Urban trees and eco-anxiety

Intro: Trees and other objects 

Trees populate the edges of phenomenology, seen as they often are from the perspective of the philosopher’s window, sat at their desk and in turn writing what they presumably perceive. Phenomenology seems to start with paper, a desk and a window as Sara Ahmed demonstrates. Saliently, it involves an orientation towards objects. But this orientation not only hinges on one’s own capacity to enact this attention, but equally and perhaps more importantly to what is reachable, that which engenders our attention in the first place. What is reachable is therefore dependent on the body in question and why Ahmed writes ‘The surface of bodies are shaped by what is reachable. Indeed, the history of bodies can be rewritten as the history of the reachable’ (Ahmed, 2006: 55) What is within the phenomenologist’s grasp? And what slips through the net? 

Phenomenology seems from the start humbled by its very limitations, the frugality of Husserl’s Epoché (ἐποχή), to demarcate the margins that can be accounted for, always put in check by the horizon. Husserl will strive to simplify in order to glean what is true to our perception of things, that which furnishes any scientific enquiry at all. This is why a tree for Husserl, which he perhaps observes from out of his office window ‘is nothing less than this perceived tree as perceived which, as perceptual sense, inseparably belongs to perception’ (Husserl, 1983: 216). What he calls ‘the sense of this perception’ is something untouched, even by the elements, an ‘essence’ that cannot burn up. But what makes the sense of our perception invulnerable? It seems that Husserl would like to separate our perception of the tree from the tree ‘simpliciter’, so much so that it becomes unclear how such objects like trees actually orient us at all in the first place. Surely they are more than mere background objects seen from the philosopher’s window and hence why they are normatively invoked as objects worth describing? There is undoubtedly something unique about the ways trees appear in our experience, besides from their often prodigious size. Competing with the height of our built environments, they continue to grow in multiple directions, even after the development of a building has stopped.

Sat at his desk, Merleau-Ponty describes that when he glances over the objects that surround him to orient himself among them, they do not necessarily stand out as individual entities but contribute to an underlying framework that enables him to carry out his projects. Though when it comes to the living objects that perhaps intrude his office environment, even with the shadows of their foliage, Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘to recognise this tree as a tree’ the ‘momentary arrangement of the sensible spectacle must begin afresh - as if at the origin of the vegetal world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 46). This is differential to Husserl’s take, because the tree ‘ceases to be an allusion to a general type’ and stands out as a growing and emerging entity, which embodies a ‘vegetal’ history if you will, a living history which is perceived in the rich plenitude of the tree’s growth, intuited without such invocation of dendrochronology. Living objects like trees encroach and unsettle phenomenology’s proclivity for the calm habitual setting of the office, ‘queering’ as Ahmed phrases it, the penchant for static truths. As Merleau-Ponty implores, ‘Husserl’s essences must bring with them all of the living relations of experience, like the net that draws up both quivering fish and seaweed from the seabed.’ (Ibid: Ixxix). This net of life that Merleau-Ponty beautifully illustrates is both excessive and equally non-exhaustive. Only so much can be dredged from the seabed, but life clings obstinately to our perception, respiring and indeed quivering.

Anxious nature

Merleau-Ponty’s writing has been unequivocally fruitful for environmental philosophers keen to challenge and undermine anthropocentrism (See Abram, 1996; Toadvine, 2009; Bannon, 2014; Booth, 2021). His philosophy intimates something symbiotic about corporeal connection to nature, how our human lives are weaved like a fold in the fabric of the world. This is divergent to Merleau-Ponty’s contemporary Sartre, who characterises humans as ‘Nothingness’, a ‘hole in being’, (Sartre, 1998: 79) that is totally discontinuous with the world and nature, like a hole in dough that cannot be kneaded and bind. Whether ‘Being’, that which is distinct from Nothingness qua human, includes all other forms of life for Sartre is ambiguous. As he writes in Being and Nothingness:

‘The world is human. We can see the very particular position of consciousness: being is everywhere, opposite me, around me; it weighs down on me, it besieges me, and I am perpetually referred from being to being that table which is there is being and nothing more; that rock, that tree [italics my own], that landscape - being and nothing else’ (Ibid: 218).

