually find some moment of shared understanding, of shared sensibility, of shared sensing, and that has real consequences for how we understand our role. The other thing that's happening with anthropomorphism is we're allowed to have sentience, we're allowed to have all of these amazing faculties. But because we have no window into all these other beings, we render them mechanical. So the scientist's response to avoiding anthropomorphism is to turn everything into machine, to show it that it's just little parts randomly interacting with one another that forms these emergent structures that are, in fact, just mechanistic, we just have to understand what the mechanism is. Now I think of mechanism as some of the most violent forms of anthropomorphism we can have. Because by turning the living world into a machine, we've actually set it up to work for us. By turning the world into a machine, we've created a context in which we can deploy plants and organisms, molecules and other things in our service. We can run them like machines. And so some people would say, oh, mechanism is not anthropomorphism. But I'm starting to recognize rendering the world as machine is making it work for us is making it into a machine that can do work for us. And that is a kind of anthropomorphism in the sense that it's about modeling the world on a form that would serve human ends. 

And so I think we can challenge anthropomorphism in really powerful ways by participating actively in the work of refusing to disenchant the living world. And so we could say, "Ah Darwin wasn't an animist, but what he didn't do was he didn't disenchant the world", okay? Or we could look at all the scientists who failed to properly turn the world into bits of mechanistic objects. They have failed to disenchant the world. And then it's real difference instead of accusing people animating world, we can open up space to stop disenchanting it. And that really changes our relationship. And it could really radically change our relationship to plants as we expand our sensibilities for their forms of sentience, their intelligences, their knowledge, their know how their ways of being,

Ayana Young  Gosh, I love what you just said. Yeah, really thinking about how some of us humans somehow think that humans have the ability to do all these things or have the sentience or the ability to connect yet nothing else does. It's like we're flipping things to create things to work only for us in the way that we want them to. But it's actually not supporting us in the long run. It's not actually even helping humans to think like this to make things into machines, even though I think some humans think that by doing this, they're supporting humanity in some way. But this disconnection, this lack of reverence, this lack of like what you're talking about with the enchantment, has so stripped our sense of fulfillment of wonder of connection to each other, of being able to live healthy lives, drinking clean water. It really has so many horrendous domino effects when do not give more space to the living world and try to be the controlling species of it all. 

And of course so many of us know this but the way that you speak to it really opens up a whole other channel in my mind and I wanted to now bring up again, in "How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene," you write “Yes, there are apocalypses already ongoing all around us. The decimation of the Boreal forest to extract bitumen on stolen Indigenous land in Canada is one such apocalypse. But giving in to apocalyptic thinking is itself a kind of exit strategy, an easy out. Ruin porn, including those all-too compelling images of plants rupturing through abandoned buildings in Detroit and Chernobyl,  thrives on this narrative of “a world without us.” The earth will be better off without people, so we are told. Beware of such apocalyptic thinking. Anthropocenic thought catches you up in thrall of apocalypse and sets us all to work, furtively dreaming the end of times.” which is something that feels so incredibly precise and magnetic in context to what many of us are feeling right now...So I’d love to ask you about how you frame the relationship between the Anthropocene and apocalypse...or perhaps, how our apocalyptic thinking is yet another trap set in motion by the machine of capitalism? Who does apocalyptic imagery work for? 

Natasha Myers  Hmm, well, your question and some of my thinking has come out of reading this great theorist, Erik Swyngedouw who really thinks that apocalyptic thinking serves capitalism- apocalypse forever- according to him is the motto of capitalism, because he can always grow a market around disaster. You could always grow markets around disaster and I think that it'd be learned from things like the Exxon Valdez as I kind of boost in GDP disaster, and that technological fixes are kind of market opportunities really for capital to continue to extract oil, minerals, metals, and maintain the economy. And so I often think about sustainability rhetoric, precisely as in many places, the translation of sustainability means sustaining the economy, keeping the economy going in the face of everything else. And so one of the things we want to think about are "Ah, how do we get out of that, and I'm really concerned with this whole explosion of imaginings around exit strategies whether people are figuring this pandemic as the thing that will finally get rid of humans and save the planet or, "People are expendable, the planet will survive us, it'll be fine as long as we're gone." This is exactly what Donna Haraway calls the "tragic detoumessence of this narrative arc," a wonderful quote that she brought in, where we, we are so enamored with ourselves and our might and our power of destruction. And yet, we're on course to destroy ourselves and anyone who kind of celebrates that and also celebrates, "Oh, it's so great. We're designing rockets to get us out of here. We're designing colonies that we can live on on Mars," this kind of exit strategy. This is that moment where I feel like we're abandoning our responsibilities. 

