Tracing lines of vegetal influence and affect, this monograph describes how plants influence and shape humans, their relations with other animals, and place. Highlighting vegetal matters related to four plant species and the triad of plants-elephants-humans in Sri Lanka, each case study opens up multi-directional influences across situated multispecies social milieus. From jacaranda trees in Australia, to wapato on a river island in the United States, to willow and weavers in Denmark, to sugarcane plantations in Sri Lanka, to dying yet mythic ash trees, features emerge of human-plant social intimacies, power dynamics, and intersubjectivities. A central glue of plant-human relations is poiesis, meaning the creation of something new, yet etymologically related to the poetic. Beyond explorations of poiesis, the vegetal offers an epistemology of recursion that is relevant for understanding place-based relationships. Elizabeth Oriel presents vegetal influence in analytical and descriptive styles, reflecting multispecies ethnography and other analytics brought to vegetal matters.
Plants Speak Through Art
This is a gallery of paintings made by plants, or really co-created by Elizabeth Oriel with primary guidance from various plant species. She developed a communicative technique to gain guidance from a plant species on all aspects of mark making, using oil pastels on canvas and paper. One of her plant artist series has been made with Bosque plants from the Rio Grande River valley in New Mexico. Cottonwood trees, coyote willow, and four-wing saltbush each reveal their own perspectives, aesthetics, and forms.
Art making in this way has revolutionary ramifications as space opens for humans to recognize other species’ voices. Once heard, these utterances become part of daily life, daily politics, and inform an earth-based multispecies politics and approach to land and governance.
Giclee prints can be purchased of these images here. Half of all profits go to an organization to end the use of herbicide, glyphosate (Roundup) in the US.
This political and land-based issue is central because glyphosate kills all plants except ones that are engineered to withstand it. This Monsanto chemical blocks the shikimate pathway in plants, which is a significant pathway for crucial gut bacteria in humans. Cancer, autism, and many chronic diseases are linked to glyphosate. In countries where glyphosate has been banned, native species are abundant, maintaining healthy soils and waterways. In this sense, this gallery joins art, plants and other species, politics, and activism in an environmental justice effort.
Yerba mansa
Elizabeth Oriel’s PhD research as a Bloomsbury Scholar at University of London, examined human-elephant relations and conflict in Sri Lanka. Her approach involved exploring how the macro and micro interact and how the last 70 years of land intensification has increased this interspecies issue. She has published numerous book chapters, journal articles and two articles in magazines.
Elizabeth Oriel has special rapport and interest in wetlands, including riparian areas and bogs. Wetlands have historically been spaces of localized political autonomy, made possible through the abundance of life, plant life, fish, and rich alluvial soils as anthropologist James Scott found (in his upcoming book, In Praise of Floods, 2025).
Bogs are where land breaths – they hold carbon and also hold water. Their acidic soils and quaking peat open up relationships for unique orchids, turtles, birds, and even light-bearing will-o-wisps. Bogs are liminal, bordering land and water, physical and invisible entities. These peatland bodies are akin to women’s bodies in that they hold futures, living continuity. They do this through slow decomposition which allows for preservation.
Elizabeth Oriel is a faculty mentor in the PhD program at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The program is Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership.
She participates in the Consortium of Environmental Philosophers, and here is a talk she gave with Dr Graham Harvey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBaVX15iSu0&t=96s
Elizabeth Oriel has conducted research on non-human animal wellbeing, and found that states of wellness are related to abilities to strive and to make decisions based on their own needs, interests, and pursuits.
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Polyphonic style is an approach to presenting of many on-the-ground voices to understand how top down policies affect local people. The journalist Svetlana Alexievitch sued this style in her amazing books on Chernobyl and the Soviet Union’s policies. Elizabeth Oriel uses this style in one chapter of her monograph on will basketry in Denmark and in this piece for Noema Magazine about human-elephant conflict. The power of people’s stories and voices told one after the other, is affecting and brings an emotional tone and information to news stories and environmental news.
