Plant-life vocabulary as metaphors for post-normal planetary challenges

Abstract

The ongoing post-normal times face two intertwining imperatives: sustainability and digital technology. Interestingly, the languages that address these imperatives are increasingly making use of concepts historically associated to or confined to the biological sciences, in particular botany and plant physiology. We address this phenomenon by applying two distinct but interacting conceptual frameworks. First, that of language ecology, i.e., the study of interactions between any given language and its environment. Language has an anticipatory nature, since it is an essential part of how we organise memory and past experience, therefore helping us to understand the present and to project the future. This paper surveys five biological concepts: autopoiesis, ecosystem, exaptation, regeneration, seed. By using an academic search engine, we assessed how often they have been used in academic publications related to biology/botany as compared to other fields. We found that their meanings are being expanded by their use in the sustainability and/or digital technology realms. Motivations for these uses include biomimetics, biophilia and/or, more simply, manipulation of words with the intention to create specific public or private rhetoric. Second, we examined this linguistic pattern as a symptom of ontological expansion, i.e., the integration and dialogue between technical innovation, philosophy and biology creating space for the emergence of new domains of experience and meanings that did not exist before. This research indicates that botany—and plant physiology in particular—can be an important source of inspiration for futures studies.