Phytospheric Justice

This book project follows the symbiotic atmospheric pathways that connect plant and human breath to develop forms of cultural theorizing accountable to an increasingly climate-deranged world. By expanding the concept of the phytosphere to include the atmospheric terrain where plant chemistry and other elemental life-forces intersect, the project aims to develop methods for reading regenerative phytochemical relationships that exceed carbon capitalism’s proprietary and destructive relationship with air. Alongside a groundswell of critical cultural theory associated with the so-called vegetal and atmospheric turns, it takes care to situate recent insight into the social lives of plants within older Indigenous, African and decolonial relational knowledge ecologies long attuned to racial capitalism’s inequitable distribution of dangerous air. Taking guidance from old and emergent imaginative archives and eco-feminist activisms in contexts with overlapping histories of colonial land theft, botanicide, and air pollution, the project will explore ways of thinking, breathing, and smelling with plants that bring the material and spiritual interdependencies required to build post-smog futures anew into focus.