Drafts by Catriona Sandilands
Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn, 2022
Introduction: Mulberries, A Love Story Until 2017, I never gave mulberries much thought. This sit... more Introduction: Mulberries, A Love Story Until 2017, I never gave mulberries much thought. This situation is unusual, as I have been living intimately, thinking, and writing with plants for a long time. If asked, I would have been able to hum the tune of "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush," but I had never knowingly tasted a mulberry fruit and certainly would not have said we were on close terms. Although a mulberry tree of some size inhabits the street-facing part of my front yard, I also had no real idea that I cohabited my West Toronto neighbourhood with rather a lot of its relatives. From a starting position of relative mulberry-blindness, that year I learned to pay attention to mulberry trees in two ways, more-or-less at the same time. In the first, I re-read Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex (2002) for a panel at the 2017 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference in Detroit, Michigan. I was looking for the plants in Middlesex, which is mostly set in Detroit, and there are mulberries all over it (both the novel and the city). In Middlesex, they are a major dramatic motif and their presence tendrils through the novel's stories of sex, gender, class, migration, racism, and incest (to name a few, see Sandilands 2018). In the second, I took a field-naturalist course in Toronto's High Park: there are mulberries all over it, too. As the course leader outlined, these trees are also part of a drama, in which one kind of mulberry (Morus alba, or white mulberry) is considered an exotic-invasive, threatening the integrity of another kind of mulberry (M. rubra, or red mulberry) to the point the latter is listed
Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose, 2022
Women's Studies, 2021
Nodding onion is a very pretty plant. Their 1 leaves are slender and resemble blades of grass; th... more Nodding onion is a very pretty plant. Their 1 leaves are slender and resemble blades of grass; their much taller flower scapes end in single clusters of tiny, pale pink, starry flowers. Their Latin binomial, Allium cernuum, roughly means "garlic with a face turned toward the earth," referring to their delicate umbrels nodding downward. Several Indigenous names, however, emphasize another of their distinctive features: their onion-ness. In Senćoten-one of the Straits Salish languages of Vancouver Island and the BC Southern Gulf Islands-the plant is known as sqw'əx, which refers to their strong "underarm odour," and several other nearby languages also describe them as "smelly" or "pungent" grass (Turner 482-4). Ethnobotanist Nancy Turner notes that nodding onion has been an important source of carbohydrates for many Indigenous nations for millennia. Although, in the Gulf Islands where I am writing, they are culturally less important than qwlhá7əl-camas in English and spénw in Hul'qumi'num, among many other names-they are a staple food in the interior, where their bulbs, like those of camas on the coast, are harvested and roasted in the spring, a process that transforms their indigestible inulin into fructose (Turner 270). I have never eaten a nodding onion (or camas, for that matter); I have, however, slowly caramelized many of their domesticated cousins, so I have an inkling of that delicious sweetness. Sqw'əx are not just nutrition: they are a delight. 1 In this essay, I use the pronouns they/them to refer to plants in both the singular and the plural. This choice reflects plants' existential plurality and often complex gender presentation; it also marks the need to move away from the objectifying "it" (see Kimmerer), for which reason I also use the relative pronoun "who" instead of "that.
The Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 2021
Forthcoming in Jeffrey Cohen and Stephanie Foote (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Environmen... more Forthcoming in Jeffrey Cohen and Stephanie Foote (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Beside the sink in my kitchen, a bottle of dishwashing liquid announces itself, in purple letters, as "powered by plants." Turn the bottle around and the phrase "plant-based" or "plant-derived" is repeated thirteen times. For example, at the top of the list of ingredients is sodium lauryl sulfate, a "plant-derived cleaning agent." Although the commonly-used surfactant is known to cause eye, skin, and respiratory irritation and is often made from rainforest-destroying palm oil, the description makes it seem positively wholesome. Plants are, it seems, the new "green." Apart from the health or environmental merits of eating lower on the food chain or avoiding petroleum-based goods, the invocation of a "plant" origin lends an aroma of virtue to products including ultra-processed meat substitutes (often nutritionally dubious), and plastics made from agricultural waste (often the product of disastrous monocrops like corn and sugar cane). While I like that my detergent bottle names and makes visible some of the extraordinary capacities of plants-they are, among thousands of other things, cleaners, emollients, stabilizers, and fragrances-"greenwashing" these capacities gets in the way of understanding how plants are entangled in human lives: for good (sugar maples), for bad (deadly nightshade), and very often both (bamboo, tobacco). Plants are also the "old" green. Algae, probably the first multicellular organisms on Earth, emerged around 1.2 billion years ago; the first land plants, like mosses and liverworts, evolved about 470 million years ago, and aquatic and land plants now make up about 80 percent of the planet's biomass. Plants are mostly autotrophs, meaning they produce their own food from inorganic materials; they take water and carbon dioxide and, with sunlight, photosynthesize them into the energy that heterotrophs, such as humans, require to live (not to mention oxygen). Despite their necessity in the maintenance of complex life on the planet-and likely because of their ubiquity-many people tend, in their everyday lives, not to notice the plants around them until they do something dramatic, like cherry trees blooming in the Spring or ragweed in the late Summer. Biology educators James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler coined the term "plant blindness" not only to refer to people's inability to "see or notice the plants in [their] environment" but also to their failure to recognize the beauty and value of "the life forms that belong to the Plant Kingdom." 1 Whether plant blindness derives from zoological narcissism, perceptual limitation, or received prejudice, one result is that plants have not received the same attention as animals-especially vertebrates-in contemporary culture, and that many people's relationships to plants are impoverished as a result. There are, however, people who do pay attention to plants, and many forms of knowledge devoted to understanding them in some aspect: botany (aka plant science or