But as Paul Gyllenhammer points out, while Sartre is particularly indifferent to the value and beauty of nature, dubious of any such entwinement between us and non-human world, he does recognise at times that ‘Our lifeworld is constituted by the basic descriptive divide between the animate, the inanimate (whether naturally occurring or created by humans) and the once living or dead’ (Gyllenhammer, 2023: 178). Quoting Sartre, who says ‘that the perception of life “cannot by nature be of the same type as that of inanimate object”, there is at least the suggestion that the living engender our attention in manifestly differential ways to inanimate matter. While Sartre’s more philosophically rigorous treatment of phenomenological description involves a rather indifferent and even pejorative treatment of nature, there are moments in his writing that reveal a heightened awareness of the manifestation of the living or once living, qua non-human. In contrast to Husserl, perceptions of objects like trees are not bracketed as impenetrable essences qua noema, but are often coloured by an intense degree of uncertainty and indeed anxiety. This is most pronounced in Sartre’s fictional work, such as in Nausea, where the emotion of panic inflects his perception of his environment, perhaps excessively so. 

Emotions for Sartre ‘evoke the appearance of a world’. ‘Horribleness’ as Sartre describes it, envelopes not only ‘the present state of the thing’, but also the ‘future’, covering in the shadow of darkness. (Sartre, 2006: 54) The act of flight or fight is broached by Sartre, as he contends that ‘flight’, that is anxiety or panic, is actually ‘mistakenly supposed to be a rational behaviour’, construed as a calculated response to danger. The emotion of panic or flight though according to Sartre is ‘magical’, insofar as it is not attributed to reason or logic, but to a kind of freedom relative to one’s consciousness, transforming the situation not as a concrete reality but as a psychological one. This is why he invokes the example of being face-to-face with a ‘ferocious beast’. As he describes, during one’s panic response, his legs give way, his heart beats more feebly and he turns pale and faints. While powerless, the act of flight is an escape of kind, in that this dissociation is an attempt to deny the reality of this encounter, which is ultimately sleight of hand. Its no coincidence really that Sartre uses predation and in fact an encounter with non-human nature as such an example to describe the emotion of panic. We see this again in his novel Nausea, but this encounter involves an urban chestnut tree, not a dangerous and wild predator. 

Sartre's chestnut tree

In rather atypical fashion to most, certainly contemporary treatises on nature, Sartre describes what one can quite safely presume to be lichen, or at least some form of moss or bryophyte, growing on a chestnut tree planted in the town centre, in quite a pejorative and almost amusingly horrified manner. As he writes ‘Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather (Sartre, 1949: 176). While the green rust that Sartre describes is seemingly lichen, the swollen black bark is likely a burl, a cluster of dormant and premature epicormic growth. They are like a tumorous lump growing out of the trunk of a tree and usually appear due to stress or infection, which are sometimes sought after for their novel and valuable contribution to carpentry. Describing the root as a ‘breathing pump’, involved in the process of the tree’s respiration, Roquentin concedes that ‘the function explained nothing’ and that ‘this root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was…below all explanation’ (Ibid: 174). We are therefore not provided with an accurate description of the chestnut tree’s biology, but we are given a rather esoteric characterisation of something relatively ordinary, an urban tree. Witnessing the roots disturbs him, this ‘knotty mass’ he calls it, ‘entirely beastly’ (Ibid: 171). This characterisation is almost laughably hyperbolic, but permits some degree of nuance when we think about the sort of state of mind Sartre’s protagonist is in, and how this is actually engendered by his attunement towards the natural objects around him.

Roquentin expresses that this perception makes him think of ‘belonging’, sharing that in his state of anxiety he is forced to tell himself that the ‘sea belonged to the class of green objects’, as if he is trying to reassure himself in a state of panic. Here Sartre auspiciously articulates the uncanny state of panic, as one begins to feel dissociated from their environment. What had only moments ago made sense about the world suddenly appears utterly fortuitous, senseless even. One is forced to remind themselves of common features of our existence that can make us feel grounded, i.e. Breathing the air outside, or holding onto objects like trees. But in this heightened state, neither him nor other living beings appear to belong convincingly to the earth. Roquentin contends that this ‘heap of living creatures’, perhaps both human and vegetal, ‘hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us’, adumbrating a kind of provisional eco-existentialism (ibid: 172). As Roquentin observes ‘the tree-trunks shrivel like weary wands, crumple up, fall on the ground in a soft, folded, black heap’, mocking those ‘idiots who came to tell you about will-power and struggle for life’ subverting the veneration of the tree’s upwards trajectory into the sky by recognising its ‘collapse’ (179). This interaction with the chestnut tree, while prima facie negative, doesn’t necessarily elicit disgust at the qualities of the tree qua gnarled, tumorous etc. but actually engenders a heightened sense of existential ambivalence, a profound awareness of the very fragility of living things.

