‘We Live in Their Shade’: Towards a Plant-Based Civic Imagination

As society survives pandemic-induced confinement and many of us pivot into thinking about longer term futures, we now need to engage with our surroundings in new ways. We need to tap into the collective emotions that power the imagination to recognize our boundedness with the natural world. In this chapter, the authors draw on their work at the Civic Imagination Project to explore plants, and the stories they inspire, and importantly, how these stories become portals for noticing, reflecting, creating, connecting, and charting collective paths forward. The authors ask what we can learn about the emotional relationships we form with plants, and how these connect to other areas of our lives to become powerful entry points into mobilizing around climate change. Civic Imagination is the practice of visualizing any social change that supports us in the movement towards a better world and is also a framework to guide the process of such radical change.