Planetary vegetal thought

The first living being successfully to cross the threshold from Earth's atmosphere into space was not a chimpanzee, nor a dog, nor a human. It was a maize seed, part of a cache launched into orbit by Harvard University and the US Naval Research Laboratory in July 1946. Twenty years later, several seeds including lettuce, beans and cabbage became the first to germinate in space, as the Soviet Kosmos 110 spacecraft orbited Earth. Experiments since the 1980s – initially onboard Salyut 7, then on Mir, the ISS, as well as, for three years, China's Tiangong-2 space lab – have tested and refined systems for plant growth and reproduction in outer space (Stutte et al., 2015). The ISS now features two distinct plant growth systems that are almost self-sustaining: courgette, rice, Arabidopsis, wheat and other species have all been grown successfully. One key challenge is plant structure in zero and microgravity conditions; while plants do adapt to low gravity living (shoots still move to light, roots away from light), water, nutrients, and air must be artificially distributed with great precision. Plant genetic expression also changes in space in ways not yet understood (NASA, 2021).

The genealogy of plants in space emerges from big-state, mid-twentieth-century space imperialism (Battaglia, 2017). More recently, the genealogy broadens, as sky-god tech bros seek apotheosis by bringing user-friendly software to the cosmos and by securing humanity as a multiplanetary civilisation (Tutton, 2021). Looking to the future, plants will definitely be used in interplanetary space exploration for food, carbon dioxide scrubbing, wellbeing and other services. Space exploration practitioners, and their science and technologies, are clearly a certain form of what Clark and Szerszynski (2021) call an ‘earthly multitude’, one with abundant power, prestige and privilege. Space exploration can be critiqued and dismissed as a dangerous distraction of the hyperbolic ‘Good Anthropocene’, the offspring of Californian libertarian capitalist fantasy and big-state techno-politics. In this vein, plants might be seen merely as instruments.

While social science can reliably critique space exploration using our received repertoires, might other responses shed light on what else might be going on (Valentine, 2012)? This question indicates a key challenge taken up in Clark and Szerszynski's Planetary Social Thought. Their take on the mainstream Anthropocene debate is not to dismiss geoscience or global environmental policy, nor is it to engage in the familiar work of critique. The authors are reluctant to consign contemporary geoscience to a regressive, unitary Anthropocene narrative, and more interested to ‘discern wayward and insurgent traces of multiplicity within the sciences behind the Anthropocene’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 162). Their aim is less to analyse inhuman planetary powers than to enable these powers to speak through us, to transform knowledge and thought. As such they are aligned to critical scholars such as Donna Haraway or Elizabeth Povinelli, and allied to decolonial thinkers who emphasise the multiplicity of worlds above any singular planetary condition (though Planetary Social Thought manifests as more enthusiastically Deleuzian than any other recent Anthropocene intervention). Planetary social thought must be more than a question of epochal labels, critique and the assertion of liberal power/knowledge (Chakrabarty, 2021). Indeed, as Clark and Szerszynski remind us, modern social thought ‘self-legislates' by abstracting itself from material-energetic flows out of which it coheres. The challenge of planetary social thought is therefore to think in geo-bio-techno oriented frames that have the ambition of adequately responding to the material energies of the earth, to allow thought to be ‘altered by the material-energetic forces it grapples with’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 46). When humans align themselves with earth forces, they geologize their social formations, often in unanticipated ways. This is because ‘we’ are never masters but vectors through which the forces and strata of the Earth system flow and alter. To return to my emphasis on the vegetal, perhaps the plants in space are more than just instruments of space colonialism and technoscience; perhaps, in allying to the vegetal, space science and exploration is getting more than it first appears.

Exciting things happen at thresholds. When beings or processes cross from one state to another, they can disrupt established patterns, they can generate novelty and difference. While Clark and Szersznyski pass over the vegetal rather quickly in favour of the animal-based mobility revolution, resurgent Indigenous cosmologies and heterodox earth-beings, they do stress how significant other creatures have been in composing composite solutions to the challenges of terrestrial life. Plants have evolved to be threshold organisms on a planetary scale: their chloroplasts are the link between the zone of terrestrial life and the solar system's centre of energy (Mancuso and Viola, 2015). They have at times pushed the Earth system to new states, not least by capitalising on the biogeochemical leap to atmospheric oxygenation. Many other species have been along for the ride: from insects pollinating angiosperms, to the symbiotic mycorrhizal networks formed by 80% of plant species, to extractive capitalists making gridded ecologies (Ernwein et al., 2021). The vegetal has been a key strata through which planetary transformation has occurred, crucial to what Clark and Szerszynski call planetary multiplicity, that is, the capacity for the Earth to become otherwise.

Today the greatest slice of planetary sociability relies upon photosynthesis. Our alliances with plants are not comfortable, calculable or without remainder: rather they consist of us humans hitching ourselves to plants as they practice ‘alchemical, cosmic mattering’ in ways ultimately unknowable (Myers, 2018: 55). What is this multi-kingdom alliance, this conjoining of vegetal and other geosocial formations, and where might it be going? Planetary strata are composed from diverse spaces of possibility configuring earthly existence: the animal is but one, highly parochial, form of life. Any form of planetary social thought adequate to the epoch must provincialise the animal; more than this it must provincialise the model of subjectivity privileged in late-modern biopolitics and address the inhuman (Povinelli, 2016). Here we might pause to note how a certain, under-interrogated model of the social animates Planetary Social Thought. As Nealon (2016) argues, plant subjects easily escape the tether of appearing as a bounded organism: they are non-individuated, multiple beings, formed through interkingdom exchanges. The power of the vegetal lies in its inanimate growth, continual emergence and its deep indifference: planetary vegetal thought is not social. I gesture to the significance of the vegetal not as a criticism of Clark and Szerszynski's wonderfully rich intervention, more to illustrate how analytical decisions about which form of inhuman to follow might differentially shape planetary thought (though one might of course say that plants make better allies than volcanoes).

In 2019, cotton seeds inside a sealed, 2.6 kg biosphere aboard the Chinese Chang’e lander sprouted and survived on the moon for two weeks, until the cold lunar night killed them (Lu, 2020). We do not yet know what will happen because plants are growing, reproducing, dying and being eaten in outer space. I contend nonetheless that these few plants are growing an earthly multitude that has the potential to germinate new threshold crossings. These plants do not yet constitute an epochal revolution, or even an energetically important event, but as Clark and Szerszynski underscore, ‘actualised orders are only a small subset of what is possible’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 49). The machinic phylum of plants presents a germinal opening up of the biosphere to the cosmos, an incipient step towards Earthly life conjoining with unearthly geopowers elsewhere. Plants in space express the restlessness of the Earth, its propensity to become otherwise; they show the Earth learning to do new things, probing at cosmic possibilities. Planetary vegetal thought prompts us to wonder: what gifts might our planet yet despatch into the cold cosmos?