And in fact, we are accountable and responsible to this land here and now and any desire to exit. Any desire to escape is precisely an abandonment of our responsibilities. And it's not just that we're responsible for cleaning up those oil wells or maintaining these vast stores of uranium waste from our nuclear infrastructures. Yes, we need people around to take care of those things into perpetuity for the hundreds of thousands of years that we will need to but we are also being called to be present accountable. And so the planthropos, which sort of decenters, the human but actually centers the human-plant hybrid as the figure that should ground our actions moving forward. It allows us to take action in an alliance in a form of solidarity that would seed livable worlds. And so in fact, we can't leave. In fact, we should not dream about Apocalypse, we need to work that as thoroughly as possible. So we can actually begin to aspire to something livable, and the possibility of regeneration, the possibility of altering the course that we set ourselves, imagining that if we think about what will have been, Beth Povinelli has this beautiful way of thinking about the future and interior of what will have been, yes, what will have been will be destruction if we carry on this way, but it doesn't have to be that. 

And I think that really the power of of aligning ourselves with the plants. The power of forming those solidarity projects with the plants is that with the tiniest bit of soil, and when seed we actually can begin to do the work of transformation, we actually can on the smallest scale with the most minimal technology imaginable, activate processes to heal the planet. And that hope, I think, is what we need to live with. Hope can be quite dangerous. One person's hope can be the other person's nightmare. So we have to be very careful with hope. But I'm interested in an aspirational politics that says what we're doing right now isn't viable. What we're doing right now isn't going to nourish us into the future. What are the smallest things we can do? Not the biggest technological fixes, but the smallest gestures that we can begin to make that would actually fundamentally reconfigure our relationship to the future.

So the opposite of Apocalypse is a Livable Future. Not an unlivable one. I think there are some hints for us in this moment of COVID-19, where we are being bound up in our homes, where we are no longer allowed to fling our bodies and objects around the world, that we're being called to attend to the local, to the place right here where we stand. Whether it's throwing some flowers in a pot on our window sill, or rescuing waste from our kitchens and growing celery and green onions from cuttings on our windowsill or whether we're able to liberate our lawns and grow food in our cities. We are being called right now to build those relationships in a way that is so therapeutic to bei in action around one's garden at this very moment. Many, many people around the world are gardening, because of COVID 19. They're returning to the land, they're returning to their responsibilities, to growing food and to being in relationship with a living world. And that is is where the hope is. And it's in the smallest gesture, it's in the smallest moment of gratitude for the power of a plant to take root and transform the world around it. And these are the tiny ways that we could bypass or circumvent the powerful grip that capitalism has on our imagination, on our desires, on our consumption and our qualities of life as well.

Ayana Young  Your response reminds me of something that is in your bio, and it's about the colonial violence of restoration ecology. And as you've been talking about tending to plants, I really want to hear how that sort of tending or restoration is not actually beneficial in your eyes for the earth. And maybe if you could just get into some more detail with us around how you see restoration ecology being violent towards the Earth.

Natasha Myers  Hmm, yeah. So this is a sort of a focus of my work right now. I live five minutes from an ancient oak Savanna, which is Toronto's- Tkaronto- which is an Indigenous name for this region, is the site of this incredible rare ecology called the Oak Savanna ecologies, and we have black oaks here. And these ecologies are precisely their plant people conspiracies. There is no pure nature in an Oak Savanna. An Oak Savanna is made over millennia. And it's made not just by the shrinking and expanding lakes that leave in their wake, vast stretches of sand dunes on the land, not just the power of wind, not just the power of water and glacier activity, but the incredible ceremonial and reverent work of tending lands that Indigenous people in this region have been doing for millennia, and they've tended to land with fire. Oak Savannas or fire ecologies and they are hungry for fire. And no one relies on random lightning strikes to wait to bring fire to these lands. These were lands that have been tended over millennia by people who bring fire to the land. To ensure that these oak savannas continue to thrive. Without fire they would fill in, they would encroach with other plants. And they would thicken in into forests that would leave no room for the animals to come that love to wander through the savanna and graze on the grasses, it would leave fewer nuts trees, fewer acorns, fewer nourishing medicines. So the oak savannas of this region, were incredibly powerful places. They're the site of treaty- making for the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe peoples here in Canada. And it was the Oak Aavannas which were the hunting grounds, the places where you would gather your acorns the places your gather your medicines, you grow your corn, in the open spaces in the canopy, places for making villages and community. 

