In Conversation: An Experiment in Changing Our Thinking to Help Address the Climate Crisis
This article is part of a series, in collaboration with the Civic Paths working group at the University of Southern California.
The collaboration between conceptual artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats and media scholar Henry Jenkins and the Civic Imagination Project (an initiative of Civic Paths at USC) came to be in 2021 when we all started to explore the idea of a "plant-based democracy" and how it could change how we relate to plants and the environment.
What if plants become co-creators and collaborators in our society? How would we listen to them? How might we imagine with them?
In a conversation facilitated and curated by Paulina Lanz Garcia, Jenkins and Keats explored how imagining with plants might lead to more participatory, radically-democratic and sustainable futures.
Before you can change the world, you have to imagine what a better world might look like.Henry Jenkins, co-principal investigator on the Civic Imagination Project
Working through tensions that emerge when we approach talking with plants versus having communities talk through plants, they discussed the unique context that Los Angeles — a city that has at times been at the forefront of cultural and environmental trends — brings to this conversation.
Jenkins and Keats emphasized engaging with diverse voices and perspectives to explore this provocative idea, laying out the foundation of this collaboration.
You can listen to the full conversation here or in the player below.
You can also read transcribed excerpts from their conversation, edited for time and clarity, below:
Introductions
Henry Jenkins: I'm a Provost Professor of Communication Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. And I'm one of the primary investigators of a project from the MacArthur Foundation on civic imagination. And we're excited to be partnering with Jonathon Keats on some of this work.
Jonathon Keats: I’m an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer. I attempt to undertake large-scale thought experiments basically trying to bring people together to "What if … ?" and to consider possible futures in ways that can lead us collectively toward a future that is better for all of us.
I started a conversation with Henry, trying to figure out how we might ask, "What if?" What if we were to enfranchise other species in democratic decision making-processes? Starting with the majority — in terms of biomass, at least — and that would be plants.
Imagining Better Futures: The Role of Imagination in Political Change
HJ: I was really smitten by this idea, both because of what it teaches us about the natural world, and because of what it teaches us about democracy itself and the notion of enfranchisement at a point where voter suppression, other issues are at stake.
The work we do in civic imagination is really to think about what roles imagination plays in political change. We start from the premise that before you can change the world, you have to imagine what a better world might look like.
We are facing a crisis that is fundamentally caused by a disconnect between humans and all other life forms on our planet.Jonathon Keats, conceptual artist and experimental philosopher
JK: What I try to do in my work is to create circumstances in which we can enter into the civic imagination — both as construed narrowly, the imagination that we all share as humans, and more broadly, the imagination, where other species might contribute as well to that imagination of what sort of world we want to live in.
At present, we are facing a crisis that is fundamentally caused by a disconnect between humans and all other life forms on our planet. And that has come about as our society has become increasingly de-naturalized. What we are seeking to do is to create a forum to be able to think through collectively how a reintegration of all life forms and living systems might take place — forefronting plants, which tend to get left out of the conversation.
Beyond Belief: Exploring Multiple Possibilities for the Future
HJ: I think Americans are in a rut in our thinking about democracy, that we have not renewed our image bank for democracy since the 1930s, for all practical purposes. Maybe we layer a small patina of the civil rights movement and '60s counterculture on top of that. Most of the time, we're just not talking to each other at all. Both the right and the left perceive a crisis in democracy and don’t know what to do about it.
I'm interested in how we might use speculative fiction and creative projects, thought experiments using Jonathon's term, to revitalize how we think about it — taking the familiar and making it strange. So thinking of democracy as something that is broader than a human concern, a way of revitalizing our discussions of democracy, as well as creating a new frame for thinking about our relations to the environment.
JK: There's the outside-in and the inside-out perspective, and they both are complementary. We are simultaneously trying to understand how decisions might be better-informed and more inclusive for governance that is able to address the environmental crises of our time — looking at how to bring in the perspectives of other species — while trying to understand the shortcomings and the failure of imagination in terms of how we interact as humans within our own society.
By looking outward to other species, to the planet as a whole, it brings us into a different context in which to be able to reconsider what human democracy might be while we simultaneously think about what might be an enlarged version of democracy that encompasses more than just humans.
Nature in Crisis: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Environment
HJ: My interest in this project dates all the way back to my childhood. My mother was a gardener, who loved the native plants of Georgia where I grew up. She grew azalea bushes in the backyard, she had dogwood trees. She had a rock garden in the back, where the rocks came from North Georgia streams, and the plants were transplanted from the north Georgia mountains. The things she couldn't bring back, mountain laurel being one of them, she loved and valued, and she would go and paint them. And she was a kind of Bob Ross dabbler, who usually painted according to instructions. But for her, it was an important creative outlet.
