The Coloniality of Planting with Ros Gray & Shela Sheikh
This is my partial notes / rough transcript of ‘The Coloniality of Planting’, a podcast that’s part of the Botanical Mind online project at Camden Arts Centre.
Notes made August 10th 2020
Sheikh: Whilst one may think of botany or practise of botany as passive, peaceful or benign activity, what’s crucial to understand is botany was actually absolutely integral to the expansion of empire. […] One can’t really reach histories of colonisation without teaching how colonisation and cultivation are very much entangled.
[…] The inauguration of botany as a scientific discipline emerged as a consequence of the voyages / exploratory voyages around the world. Botanists such as Carl Linnaeus and many others became agents of empire. Botany became a form of classification, a form of collecting different species from around the world, ordering them up, naming them, becoming integral to ordering up the wealth of empire.
Gray: The very act of planting has been a form of colonial violence.
So we see also in the movement and transfer of certain plants around the world […] goes hand in hand with the transfer of bodies - slavery. There’s a kind of violence in which planting takes place in different geographic locations, and landscapes and whole environments are changed through impositions of certain plants / crops which are planted with economic value in mind.
Historically we see how plantation system of slavery is also a system of imposing monocultures on land.
Colonial botany involved a process of both extraction and erasure. So the extraction of the local knowledge is local plants, local labour and an erasure of Indigenous knowledge. From the beginning of when European powers were sending out these exploratory voyages around the world, they would collect plant samples and bring them back, and by the time of the Enlightenment, this was a vast enterprise of people like John Hooker at Kew would send out their plant collectors across the world to find new specimens to bring back to hybridise and then taken to other parts of the world to be grown in the plantation system.
What makes the plantation system? Clearing of land, destruction of ecosystem. Importation of new species to be planted as a monoculture. Importation of a labour force that has no previous connection to that place and therefore is very limited in terms of its capacity to self-organise and resist the violent regime they find themselves under.
Over hundreds of years of the colonial project you get this vast transportation of plants and human beings and animals and soil on the ships that were crossing the oceans of the world.
At the same time there is the emergence of scientific botany, a vast project to universalise the system by which we understand life. A plant that had been brought to Kew would be given a Latin name and in that process local knowledge would be extracted and the source erased, so the local name would be erased, but also the world in which that plant existed. Destruction of worlds taking place through colonial project.
Sheikh: There were many notable botanists such as Carl Linnaeus but also Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks, and we know historically that these figures were very much influential in the development of scientific racism and endorsement of slavery and colonisation of foreign territory.
So colonial natural science and these systems of taxonomy or the ordering up of the world became very important for the construction of categories of race and sexuality. Each was elevated as a fundamental marker of difference and this is what one really sees in these botanical illustrations as well, what is visibly different. So these productions of different categories of the vegetal world went hand-in-hand with with different categories of forms of life, including humans. And they were underpinning the science of botany, but also the practise of bio-prospecting, so the discovery and searching for different forms of life which could then be commercialised and become products based on specific natural and biological resources.
Gray: […] what we think of as a quintessential English landscape garden, the landscape gardens of the 18th century that were made around manor houses and so on, they were actually based on Caribbean landscapes that had been terraformed, transformed, by the making of the plantation system. And so, with the vast wealth that was coming in from the plantation system to England, there’s also a fashion for a new form of art which was prints of landscapes, picturesque landscapes, which presented slavery as a sort of benign system, in which there were “happy slaves” who would have celebrations and so on, and also these rolling hills and so on. That had a big impact on English landscaping.
Sheikh: If we think about the way history is told, which is such an important question for current debates around decolonisation and Black Lives Matter and representation and so on, we tend to think about historical events as things that take place, that are enacted by humans in a given context, and that landscape is the backdrop for that. So this presents a picture of landscape and nature as this kind of passive, non-changing environment, a kind of stage upon which historical events and actions take place.
And this also goes hand-in-hand with the extractivist, capitalist, also colonial notion of nature as this passive object, a resource to be extracted, to be profited from, to be controlled and mastered. Whereas actually what one sees is that landscape and nature has in the first place agential capacities: that it’s not fixed; that it’s changing, obviously, continually; but also that it can be manipulated but human actors - almost, even, in some cases weaponised. So it might be as simple as destroying the ecosystem in which a particular group of people live, or it might be much simpler practises such as hedges might be planted as a way of dividing up land and disallowing people access to the land. So you see throughout history the way in which landscape is utilised as a way of controlling and dispossession certain populations.
Nowadays luckily there’s quite a lot of discussion around environmental racism in the press and in activist circles, and one thing that’s very important to stress is that thinking about issues of environmental justice doesn’t simply have to be an issue of the rural as we think we know it, or as opposed to the urban. So the phenomenon of environmental racism, this first gets coined as a term in the U.S. in the 1970s and the 1980s in the context of the environmental justice movement. So this was taking place in the Southern states of the U.S., in particularly poor African-American neighbourhoods, and campaigners were stressing the way in which the inhabitants of these neighbourhoods were very much more exposed to toxic waste, and so what’s important is to see how this begins in an urban context.
Gray: One of the problems there’s been with white environmentalism is it’s tended to perpetuated this idea that there’s something out there called nature or the environment that needs to be protected from people, rather than understanding human beings as part of ecological systems, be it rural or urban. The other aspect of environment racism which I think is really important to emphasize is also about people’s access to wild spaces and to green spaces, so certain urban areas have much worse air pollution for example, much fewer parks and green spaces, much fewer people have gardens of their own. And that’s something which has been very apparent in the lockdown that we’re still within, is the policing of the lockdown has disproportionately targeted people of colour, whose only access to green spaces might be their local park.
Sheikh: So we see how we inherit this kind of naturalisation who is supposed to enjoy the land versus who is supposed to be working on the land. And also who’s supposed to be speaking for or advocating the protection of the land. We inherit that from the colonial plantation system onwards, and we can see for instance, the same day George Floyd was murdered, there was a white woman in Central Park who called the police on a Black bird-watcher, Christian Cooper, so we see very much […] this kind of naturalisation of who should be, or has the right to be, in “nature.”
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