PLANTCRAFT Is Live!
A New Offering From Amirio Freeman
PHOTO BY KAILEA LOFTEN
In celebration of the Spring Equinox, we want to share a little extra sweetness with you all: PLANTCRAFT from visionary writer, interviewer, and Loam co-conspirator Amirio Freeman is here!
As Amirio notes, PLANTCRAFT is “a slow newsletter about people and the plants they love. In each monthly missive, or broadcast, readers will find long-form interviews with artists, activists, thinkers, and more about one botanical being that has shaped their lives.”
Loam Co-Editor Kate is very honored to be Amirio’s first interviewee. Below, you’ll find Amirio’s introduction to the inaugural PLANTCRAFT broadcast as well as a link to Amirio and Kate’s conversation on roses, sentience justice, and beauty culture.
If you know Amirio’s work (from the juicy Down to Earth Deck to their more recent essays on bioluminescence and botany) you KNOW just what a gem Amirio is. PLANTCRAFT has been in the works for more than a year, and we’re so excited to see this space come to life. Subscribe! Savor! Share!
In James Bridle’s book Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, we’re reminded of a fundamental truth, upending the enduring fiction of human supremacy: plants “precede us, and make life, everywhere, possible.”¹ They continue: “[T]hrough photosynthesis, soil production and the conversion of nutrients into food, plants are the founders and sustainers of the world.” Bridle foregrounds that we were never the first to roam this planet and, thus, we owe a debt to all our Earth elders—especially our vegetal kin.
The world of plants begets our own. In that way, vegetal bodies are gestational bodies. And, yet, the centrality of plants in our daily lives is oft-obscured by all the ways we move plants to the periphery, to the bottom of our hierarchies, leaving them devoid of agency and bereft of interiority.
Plants as decor. Plants as things. Plants as Nature, far removed from the realms of Culture and the Human. Plants as akin to ambient music: a class of life that is “ignorable as it is interesting,” to borrow from musician Brian Eno. These are some of the perspectives and narratives—very Westernperspectives and narratives—that have and continue to render plants passive and inactive and, thus, measurable, monetizable, and conquerable. Even Aristotle believed that every plant has a soul “capable of reproduction and growth, but is insensible and immobile.”² Yet, the joke’s on us. Plants still rumble from the background, as they always have, communicating with each other, migrating to more suitable environments as the planet warms, and engaging in other acts that defy our expectations and understandings of plant life—and ourselves.
I wonder, then, what’s possible when we move plants back to the center, attuning our senses to witness them differently, listening to them with renewed intention, becoming literate in their language, and returning to being in full relationship with them. For Bridle, when plants speak, and we hear them, “the boundaries which we thought enclosed our worlds are shaken.”³From such a world-unmaking convulsion, perhaps we could dissolve our fidelity to human-ness, opting to be more vegetal instead, with new commitments to make, new values to make homes of, and new mythologies to tell ourselves. After all, the anthropogenic reality we’re inhabiting now is wholly unworkable. As the unspooling violence of climate change brings into relief, a human-centric vision of the world is a death-centric one. What, then, could vegetal perspectives help us build from the rubble of human imagination? How can planthood be a method for living otherwise?
Those questions, and so many others, are at the root of this newsletter, PLANTCRAFT. I’m excited to have you here to explore them with me alongside guests I’m inspired by, starting with one of the most recognized and iconic plants of all time: the rose.