These are now lands that in the late 1980s, no one recognized these lands as Oak Aavannas, the City of Toronto, it was only in the late 1980s that a report came out that recognize that the lands in one of our major parks here in Toronto, it was actually Oak Savanna land. And in fact, there are remnant Oak Aavannas all the way through Toronto. They're big pockets of these beautiful Oak Savannas. And so the restoration ecologist came in, they looked at all the different species and they realized that they needed to do these controlled burns and they had to restore the land. And so what they did was they came in with their pesticides they came in with Roundup, and they decided who should live and who should die in the Oak Savanna. They're there to rip out the garlic mustard. They're there to wick the dog straggling vine with glyphosate to remove it, they're there to cut down the European buckthorn, even though it's nourishing all the birds right now, cut down the European buckthorn and purify these oak savannas to make them look like they were supposed to historically. Unfortunately, restoration ecologists have not understood the Indigenous history of these fires for Oak Aavannas. And they're also oak savannas in California that were maintained by fire by Indigenous people. And so the entire story that restoration ecologist write up about oak savannas is that they are replacing natural wildfires and that the fires that they bring to the land are just mimicking these natural wildfires and has nothing to do with any human activity.

And so there's a complete erasure of Indigenous livelihood of Indigenous history of Indigenous stewardship and the intimate relationship of the relationship between people fire and these Oak Aavannas. And so restoration ecologists have taken over the stewardship of the Oak Savanna for the last 20 years and I'm involved right now- first of all, my research was documenting the work of restoration ecologist- and now my work has been transformed entirely towards supporting Indigenous stewards to take leadership in Oak Savanna restoration. And for them, they see Indigenous stewardship as a form of harm reduction. So removing pesticides, getting pesticides, and their entire economies, destructive economies out of the Oak Savannas, and they want to bring fire through ceremony. And bringing fire through ceremony is a very different thing. Fire is not just combustion. Fire is not just about the fuel levels in the ground. It's not just about maintaining ecosystem services. It's actually about being In right relation with the land, with the spirit, and with all of the other beings. And so, transforming right now in the midst of building consultations with the City of Toronto, the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle in Toronto, which is made up of Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Metis people from this region and people from other regions who are committed to taking leadership. And the work now is really about educating restoration ecologist here in Indigenous stewardship to center Indigenous stewardship in land work, not just to heal the land, but also to help to support the healing of Indigenous community and to support the climate action in the city that would actually have effects more powerfully for everyone. 

And so the violence of colonial restoration ecology really is around Indigenous erasure, is this sort of like terra nullius- "there was nothing here nothing to look at, nothing to think about before. colonizers came." And this work that we're doing with around Indigenous stewardship is about totally changing that story. And by empowering Indigenous people to take up this work, it really centers them on the land, it gives them the opportunity to heal from intergenerational traumas of colonialism. And this is what the land needs. This is what the land wants. And the trees do remember, there are people, they know who's bringing pesticides and who's not bringing pesticides to the land. And there are trees here on the land that come from precolonial times where there were Indigenous people burning the land. And so the shift for restoration ecology is big. And it can't be about restoring the land to some idea of some de-peopled nature. It's about bringing Indigenous people back to the land and integrating people on the land. It's about recognizing that these lands are not sites of pure nature where we have to keep people out but actually activating spaces for healing of people in plants together, the land and the plants and the people together, in ways that could actually alter the course for the future. And so studies have been done recently that biodiversity is highest on indigenous lands that Indigenous people are at the forefront of climate action that they are at the forefront of land stewardship, and that these are the people we need to follow if we want to build the plant people conspiracies that will grow the livable world.

Ayana Young  Yes, thank you for speaking to that. I studied restoration ecology, and I really set out to be engaged with restoration ecology physically, and the more that I learned, I started to feel like something wasn't right here. And I had to unlearn a lot of the methods and tools that I was being taught about reforestation and  propagation. And just learning about the entire restoration industrial complex in and of itself has been a real eye opener. And I love how you speak about ungriddable protocols and the ways that you're understanding restoration ecology and the spiritual element of it. The relational element of it, I think has been really lost in academia, and a lot of scientific protocols. And I do think that it is extremely detrimental more than we really realize right now. And it's hard when we try to do good things with good intentions, but we're doing it from a reductionist lens or a human supremacist lens or an urgent lens even and how that shifts a project. So I love you speaking to this. It's something that really is close to my life.

I also wanted to mention that you cite the importance of detuning settler common sense. And I'm also thinking about the ways in which opening ourselves to foreign embodiments invites breakdown and makes unsense of things, which feels important to name right? The incredible power of breakdown, fracture and confusion. And I'm wondering how do you define not knowing as an ethic and how does lending ourselves to the unknown, provide a fruitful opportunity for imagining and creating?