This awareness seems to capture a weird sense of sympathy towards the urban tree and while sometimes guilty of self-indulgent spirals, what Sartre describes does provoke recognition for the existence of other non-living things. As Roquentin puts it, describing the chestnut trees, ‘They did not want to exist, only they could not help themselves. So they quietly minded their own business’. Does this description solely perpetuate a lowly opinion of nature, or does it also instil a weird sense of sympathy , for the destitution of all living things, human and plant alike? Though rather presumptuous, Sartre shakes the environmentalist platitude that plants strive to live and co-exist and with particular attunement to the urban tree, he encourages us to question assumptions about nature and acknowledge the frail conditions of living creatures. Often planted uniformly along roads, urban trees are deprived of the mycelial interconnectedness and relative richness of the ancient woodland. They become stressed, vacuums of pollutants caused by the city’s congestion, strained by the rigidity of their placement in concrete, which they eventually bulge through the growth of their roots. Exposed to ash dieback and Dutch elm disease, urban trees are treated, girdled and manicured by the act of pollarding, preventing boughs from falling on passersby. Quite often overlooked, they constitute a fundamental feature of our urban environments, tacit indicators of the mercurial seasons. While vulnerable and potentially uncomfortable in urban spaces, they are resilient and flourish amidst the grey rows of corrugated buildings. In the above passage, Sartre’s description of the tree is compelling, because while it doesn’t quite capture the beautiful fecundity of non-human life, it does intimate our shared condition of vulnerability.

As Roquentin share how he feels ‘in the way’ and in turn drawn to thoughts of suicide, he concedes that even in his state of being ‘decomposed flesh’, he would still be ‘in the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth’ (173). The very existential character of being 'in the way' might be experienced consciously, but it also pertains to the very brute fact of being there of organic matter, its inherent quality of ‘having-been’. Roquentin’s anxiety might seem like a prime example of feeling detached from one’s environment, dissociated from the natural world and yet his anxiety or nausea actually elicits his attention towards the tree’s existence. While coloured by his rather negative state of mind, the tree isn’t necessarily judged as being inferior to humans, but as actually cut from the same cloth of vulnerability, at least in this brief passage. The image of the roots sinking into the earth is compared to the proverbial cadaver that decomposes in the soil, eliciting an ambiguous sense of sympathy with all that is living and once-living. As Gyllenhammer writes, ‘just because Sartre does not support a beautiful, holistic cosmos does not mean he supports a dualist ontology’ (Gyllenhammer, 174). While this kind of binary ontology does become more conspicuous in some of Sartre’s more philosophical work, there are fragments of his writings that contain interesting takes on non-human nature. Certainly when we consider the excerpt from Nausea, where Sartre depicts non-human life as almost alienated from ‘nature’ in an analogous way to humans. This provokes us to question any such holistic concept of nature in the first place, and engenders differential perspectives of nature based on attunement and mood, such as seeing nature through an anxious and neurodivergent perspective, queering what is normative to representations of nature.  

Conclusion

Notwithstanding the imminent threat of the natural world, whether a rare encounter with a predator, or even encountering the poisonous aura of a death cap mushroom on a woodland walk, there are unsettling things about nature that aren't so immediately obvious. Perhaps because these living things actually reflect what is strange about our own existence, the fact that we and they exist at all; the fulcrum of philosophy, that is why there is something instead of nothing. This is where I think Sartre’s unlikely contribution to environmental philosophy is felicitous and why I think existentialism does have something to offer to ecological thought; moreover, that it doesn’t necessarily have to merely perpetuate human exceptionalism. It is an eco-anxiety that isn’t necessarily fear of the emerging disintegration of ecology, our earth, but pertains to the fear of ecology and the earth itself, that which already is. While eco-phenomenologists of a Merleau-Pontian ilk flesh out the intuitive dynamic of sense making when it comes to our perception of the natural world, there is risk that we overlook what is unsettling and uncanny about nature and our ostensible entanglement with non-human creatures. This means that recourse to ‘sense’ must also involve conceding what is not possible to make entirely unequivocal, that is what life slips through the net. Merleau-Ponty does of course avow the invisible layer at heart of the dimensionality of the world, never quite dispelled - but there is less anxiety and alienation than you find in Sartre’s writing, where sense never seems entirely captured. Feeling more connected to the natural world, like a lichen clinging to the trunk of a tree, doesn’t necessarily always correlate to harmonious bliss. We are bound in some sense in an analogous way to the tree, vulnerable to the lumps and masses that grow from the tree’s body like a cancer; we might even find ourselves panic ridden in places where we felt at home only moments before. Sartre does admittedly overemphasise what is ostensibly unsettling about the natural world, whether gnarled roots or beastly animals, and he does indeed exaggerate the exceptionality of human freedom, but there is some recourse to his perspective, doing justice to the sense of anxiety and malaise that is certainly a part of nature.

