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5 Introduction Glimpsing the Peacock Angel If we recognize the plant as an autonomous power which enters in order to put roots and flowers in us, then we distance ourselves by several degrees from the skewed perspective which imagines that spirit (Geist) is the monopoly of human beings and doesn’t exist outside of them. A new world-picture has to follow the planetary leveling; that is the task which the next century will take up. —Ernst Jünger, “The Plant as Autonomous Power” C rawling with transactions, the contemporary Earth whirls and whorls,1 uncannily bereft of human agency. The global ecosystem , undeniably in crisis due to the presence and activities of humans and their fossil-fuel familiars, maintains itself far from equilibrium, surfing diverse gradients through raised ocean levels and proliferating vectors of disease; malarial mosquitoes have followed thickening sea levels and achieved new highs, more than doubling the altitude at which they can survive and reproduce. Global warming is no longer debated, but instead yields a muted and contentless call for “adaptation” while tens of thousands die of heat stroke in “old Europe.”2 A 2003 Pentagon report identifies sudden climatic change as a plausible “challenge to U.S. security in ways that should be considered immediately” (Schwartz and Randall), and an enormous hurricane provoked what the BBC called the biggest failure of the U.S. government since the Great Depression, itself echoed by a financial crisis linked to our use of fossil fuels that flow into the Gulf of Mexico even as I write. While trillions of dollars are spent in the pursuit of “security ,” a ubiquitous superpower—Gaia—launches global-defense operations against Homo sapiens of every demographic. Has yet another security briefing gone unheeded?3 6 Introduction The apparent inability of humans to perceive the densely interconnected nature of their habitat threatens not only said ecosystem but the very selfdefinition of humanity itself as homo faber, an organism actively creating, rather than created by, her environment. Faced with overwhelming evidence of climatic change, one would expect an outburst of human agency, an ordering of the world according to the specifications of Homo sapiens— the species who, after all, knows what it is doing. And yet humans—or at least, the only ones deserving of the slur—call for a strange acquiescence to the agency of the Earth: The United States is a world leader in addressing and adapting to a variety of national and global scientific problems that could be exacerbated by climate change, including malaria, hunger, malnourishment, property losses due to extreme weather events, and habitat loss and other threats to biological diversity. (U.S. Global Change Research Information Office) This is a book that is, in part, about rhetoric, so let’s zoom in on the paradox : Watch as the alleged lone superpower “leads” not through “resolve” or “will,” but by speaking to, “addressing,” even “rehearsing,” “adaptation.”4 Even as Paul Wolfowitz dreamed of a global empire ordered according to the “interests” of the United States, the Bush regime beat a hasty retreat before the very real activities of bioterror their own report suggests could plausibly unfold. Instead of repeating the usual algorithm of empire—“make it so!”— the bloated über power called for nothing but an address or a “rehearsal,” a simulacrum of “adaptation,” yet another retraining that teaches humans how to respond to their devastated environment. It is in this rather absurd context that a discussion of plant agency or “power” alluded to by the German writer and botanist Ernst Jünger must take place. Ethnobotany has long devoted itself to the relations between humans and plants, as has the shamanic medicine that has served the vast majority of Homo sapiens in history and the present. This book will suggest that indeed in responding to global climatic change we must less adapt than evolve, and this evolution begins with the recognition of plants, and the Earth itself, as a power, perhaps a superpower worthy of the name. Though this phrasing may sound a bit odd to some, this claim is unlikely to remain controversial for long, as the massive effects of climatic change Introduction 7 become slowly and unmistakably visible. Part of the adaptation called for by the Bush administration would entail a submission to a world-governing body—the world’s body—whose weaponry is temperature change, rising ocean levels, and emergent and proliferating diseases rather than shock and awe. But if it is easy enough to say we...

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