Natasha Myers  Hmm, that's great question. And I mean, I've spent so much of my academic life studying knowledge, epistemology, and knowledge formations and what we know and how we know, and all the things that science can know. And I realized that there's also this assumption that everything should be made knowable, that we should be able to unmask the truth behind everything. And that, you know, with just a little more time and better equipment and better techniques, we can know, we can really know. And I think the invitation, what I'm learning from the work of detuning my settler common sense and the common sense being like, the things that fit in my world, all the things that fit, that makes sense that hold together that hang together, that so much of our conditioning has been in a colonial mindset that has forced us to serve recognize the inherent value of one thing over another, or the value of knowledge or the value of research, the value of inquiry, the value of curiosity, and getting to the bottom of things and extracting something from something or really digging into something. All these things have a kind of extractive force to them as if it's our right, as if it's something that humans need is access to knowledge and not knowing. 

And so that prevents us all this knowledge we have actually is limiting our imagination. It's limiting what we could possibly sense and feel about the world. And so there's so much knowledge we have about the nonhuman world, and a lot of it's rooted in science. And in that way, a lot of it is also rooted in colonial formations and understandings. And so I worry about the way that restoration ecologists talk about ecosystem services as if they could calculate the benefit of a tree as its contribution to our capitalist economy. There's a kind of knowing in that I want to unlearn radically. I want to not know that I want to think about the world in a different way. So stepping into not knowing I think if we want to get to know plants, well if we want to get a feel for what they care about, for what they enjoy about life or what they want to give us, and the attitudes and postures and attentions that we think are necessary for us to get to the bottom of things or to answer things. So an ethic of not knowing is suspending sometimes even our curiosity, right, and allowing ourselves to be in the presence of another being without needing to know its scientific name, without needing to know the molecules that it's making in its tissues. And actually just being present with another being and opening ourselves up to the learning and the teaching that can come from that and stepping into not knowing means kind of taking off the veils, these blinders that we've put on that tell us what we think matters. Our attentions have so been shaped by what we're told matters in the world. I think other things might also matter. And the only way we're going to get to those things, the phenomena that are calling our attention, but we can't see or hear or attend to, because we're so busy trying to dissect or extract or parse all these things. So an ethic of not knowing precisely what needs to open up our hearts and open up our minds, and our sensorium to kind of other sensibilities, other ways of doing life, and that's where the learning will begin. And so a kind of ungriddable ecology is the practice of ecology that forgets about ecosystem services, it forgets about cost benefit analyses, it forgets about the mechanisms in plants that allow it to gather light as energy. We just have to find forget about those things in order to actually build relationships with the plants that could give us a chance at forming these solidarities with them. 

Ayana Young  Hmm, yes. So beautiful. Natasha, I just want to go hug a tree right now honestly, I do. 

Natasha Myers  And it wants to hug you back. [laughs]

Ayana Young  Yeah, I feel so much kinship from your words, and so much opportunity and possibility and creativity and just so much more opportunity for love for relating for joy for purpose. And yeah, it's really yeah, it's conversations really put me in such a good mood. And I know it's hard right now because we're going through a lot of course, COVID-19 has swept us all away in one sense or the other. And there's a lot of loneliness. I'm sure that's happening for many people. And when I think about relating to the plants that loneliness fades, and there's this type of future vision of being able to expand our way of connecting with other beings and, and yeah, also a kind of hope for the future, not just with COVID, but also with the effects of the extinction crisis and climate change. We know that we are up against a lot in the upcoming decades. And how we'll get through this is a question I think, on so many people's hearts, but it's not just about us. And it's not just about relying on humans or human ingenuity. There's so much more to listen to. And that to me brings a lot of relief to know that it's not all on our shoulders to "figure it out, or find the solutions or the fixes." But instead, how do we quiet and listen? Because there are beings that are, I think far wiser than we are, who really do know how to deal with the issues at hand. And I don't think we'll ever figure it out. And I love how you speak to the humility of not knowing and that ethic is so powerful in a world where we are being just hit over the head with this idea that we should know everything and we should figure everything out and somehow somebody somewhere should have all the answers and the pressure that then puts on those certain people, the ego, it's really just a spiral of, of BS. It doesn't make sense? So I'm really appreciative of your take on things. As much as I don't want to close this conversation, I know we have been speaking for a while. And as we start to wrap up our conversation for the moment, I'd like to ask you about the work of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle in Toronto. A little bit more I know you've spoken to how it's relating to the hi parks, Oak savannas. But if there's anything else that you would like to speak about this circle with us, if there is any lessons or other stories that come to mind, I would really love to hear them.