References

Ahmed, S. Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press: 2006

Gyllenhammer, P. 'Counter Finality and the Living World' in Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre After the Holocene. Ed. M. Ally & D. Boria. Lexington Books: 2023

Husserl, E. Ideas, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Martinus Nijhoff: 1983

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Tr. D. Landes. Routledge: 2005

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Tr. H. Barnes. Routledge: 1998

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Tr. P. Mairet. Routledge: 2006

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Tr. L. Alexander. The New Classics Series: 1949.

The Place of Plants in War 

Taraxacum kok-saghyz

INTRO: RUSSIAN DANDELION

On my visit to the Holocaust Galleries at London's Imperial War Museum, I was struck by an exhibit label describing a ‘blue and grey striped rough wool or 'shoddy' dress’ on display, hauntingly bearing the number '7963' and red Star of David. The label referenced ‘dandelion plants’, in conjunction with French and Jewish biologist Claudette Bloch, who in the summer of 1942 was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a prisoner, and later wore the dress at a protest ‘in front of the German Embassy in London against the resurgence of Nazism in Europe’ in the 1960s. With a PhD in biology, Bloch became a scientific asset to the Nazi party and was sent to work as a research assistant in Rajsko, a sub-camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here she was forced to aid the rather cumbersome task of synthesising Russian dandelion, or Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), into rubber, as Germany and other countries suffered from a dearth of supplies, blockaded by Japan from Southeast Asia, namely the prolific Hevea brasiliensis. Little is on public record of Bloch's life, but the botanical research she undertook at Auschwitz demonstrates the Nazis’ desperate attempts to prematurely concoct technological alternatives out of whatever materials they could muster, lowly weeds included. Ersatz, as they were commonly referred.

Seizing USSR land in Ukraine, ripe with fertile soil conducive for the abundant growth of Russian dandelion, the Nazis continued its cultivation, distributing samples for the research labs occupied by prisoner scientists such as Bloch. However, the latex distilled from the Russian dandelion was not known to be so amenable as the Havea plants of Southeast Asia, namely due to high rates of coagulation. Astonishingly, efforts to augment the production of rubber using Russian dandelion are being reexplored, many decades after the war, researched as a potentially more ‘sustainable’ alternative latex material to the dominant rubber plants. The hardy Russian dandelion was recalcitrant to the Nazis’ efforts to transform it into rubber. Despite being nominally ‘Russian,’ the eponymous plant is native across central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Uzbekistan, border encroaching, without the invasive bellicosity of industrial military complexes.

While Bloch recounted the rather terrible conditions she and others experienced at Rjasko, her botanical erudition and concomitant connection to plants in the context of the war ultimately released her from the death camps that sealed the fate of so many others. As William G. Clarence-Smith writes, ‘Paradoxically, the Russian dandelion saved the lives of some Jews in Auschwitz, mainly women’. At Rjasko, Bloch and the Jewish inmates she recruited as researchers were allegedly ‘treated somewhat better than in the main camps’. Importantly, Clarence-Smith concedes that ‘The German managers were not acting to save Jews, however, but to advance their scientific careers and avoid being sent to fight on the eastern front’. Notwithstanding, the Russian dandelion's contribution to the turn of events is striking and demonstrates how the lives of humans and plants intersect in times of adversity, oftentimes changing the course of history. The recalcitrant wildness of the plant stalled the Nazi's technological development and in turn deferred Bloch's likely death.

These historical events reminded me of the writings of the late Bruno Latour, whose 'actor-network-theory' describes the influence enacted by all manners of beings, no matter how diminutive or even sentient they are. As Latour explains:

An “actor” in AT is a semiotic definition -an actant-, that is, something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action. Bruno Latour

What follows is a musing on the place of plants in war, what spaces they occupy, in both a metaphysical and moral sense...

