“Plants can provide us with everything we need both for survival, and for a comfortable, healthy life… but our interaction with the plant has become almost entirely detached” (Wild Human, 2022)
Interest in (re)learning the wisdom of ‘purposeful plants’ (Mabey, 1980) in the UK has been driven by two interlinked crises: the spectre of future catastrophe and attendant need to prepare to secure individual survival, and the crisis of detachment from nature and loss of an authentic natural subjectivity. Plant-use practices previously associated with lifestyle environmentalism, and earlier, frugality (such as home growing, foraging, brewing and preserving) are being rescripted as essential skills for imminent catastrophic futures, as lay preparedness becomes an increasingly significant part of wider social identities.
This paper draws on early stages of research into the revival of foraging and wild plant use in the UK within a wider project on prepping and survivalism (Barker, 2020), to examine this meeting of multiple human-plant crisis temporalities. Seasonal variations creating anticipated periods of abundance and shortage underpin the tradition of harvesting and preserving wild plant products. Survival is negotiated between plants and vibrant microbial ecosystems in efforts to preserve, ferment and distill an ongoing future. As these assemblages and their temporal rhythms are re-enrolled they meet a host of additional real, imagined and anticipated crisis temporalities: the appropriation of imagined Edenic botanical pasts (Head, 2016), contemporary turmoil in ‘just-in-time’ food distribution networks, disrupted seasonality amidst environmental loss and absence, and future dystopias of collapse and survival (Horn, 2018).
Mots clés : Foraging|Survival|Crisis temporalities|Anthropocene|UK
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