University of California Santa Cruz Frontiers of Plant

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ FRONTIERS OF PLANT-HUMAN COLLABORATION A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in PHILOSOPHY by Linda Kealey June 2019 The Dissertation of Linda Kealey is approved: _________________________ Professor Nico Orlandi, Chair _________________________ Professor Karen Barad _________________________ Professor Abe Stone _________________________ Lori Kletzer Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Ontological, Anthropological, and Methodological 47 Considerations Chapter 3 The Findhorn Garden and its New Age Onto-World 97 Chapter 4 Making Sense of Plant-Human Collaboration 136 Chapter 5 Collaboration in an Agential Realist Onto-World 192 Chapter 6 Devas and Nature Spirits in an Agential Realist Onto- 248 World Chapter 7 Engaging Scientifically with Plant-Human 324 Collaboration Chapter 8 Conclusion 383 Appendix A Plant Sentience in the Scientific and Philosophical 393 Literature References 407 iii Abstract Frontiers of Plant-Human Collaboration Linda Kealey In Findhorn, Scotland, as part of the “New Age” in the 1960s, a novel form of plant-human collaboration developed in which humans collaborated with “nature”, or specifically with “devas” and “nature spirits”, beings that are not physical and cannot be engaged with in the usual physical manner, but that through this collaboration made a meaningful difference in the lives of the humans and in the physical reality of their gardens. In a “modernist” world, defined such that only the “physical” is scientifically real, where the physical is that which can be observed and measured with the physical senses and their technological extensions, it is not possible to make sense of non-physical beings such as devas and nature spirits. The underlying theme of this project is to overcome this modernist “physicocentrism” in order to expand what is considered to be scientifically real. Methodologically, Findhorn’s experiences are not dismissed outright, nor is it attempted to reduce them to the physical, but their experiences are engaged with as real on their own terms, suggesting the need for a critical rethinking of implicit modernist assumptions about the nature of reality, including individualist metaphysics, nature-culture dualism, human exceptionalism, and reductionism. The New Age implicitly retains these modernist tendencies, resulting in problematic practices, but with Karen Barad’s “agential realism” – an ethico-onto-epistemology iv that, among other features, provides a coherent interpretation of quantum physics – these modernist limitations are overcome through the reworking of key concepts such as matter, causality, space, time, agency, and knowledge. Through agential realism’s fundamental in/determinacy of matter that is in stark contrast to the determinate individuals of modernism, it is possible to make sense of devas as “virtual beings”, of nature spirits as “transphysical beings”, and of collaboration as not limited to humans but inclusive of any mutually intra-acting agencies that jointly take responsibility for the iterative enaction of their common world. There is a possibility of engaging scientifically with virtuality and transphysicality through their physical traces in laboratory experiments, and collaborating with devas and nature spirits could help create ethically responsible scientific practices with plants. v Acknowledgements I consider all beings my teachers, especially those from whom I initially believe that I have nothing to learn, and I find it of utmost importance to acknowledge that ultimately, all interrelated beings and their various institutions made the writing of this dissertation possible. Within this rather large scope, I can point specifically to some of the most immediately obvious participants. I am grateful to my family (especially to my husband Jim), to all the places I have lived, and to the incredible privilege by which I have able to partake in this academic journey. I am grateful to the variety of academic training that I have received, to all the professors, students, and staff who made a difference, and especially to the U.C. Santa Cruz campus with its Redwood trees, its gorgeous views, and the opportunity to do lots of walking. I am grateful for the five years of support provided by the Cota-Robles Fellowship, as well as numerous grants from the Philosophy Department and the Graduate Student Associate that enabled my travel to conferences. Thank you to my dissertation committee Nico Orlandi, Karen Barad, and Abe Stone. I am especially grateful to Karen Barad for their passionate adherence to agential realism as an ethico-onto-epistemology that requires dedication to such a wide range of important issues. Thank you to my cohort Nikos Knightly and David Donley for engaging with me in philosophy as a way of life, and to Yoshi Shibata for teaching me aikido as a way of life. vi Thank you to the beings at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, and to the beings of the land where I currently live in Sebastopol, for our ongoing