Natasha Myers  So one of the things that's so important around the Planthroposcene is not just allying with the plants, but allying with the people who know the plants in deep ways. The people who have the knowledge, who have the protocols, who have the stories and the ancient practices that can support our moving forward. And so it became really clear to me as soon as I took on this project of looking at colonial formations of restoration ecology that actually I couldn't go very far into this project until I found ways to become an accomplice to Indigenous community here in Toronto. The questions I was asking, I couldn't even ask on my own, they're not my questions to ask. And there aren't really my stories to tell. What I needed to be doing as a researcher was to find ways to support Indigenous people in their research and engagement and curiosity and practices in order to facilitate transformation of who gets to do the restoration work. And so I think the Planthroposcene really does hinge on us on people all over the world, elevating Indigenous voices, centering the people with the knowledge and creating opportunities for them to practice and to develop an elaborate their protocols, their ancient protocols that they've inherited, but then also as they create new ones. And so building relationships with Indigenous community in Toronto around that stewardship has been the most rewarding and most powerful work I've ever done. And it also feels like the only thing that I need to be doing right now, which is raising money for the Indigenous Land Stewardship Council to do their work, so resourcing and organizing and supporting and facilitating any processes they need right now, because these are dire times, especially with COVID-19. We have Indigenous communities who are disproportionately affected here in Canada. I know also in the US and Canada, Black communities are also disproportionately affected. And so there's a real moment of exposure of the inequalities and the source of healing for Indigenous people is access to land and for us to begin to rethink who runs the city and who's responsible for land in a city. Especially given that so many Indigenous people in Canada, at least, live in cities. Because this is where the jobs are, these are where the resources are, they no longer have access to a land base. And so creating opportunities for land based pedagogies for land based healing and ceremony here in the city feels like that's where the work is. And these are the people who have formed solidarities with the plants. These are the people who know how to listen, who know how to talk to them, who know how to do the honorable harvest, who know how to sing to the seedlings as they're growing, as they plant their gardens, and so becoming an accomplice, which is you know, a little different than an ally, becoming an accomplice is being able to make oneself available to serve community in whatever their needs are, feels like that's actually work for the Planthroposcene, supporting the people who know how, who has the plant, know how, and who have seed knowledge feels like where we could put our energy. And what we're hoping to do with the Land Stewardship Circle is create a toolkit and a model for Indigenous people in cities across North America wherever, really to begin to organize, begin to recognize the municipal structures and to see where they can create opportunities for restoration, taking leadership in restoration, and I love the idea that the word restoration, which is to restore to something is actually about restoring to Indigenous people, restoring to the original landholders, restoring to the treaty holders, the people who have the inherent and treaty responsibilities to tend these lands, if they're not tending the land, they're not fulfilling their responsibilities and whatever obstacles colonial governments have put in their way have to be removed so that becomes possible. And so that feels like work for the Planthroposcene is part of the work that settlers like myself are responsible for. If I want to research restoration ecology, I need to be able to spend a lot of my energy supporting Indigenous researchers to do that work.

Ayana Young  Yes, I think Rematriation and Land Back is such an important part of the Planthroposcene. And reminds me of the conversation I've had with Kurt Russo about the Salish Sea and the Orcas, and that to rematriate the stolen Orcas back to their natal waters, will create a type of healing that is beyond our understanding. And I feel the same way about the rematiration of land, and respecting the original stewards of this land who do have the plant knowledge that settlers just can't have. You know, studying restoration ecology even for 100 years is a drop in the bucket- what is that really 100 years, but it's not even 100 years for most people, you know, going to school for seven years, even two years. What does that really tell us? We're crawling or crawling babies with not a lot of actual time spent with these plants and this land. And so I'm really with you there. And Natasha, this has been such a beautiful conversation. And I'm sure for the folks who are listening like me, you're probably at this point smiling and feeling a very deep warmth. I know I feel that warmth in my heart. Because there is, like I had mentioned earlier, a type of loneliness that has faded, knowing that there are so many other beings out there who can hold so much, who hold us, protect us, give us life, if there are answers to have they have them. And we don't have to try to build up our human ego to think that we should try to have them and to me, there is so much relief and joy and connection in that. So thank you again for all your work and for speaking to us today.

Natasha Myers Thank you so much. I'm also smiling and I feel that good warmth for this conversation. So I'm really grateful. Thank you.