Plants for a Cold Cosmos: Planetary Vegetal Thresholds

Abstract

What does it mean that plants—soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more—are growing in Near-Earth orbit? What histories account for their presence beyond the terrestrial, and what futures might they be incubating? In this paper, to address these questions, I describe four very different planetary vegetal thresholds, which I understand as geohistoric events thick with potentials for realigning worlds. First, technoscientific cultures of space science. Second, the allying of crops and elites in late neolithic plantation agriculture. Third, the cosmic and global travels of the kumara, figuring Māori plant alliances that take us beyond colonial ideologies of space exploration. Fourth, a science fiction art installation growing plants in a prototyped Martian House. Drawing on vegetal geographies, critical plants studies and Anthropocene geophilosophy, the paper is a work in speculative planetology which argues that plants are seeking to stretch out beyond Earth and enable other planets to become otherwise: photosynthesis is a vegetal gift to the cold cosmos.