journey in plant-human collaboration. I have a deep and reverent gratitude for a particular Eucalyptus tree that stands on the northwest corner of the U.C. Berkeley campus, with amazing diagonally spiraling striations of different colored bark winding up its trunk; over a period of years, this tree helped pull me out of my modernist slumber to notice “nature” in a new way, which eventually led to this dissertation on plant-human collaboration. I am indebted to Barbara Pennington for demanding that I find the courage within myself to quit my career and go back to school, and for encouraging me to be outrageous enough to propose an analytical philosophy dissertation on the topic of devas and nature spirits. I am ongoingly grateful to Eric Weiss for luring me into the world of speculative metaphysics and for continuing to be an inspiration, a fount of creative genius, an excellent listener, a friend, and a fellow explorer on this intra-active quest for an expanded sense of reality that can be engaged with both critically and compassionately. vii 1. Introduction What if it were possible to dramatically increase soil fertility and food production yields by communicating directly with plants to find out how to best enable their growth and vitality? If this seems like a fairly radical question to ask, consider the immense significance that such an alternative mode of sustainable food production and soil regeneration could have in terms of addressing current global issues. While there is as yet no scientifically established method of engaging with the plant world that includes plant-human collaboration as a key aspect, collaborative relationships between humans and plants are certainly not new, and traditional and Indigenous practices are being considered in conjunction with Western scientific practices.1 This project is not intended to be a survey or a history of plant-human collaboration, but is focused on one particular style of plant-human collaboration that was developed by a “New Age” community in the 1960s in Findhorn, Scotland (Findhorn Community 1975). Because the very idea of communicating directly with plants as collaborative partners may seem impossible within existing scientific frameworks, we must investigate and overcome the limitations of these frameworks. The overall intention of this project is to engage with Findhorn’s plant-human collaboration in a way that has the potential to affect our own beliefs and actions, which is more likely to be accomplished if we can connect Findhorn’s experiences with current scientific 1 For example, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) is a plant ecologist who engages with Indigenous practices through her Potawatomi ancestors’ traditional ways of knowing, and Fikret Berkes (2012), an applied ecologist who worked with the Cree Indians in subarctic Canada, examines local and Indigenous knowledge in relation to scientific ecology. 1 theories. The thesis of this project is that “agential realism” – an ethico-onto- epistemology developed by Karen Barad (2007) that, among other features, provides a coherent interpretation of quantum physics – allows for the possibility of coming to terms in a scientific way with the efficaciousness of Findhorn’s plant-human collaboration by overcoming the implicit limitations of our current scientific frameworks. In order to understand how I have arrived at this thesis, as well as how this thesis could inform our current beliefs and actions, it will be helpful to begin with detailed overviews of the key points from each chapter. This thorough introduction to the project as a whole will necessarily result in a rather condensed presentation of the material, but grasping the whole will render each part more comprehensible when it is expanded upon in the subsequent chapters. Because we will be shifting between ontological frameworks in which our basic implicit assumptions are being disrupted, it is important to define a working vocabulary in order to focus the discussion and remain as clear as possible, so this chapter will include initial definitions and clarifications that will be discussed in more detail later. In §1.1, I will introduce Findhorn’s plant-human collaboration, and in §1.2, I will introduce the various frameworks that will be utilized, including agential realism. In §1.3, we will address the anthropological considerations involved in studying Findhorn’s plant-human collaboration, and in §1.4, we will investigate how Findhorn’s experiences do and do not make sense from within the various frameworks we are considering. This will lead us to the thesis of this project, which 2 will be addressed in two parts: in §1.5, we will see how agential realism expands the notion of collaborative partners beyond humans; in §1.6, we will use agential realism to show how it could be possible to make sense of the particular plant-human collaborative methods utilized at Findhorn. Finally, before concluding in §1.8, we will, in §1.7, consider what might be required in engaging with plant-human collaboration scientifically.

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