This paper suggests that growing plants in outer space is a germinal moment of cosmic transformation to come. It maps two geo-historical accounts of plant travel. The first account of plants captures the alignment between technoscientific worlding and the prevailing Western ontology of plants as open, manipulable, pliant: as free labourers in space exploration aboard the International Space Station. Space exploration has from the beginning been a multispecies endeavour, and will continue to be so: corporate Sky Gods of the Anthropocene may rocket into orbit, but long-term survival will require plants for oxygen, food and perhaps other services. This technoscientific alignment is not the whole story, with alter-ontologies emphasising vegetal reciprocity visible through sf worlding. The second account concerns the planetary travels of the kumara, and its alignment with the great Polynesian migrations to the far corners of the Pacific. The paper analyses a debate conducted in the 1870s by M?ori experts about the origins of the kumara. That debate concerned not just where the kumara came from, nor who had the best claim to be correct about its origins; more than that, the debate concerned the precise manner in which the root vegetable linked cosmic beginnings and endings. Both accounts show what happens when geosocial formations ally themselves to the vegetal, demonstrating comparable solutions that have emerged from distinct historical-geographic forms of experimentation. The paper is a work in speculative planetology that sees photosynthesis as an Earthly gift and a germinal spark for a New Earth, or for Earth to stretch out and enable other planets to become otherwise.
Mots clés : plants|cultural geography|multispecies|space
A104755FG