PLANTS AS SYMBOLS OF REMEMBRANCE

Wars have a pertinent influence on the ways that people come to interact with plants, not just as resourceful materials, but as auxiliaries for wellbeing, poetic influences, but perhaps most powerfully, as co-inhabitants and as kin. Although animals too contribute significantly to the mechanisms and semiotics of war, their involvement is more explicitly avowed than plants and in a less metaphorical way. We see this for instance in the variation of the purple poppy, intended to elicit the remembrance of animals lost to the war; namely that of horses, ponies and canines. While the plant plays the signifier, it is normatively the human/animal that is signified. The purple poppy that UK charity Animal Aid had originally conceived of, however, was to be replaced by an enamel badge in the shape of a paw, as to dispel the perception of animals as heroes, supplanting the misnomer with 'victims'. Isn't it interesting then that the First World War saw the phrase 'Lions led by donkeys'? As if the very concept of heroism wasn't influenced by the animality that the red poppy excludes, and that the enamel paw corrects.

Perhaps the retrospective power of floral war symbols is that they oversimplify, a bit like stone monuments that root a historic and complicated figure into a city centre, serving to venerate or vindicate, eventually to be torn down by city dwellers that disagree with tacitly problematic, lithic reverence. The organic vibrancy of flowers is that they grow, wilt, die and decay. But the plastic poppy, pinned to one's lapel is solidified in time in quite a different way to the sessile plant. The white poppy is intended to provoke remembrance for victims of all wars, which has been perceived as reactionary. This litany of prismatic poppies, oftentimes eliciting incredulity, however seems to highlight the parochialism at the heart of the red poppy, or indeed any floral symbol of war, which is susceptible to circumscribe victimhood or indeed heroism to one particular characteristic.

When lieutenant John McCrae wrote his poem In Flanders Fields, the red poppies he saw growing amidst the graves of his fellow soldiers were representative of both the dead and the living, whom fought at the Battle of Ypres. 'We are Dead' McCrae declares, 'Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved, and were loved, and now we live in Flanders Fields'. Poppies emerge from the aftermath, living in or from the remains of the dead. McCrae is the survivor, the dead accompanying the living, not a surrogate but a spectre. The poem evinces that survival from war is really a type of death, but is this 'we' delimited to McCrae and his battalion? In some ways, yes. But as the red poppy began to encompass more, the day of 'Remembrance' itself, its capaciousness came into question and other poppies of different stripes emerged.

What is so especially allegorical and indeed powerful about the poppies growing in Flanders? Admittedly, the flower of the poppies themselves are rather striking, a prodigious flower, akin to a head standing strong atop a lofty torso. The solider's bodies perhaps? Without losing the plants themselves to the power of men, there is a blissful continuity between what is materially and indeed allegorically true. Though a commemoration of kinds to McCrae's friend and fellow soldier Alexis Helmer, who died in the second battle of Ypres at a tender age of 22, the poem is in a profound sense anonymous. When we think of the poppies at Flanders or any meadow of flowers for that matter, there is something inherently anonymous, almost egoless, ghostly even, to the scene, comparable but not quite equivalent to perceiving a sparkling array of constellations in a clear night sky. As discrete as they may appear, the flowers' collective anonymity is much like the anonymity of the dead that lie beneath both them and McCrae's poem. To broach this thread further, we shall invoke the work of 'mystic' philosopher Georges Bataille.

GIVING BATAILLE HIS FLOWERS

For Bataille, both continuity and discontinuity are very real to both life and death (La vie la mort, as phrased by Jacques Derrida, who highlights their contiguity). Discontinuity is normative to our everyday, stratified existence as individuals. However, as Bataille demonstrates, many experiences and indeed desires are shaped towards shattering discontinuous existence. While oft erotic in nature, the ecstasy of continuity, that is a form of coincidence and togetherness, is also anxiety inducing, as is it in some sense reflective of death, the cessation of self. This is why Bataille writes 'After the living man the dead body is nothing at all...what we experience is a kind of void, a sinking sensation' (Bataille, Eroticism, 58). It is the 'growth of vegetable life' that Bataille characterises as the 'continuous piling up of dissociated substances corrupted by death' (Ibid., 60). Even in this decomposed mass, or compost, Bataille asks rhetorically 'How could anyone assert that that stinking mass is nothing at all?'.

