Seeing Green: The Re-discovery of Plants and Nature’s Wisdom

A case study in citizen environmental humanities: creating a participatory plant story website

Public engagement in crowd-sourced science projects such as iNaturalist or the Audubon Christmas Bird Count is a long-established practice within environmental studies and sciences. As a corollary to these "citizen science" efforts, "citizen humanities" engages public participation in humanities research and/or with humanities tools such as creative writing, photography, art-making, or conducting and recording interviews. In this essay, we outline our work creating a citizen environmental humanities website, Herbaria 3.0, including our motivations, process, and theoretical underpinnings. This project draws upon the critical understanding within environmental studies of the importance of narrative and storytelling for fostering a connection and commitment to environments and nonhuman beings. Situated within the field of environmental humanities, our website solicits, collects, and archives stories about the manifold relationships between plants and people, inviting visitors to read, share, or write their own story for digital publication. The kind of environmental storytelling that results, we argue, can (1) enrich our conceptualization of attachment to places, (2) expand our notion of what "counts" as an encounter with nature, and (3) help us recognize the agency of individual plants. We conclude that similar citizen humanities projects are crucial to the ongoing work of environmental humanities and environmental studies at large, for it is through such public engagement that we can meet the cultural challenges that seeded, and the societal problems occasioned by, ongoing climate change.

Emotional sentience and the nature of phenomenal experience

When phenomenal experience is examined through the lens of physics, several conundrums come to light including: Specificity of mind-body interactions, feelings of free will in a deterministic universe, and the relativity of subjective perception. The new biology of "emotion" can shed direct light upon these issues, via a broadened categorical definition that includes both affective feelings and their coupled (yet often subconscious) hedonic motivations. In this new view, evaluative (good/bad) feelings that trigger approach/avoid behaviors emerged with life itself, a crude stimulus-response information loop between organism and its environment, a semiotic signaling system embodying the first crude form of "mind". Emotion serves the ancient function of sensory-motor self-regulation and affords organisms - at every level of complexity - an active, adaptive, role in evolution. A careful examination of the biophysics involved in emotional "self-regulatory" signaling, however, acknowledges constituents that are incompatible with classical physics. This requires a further investigation, proposed herein, of the fundamental nature of "the self" as the subjective observer central to the measurement process in quantum mechanics, and ultimately as an active, unified, self-awareness with a centrally creative role in "self-organizing" processes and physical forces of the classical world. In this deeper investigation, a new phenomenological dualism is proposed: The flow of complex human experience is instantiated by both a classically embodied mind and a deeper form of quantum consciousness that is inherent in the universe itself, implying much deeper - more Whiteheadian - interpretations of the "self-regulatory" and "self-relevant" nature of emotional stimulus. A broad stroke, speculative, intuitive sketch of this new territory is then set forth, loosely mapped to several theoretical models of consciousness, potentially relevant mathematical devices and pertinent philosophical themes, in an attempt to acknowledge the myriad questions - and limitations - implicit in the quest to understand "sentience" in any ontologically pansentient universe.