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Paper short abstract

Three ethnographies with plants in Chile challenge Western notions of cohabitation and futures. Interspecies relationships rethink categories, methods, and the understanding of life-with. From a decolonial perspective, plants and humans spark creativity and other onto-epistemic links.

Paper long abstract

The phrase is inspired by the ideas of Timothy Morton, particularly his “dark ecology,” which, far from rushing headlong into the Anthropocene, seeks to problematize overly simplistic or naive imaginaries of the future. This paper seeks to continue that critique from the Global South, particularly Latin America, proposing some human-plant relationships in which the tension for coexistence remains and “Western” links fade or are understood in other ways: hybrid, porous, chaotic. We depend on the plant world, in its variety of forms, to live. At the same time, we use them to keep warm, to build our homes, to feed them, or simply to transform the space where plants have settled. We dispute space with plants in a tension that cannot be resolved simply, either with conservation proposals or with the creation of spaces reserved for them. Should we think of a future where “the word for world is forest,” as Ursula K. Le Guin suggested in her work? Can we push further the imaginaries of cohabitation where the plant world is not domesticated, colonized, or designed solely by humans and for humans? These questions are raised by the work based on ethnographic experiences in ancestral forests in southern Chile, work with people who are dedicated to health/rituals with medicinal herbs, and work in nurseries in central Chile. Three diverse experiences, all of them with and among plants, with a view to delving into the critical knots of cohabitation and learning to live on a damaged planet.