Paper short abstract:

Plant functional traits let ecologists aggregate a plant community's properties. Anthropologists are skeptical of function but the concept is important. Narratives of shrub encroachment in Lesotho show us how to see plant strategies and the local histories that make strategies matter.

Paper long abstract:

Plant functional traits (PFTs) refer to those physiological, morphological, or phenological properties of plants that define strategies for survival (e.g., seed mass, plant height) and enable ecologists to bypass binomials, instead aggregating the functional properties of plant communities. Anthropologists and others know to be skeptical of "function," given its use in apolitical, ahistorical models of social organization assigned to colonized people. Yet, in the Anthropocene it seems that restoring the function—the ability to productively coordinate—of more-than-human communities is an urgent matter of concern. This paper works in this contentious zone to understand plants' role in transforming rangelands in Lesotho. There, the "dwarf shrub"—a life-form with certain functional traits—has become an important figure of contemporary life, crowding out grasses necessary to livestock and the people who depend on them. Elites in Lesotho take an "ecological", abstracted view of shrubs, envisioning them as indicators of rangeland degradation. The people who live beside shrub-encroached rangelands, however, see not simply degradation but a history of climate contingency, population pressures, and soil conservation programs implemented by elites, which removed a key tool for keeping shrubs in check: fire. That is, they make possible a landscape historiography that respects plant strategies and the local histories that make those strategies matter. My findings are based on 14 months of fieldwork in Lesotho, where shrubs proliferate alongside efforts at soil conservation. Informed by ecological theory, history, anthropology, and STS, this paper attests that form and function need not be ahistorical and abstract.