The Vegetal Turn: A Conversation with Marcello Di Paola

What are some new ways that scholars in the environmental humanities are thinking about plants, including plant intelligence, plant personhood, plant-human relations, and plant rights?

Join Dr. Marcello Di Paola in a conversation about his important newly edited book . The event will be moderated by Plant Initiative board member Dr. Laura Pustarfi.

Join us for this free interactive program!

There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. This free program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.

About the book

The Vegetal Turn: History, Concepts, Applications charts the multidimensional course of what has come to be known as the “Vegetal Turn” in environmental humanities - a wave of theoretical and practical interest in the complexities and peculiarities of plant life and plant-human relations. The turn consists of increasingly sophisticated, inter- and trans-disciplinary, inter- and trans-cultural explorations of the multiple systems and networks of intelligence, communication, technical-operational capabilities, and relations articulated by and via plants. In its applicational aspects, it concerns itself with the ethical, economic, cultural, and political dimensions of plant-human and plant-mediated human relations and practices.

The volume includes contributions from philosophy and the humanities more generally that reflect on the history, prospects, and applications of four main themes that the Vegetal Turn has brought to general attention: plant intelligence, and what its peculiarities can tell us about intelligence more generally; plant personhood and/or moral standing, and the justifications and implications of attributions thereof; plant-human relations, plant-mediated human relations, and the ethics of human practices that concern or involve plants - from agriculture to the arts, from forest conservation to global health management; as well as the rights and/or political representation of plant life and the other life-forms that depend on it, human as well as non-human, present and future.

About Marcello Di Paola

Dr. Marcello Di Paola is an environmental philosopher, writer and public speaker. He writes on ethics, aesthetics, political theory, and the history of philosophy. Among his publications are Ethics and Politics of the Built Environment: Gardens of the Anthropocene (Springer, 2017) and the co-edited volumes Canned Heat: Ethics and Politics of Global Climate Change (Routledge, 2014), Climate Change and Human Rights (Global Policy, 2015), Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications (Routledge, 2018), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change (Springer 2023), and The Philosophy of Outer Space: Explorations, Controversies, Speculations (Routledge 2024).

Marcello is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at the University of Palermo in Italy. His teaching is entirely dedicated to contemporary readings and applications of the thought of Baruch Spinoza. He is the founding president of Minima Urbania, a network devoted to environmental education and various cultural and creative activities. He also grows succulent plants professionally and is in the management team of Vivai Cuba.

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