Heroes of Botany: Voices of Dissent from the Western Tradition’s Devaluation of Plants

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the way plants have often been downplayed in Western culture so that their attributes and their beingness have been overlooked. To illustrate this, reference is made to ideas such as: the great chain of being; the zoocentric emphasis in biology, which encourages a misreading of plants as essentially passive (virtually inanimate); and the anthropocentric focus on use value. The chapter goes on to sketch four vignettes of historical figures in botany who explored and wrote about the plant realm in ways that dissented from the Western orthodoxy. These figures are: Theophrastus (pupil of Aristotle and arguably the father of scientific botany); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (eighteenth century German poet whose scientific works include The Metamorphosis of Plants and whose approach to science required a human/plant interaction); Agnes Arber (twentieth century English botanist and philosopher who understood the useful vestiges in earlier approaches to the appreciation of plant agency); and Barbara McClintock (twentieth century US botanist/cytogeneticist who discovered transposons, the so-called “jumping genes”). Each of these figures is placed in their time, and the chapter presents something of what they offered to the vegetal turn. The picture of plants that emerges is that of dynamically engaged beings open to relationships—a picture which, in turn, can connect us to a broader/deeper conception of the world.