Over the last six months I have been working on a new manuscript, titled all our names are kin: a field guild to future flora, that engages with imagined plants some three hundred years into a post-climate change future. Now, writing climate change (as opposed to writing on climate change) is a near impossible task. As Amitav Ghosh notes, “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.[1] In The Great Derangement, Ghosh predominantly criticizes climate fiction for its failures to conceptualize the climate crisis, and while he’s more sympathetic to poetry, I think his critiques are equally applicable to ecopoetry. Which is to say: climate change presents an unsurmountable challenge toward its aesthetic representation as well as the representation of a very unique human crisis of ethics. After all, climate change is a failure of our global moral conscience to accommodate the futures of diverse agents, including beings (or para-beings) like rivers or flora, in the more-than-human world.

all our names are kin is thus an exercise in futility, although I am interested in exploring what forms of poetry (or poetic language) might effectively communicate the ambiguity of  future environments based on the limitations of our current knowledge of climate change. Each prose poem is voiced—perhaps problematically—by a future plant. I prefer Camille Dungy’s excellent comment that rather than speaking for another lifeform, one is ‘speaking up for them’, although what does it mean to speak up for a potential actor, who may not exist or who uses alien forms of communication.[2] Practically, I have used platforms such as NightCafe Studio with inputs of real flora to generate the accompanying images, although these generated snapshots are meant to be read as encounters with speculative forms of consciousness, not as direct representations of the flora themselves.

The real question I am presenting in my manuscript is: how are humans and vegetal life entangled biologically, socially, and environmentally, now and in the future? In my imagined scenario, all humans have fully extended Maureen N. McLane’s provocation: that we not just pre-plants; we are plants, and are thus critically enmeshed—finally!—with a post-climate change wilderness.[3] Such a conclusion is not meant to invoke a climate revenge narrative, but rather it is an opportunity to explore the intelligence and wit of plants that we otherwise erase. 

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