On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation, 2021
Forthcoming in in Laurie Cluitmans (ed.), Over De Noodzaak van Tuinieren / On the Necessity of Ga... more Forthcoming in in Laurie Cluitmans (ed.), Over De Noodzaak van Tuinieren / On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2021). January. On Galiano Island, BC (Canada) where I am writing, the month is long, dark, damp, and cold. Especially in COVID isolation, it is a long stretch of hibernation. The woodstove is lit and there is a pot of bean and tomato soup on top, complete with some of the overwintering kale from the garden. Part of the annual winter ritual, the first seed catalogue also arrived in the mail yesterday. Amid my enjoyment of the January sounds, smells, and tastes, I am also called to imagine future seasonalities with luscious pictures of peas, beans, tomatoes, summer squash, and annual herbs, not to mention the abundant flowers I can't help but miss in these somewhat monochromatic times. Black Krim tomatoes: "The flesh is tinted green and has a wonderful, almost salty quality." Glorious Gleam nasturtiums: "Large, fragrant, double and semi-double, multicoloured flowers blanket the plants … [and] spill over a low wall for a great effect." Celebration Swiss chard: "Thick red, yellow, rose, gold, and white stems bear slightly savoyed leaves of burgundy and green." 1 Seed catalogues inspire world-making. Last year, for the first time, I drew a careful grid of my vegetable garden on a sheet of paper, measuring out in miniature which plants would go where: who should and shouldn't be planted next to whom, which plants have similar needs for water and fertilizer, the timing of the peas up the trellis in relation to that of the beets growing underneath them. It was a deeply enriching experience. In my research and planning, I learned a great deal more about companion planting, and about the diverse plant-human-pollinator
What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be, 2021
Behind the little house that I rent on Galiano Island, there is a back trail cut through the wood... more Behind the little house that I rent on Galiano Island, there is a back trail cut through the woods from the road, up a steep hill, to The Bluffs. The Bluffs were set aside by the Galiano community in 1948: they were one of the first places in the Southern Gulf Islands to be formally protected, by settler-colonists at least, from logging and real estate development. You can see why as soon as you arrive at the lookout: The southwest view across the Salish Sea to Mayne, Pender, Prevost, Salt Spring, and Vancouver Islands-and, then, on a clear day, into the San Juans and the Olympic Mountains-is deep and seemingly limitless. On the way up to The Bluffs, from the house, the back trail winds through a dense, mostly second-growth fir and cedar forest, across private property marked with polite signs prohibiting mountain bikes, back and forth up several hills and plateaus, to the top. It is called the Grace
Plant Fever: Towards a Phytocentric Design, 2020
Chapters in Books by Catriona Sandilands
Veer Ecology: Key Words for Ecotheory, 2017
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017
The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 2016
The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, 2016
This chapter turns on the concept of sensation to sketch some of the ways plants are caught up in... more This chapter turns on the concept of sensation to sketch some of the ways plants are caught up in contemporary biopolitics. Specifically, the idea of the floral sensation both describes the spectacular qualities of (some) plants that make them particularly desirable commodities in the global floral industry, and gestures to recent research that indicate that plants have sensations that are both similar to and radically different from human ones. Together, these meanings demonstrate that plants are extensively implicated in biopolitical relations, but as agents with specific capacities rather than as passive objects of manipulation. To understand the involvement of active plants in biopolitics, then, re quires attentiveness both to the multiplicity of vegetal involvements in socio-political en tanglements, and to the ways in which plants complicate questions of life itself; ethical and political responses to plant life must therefore move beyond assertions of plant simi larity in the direction of also recognizing their unassimilable differences.
Material Ecocriticisms, 2014
The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, 2014
This article examines the relevance of queer theory and "queer ecological" trajectories to ecocri... more This article examines the relevance of queer theory and "queer ecological" trajectories to ecocriticism. It analyzes Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's formative thoughts in "Sex in Public" and proposes some "radical aspirations" of queer nature building. It outlines a "queer life" for ecocriticism and provides a reading of Jane Rule's novel After the Fire, which engages directly with both the ontological and the political dimensions of queer ecological thinking.
Cambridge University Press, 2014
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014
L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian Studies, 2013
Rethinking the Great White North: Nature and the Geographies of Whiteness in Canada, 2011
On the north side of the river, there is a fine bench which will make a first-class site for a Pa... more On the north side of the river, there is a fine bench which will make a first-class site for a Parks Bungalow camp. At the present time, there are about eight families along this bench who would have to be removed and their lands redeemed outright and turned over to the Dominion.
University of Virginia Press, 2011
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, 2010
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Drafts by Catriona Sandilands
Chapters in Books by Catriona Sandilands