There is a dynamic between continuity and discontinuity present in McCrae's poem. The soldiers are anonymous, continuous with one another like the poppies. They are continuous, however, not only in the soil of Flanders, but also with the living, hence why McCrae is in some sense already dead even in his survival. It is this life of continuity, that which is suggestive of death, which Bataille intimates we are fearful of, but desire notwithstanding. A desire for unity is, as Bataille suggests, a desire for transgression, in an act of copulation, war or death, for example, attempts 'to get at continuity...without actually crossing the boundaries of this discontinuous life' (Ibid., p. 141). We may think of the plant as demonstrative of the continuous anonymity of vegetal life, the basest of all life that sets the stage for discrete animality. But this vegetal continuity undergirds our own discontinuous life, especially potent in the emergence of poppies amidst the grave stones. This phenomenon is both poetic and metaphysical, an allegory that literally erupts from the earth. The symbol of the poppy is not merely representative of something other, for the poppy symbolises itself, enveloping humans in the life-death of its own planty existence. 

Though a lamentation of war, McCrae's poem demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the desirousness of death that Bataille broaches. Soldiers do not become continuous as such as a troop, but are made continuous in death, fused in some sense after life. This vegetative rebirth is really a reminder of the anonymous continuity inscribed in our lives, that while we might not recognise, will come with time. Regardless of the colour of the poppy in question, this continuity persists like a brute fact of existence, meaning that any delimited characteristic ascribed with a floral object is made tenuous, for the vegetation is a tapestry of soldiers wearing different stripes. To disavow the actual plantiness of the poem is to disavow death, mere pathetic fallacy. By disavowing the continuous, 'Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things.' (Ibid., p. 59) The poem really does see the soldiers become plants, not strictly as symbols of who they were as people, but actually as plants that were dormant on the battlefield, able to emerge through the destruction as boots and bullets brought seeds up with the lime-rich soil that sustained their latency. As Bataille puts it, 'Death is really the opposite process to the process ending in birth, yet these opposite processes can be reconciled. The death of the one being is correlated with the birth of the other, heralding it and making it possible.'

CONCLUSION: REMEMBERANCE AND JUSTICE

...Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?

We will write our names with scarlet steam.

We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.

We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here

our blood will plant its olive tree.’ 

- Mahmoud Darwish ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’

What does it mean to remember, to remember those that came before us and have passed? Memory is spectral, haunted by what can never truly return, yet persists in some other form. In wars so many lives are lost, red poppies, purple ones, others too. These are the forms that humans, animals, plants and other life forms take, metamorphosing into something that for a second, translates, only to look completely different in another light. Plants, whether we like it or not, play some kind of role in the remembrance and justice that comes with war and death. They don't merely act as an arbitrary sign, designed to signify a predictable image. Plants and their floral manifestations are visually captivating, not as mere adornments, but as exceptional bursts of life that embody the truth of continuity invoked above, expressions of romantic love and commemorations of death, what we were and what we become.

Plants are the life in death; this pervades religiosity, in the Buddhist lotus or in architectural, Islamic floral patterns, even in the secular environmentalist faith and solicitude, that which engenders care for the lives and generations whose future may hinge on our actions. Sometimes in these environmentalist circles, the focus on plant life leaves a sour taste. As Naomi Klein concedes, ‘People do tend to be put off when their lives are treated with less respect than flowers and reptiles' (Klein, 129). At the extreme, where ecology intersects with fascism, Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest shows a Nazi family take care of the flowers and plants growing in their garden with such delicate tactility at the anterior of Auschwitz-Birkenau, whilst the bodies of the prisoners are incinerated. Images of humans bodies fertilising the soil reappear, but in a more egregious way than Flanders.

This is also evoked powerfully by the extract of Mahmoud Darwish's poem above, whose writing illustrates the complex and deeply rooted relationship between the Palestinian people and their Olive Trees. Genocide attempts to wipe out the sui generis of a particular human ethnicity, but in turn also the relationships between them and other plants, those that been able to historically flourish, olive trees and orange groves in the West Bank. The question of remembrance and justice in the case of war and genocide is therefore infiltrated already by the presence of plants. It is not a matter of commemorating all lives, human and non-human as if they were of equivalent value. But nor is it a case of forgetting the lives that entwined with those that we once loved, whether animal or vegetal. The anonymous envelopment of life, vegetal in nature, means that remembrance can never truly restore what once was. I leave you with a quote by Derrida, which intimates the role of remembrance when it comes to the justice engendered by the memory of the once living, both human and not so human:

'To exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome— without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out of a concern for justice...One must constantly remember that it is even on the basis of the terrible possibility of this impossible that justice is desirable: through but also beyond right and law.' - Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx 

References

Bataille, G. Eroticism. tr. M Dalwood. Penguin (2001)

Derrida, J. Specters of Marx. tr. P. Kamuf. Routledge (2006)

Klein, N. On Fire: A Burning Case for a Green New Deal. Alfred Knopf Canada (2019)