I grew up with her love of plants in my mind. At the same time, I was having heated discussions with my father, who was a very conservative Republican, about environmental issues, and so forth. And in my mind, those were two totally separate conversations, as I think they are for many people in America today, right? We talk about the environment. That's a political question. We talk about plants and our relations to them. That's a cultural or personal fascination, and never the twain shall meet. But I'm interested in what it would have taken to take my mother who didn't think about plants in political terms at all, and avoided politics at all costs, and pull her toward engagement with environmental sustainability, environmental justice, which I see as some of the major causes of our time.
And it may well be that taking plants seriously, as political agents is one part of that process, having a deeper conversation around plant-based democracy may help us with that bridging.
I want to make sure that people understand that they don't have to sign into any New-Agey kind of belief structure in order to see the value of a project to ask these questions and to encourage us to think about plants as modeling for us other ways of living in the world and other ways of living together — in an environmentally-endangered moment in time.
Art as Catalyst: Creative Approaches to Social Change
Back in 2018, Keats recruited students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Asheville to join a "universal orchestra" that would be truly inviting to all beings everywhere. Conducted by Keats, they performed a universal anthem on both instruments that humans (or "earthlings") could hear and those outside of our hearing range — ones that modulated gravitational waves instead of using sound waves, with the idea that they might be perceptible to alien beings.
JK: By doing so, it [would make] us recognize that we're actually a lot more similar than the [political] rhetoric tends to indicate and that there's something particular to each one of us.
We may not be able to fully experience the lived reality of someone else — whether that's a human or a being from elsewhere in the universe — but we can still appreciate the gravitational waves that are used as a musical form, even if we can't experience them directly. It's a matter of recognition of commonality and embracing respect.
HJ: For me, speculative fiction is the phrase that somewhat captures your thought experiments — different discourses, but we're talking about something similar. Speculative fiction takes existing knowledge and pushes it as far as it can to explore what their possibilities may be. And so fans of science fiction learn quite early to ask questions at every step along the way. Is this plausible? Does this experiment work? What does it tell us? How can we imagine the human experience being different?
And it certainly would've been open, as some science fiction writers have, to imagining a world with very different relations between humans, animals and plants.
But it is still a fiction — whereas for you, the experiment part of a thought experiment has more of a grounding in reality.
Living in the Possibility Space of the Future and Exploring Mutual Futures
Some of the work that Keats has been doing in experimental philosophy revolves around eco-centric law and the rights of nature — and Keats recognized that it might all fit together with an openness to new ideas, even absurd ones. The upside? Becoming uncomfortable with what we have been uncomfortable with and getting us to rethink what we thought we knew in a different way.
But that's not all, he explained.
JK: I found myself seduced by the potential of at least some of the ideas that were feeding into this absurdist proposition — that they might have pragmatic, practical value and might actually be innovative in terms of new ways in which to live, all of that happening concurrently with the observation of an ecological crisis-in-the-making becoming more and more severe.
HJ: What you're describing is very close to the way I think about the civic imagination. First, we encourage people to take a leap of the imagination and leave behind certain constraints ... the ways we box in our imagination, that voice in our head saying, "That would be amazing, but ... "
We get rid of all of those "buts," and then we say, let's imagine what another world would look like. What was unactionable starts to seem more plausible.
How would we think about environmental politics differently if we imagined plants, animals and humans as equal stakeholders in the future of this planet?Henry Jenkins, co-principal investigator on the Civic Imagination Project
The act of seeing the world differently leads us to asking different questions, proposing different courses of action, out of which then comes a new solutions to the very real problems we face.
We don't think them away. But rather we think outside them and then bring them back to bear on the problems that we're confronting. How would we think about environmental politics differently if we imagined plants, animals and humans as equal stakeholders in the future of this planet and factored their perspectives into the choices we are making?
JK: In philosophy, the thought experiment is typically a rhetorical device. It’s a counter-narrative that leads to an absurdity, proving an argument. I'm using the thought experiment experimentally. If we ask "What if?", and we do it in good faith, it can lead us in really interesting directions. The conclusions we reach are up to us to decide.
With Civic Paths, the thought experiment is about democracy. Who needs to be involved in the decision-making process in order for democracy really to represent those who are affected by those decisions? How can democratic decision-making processes tap into the knowledge, the understanding, the wisdom that is needed to be able to make good decisions?
As a hypothesis, maybe that could be all of us.
Los Angeles as a Microcosm: Exploring Mutual Futures in an Urban Desert?
JK: There is no one future. There are many possibilities. When we speak of the future, we're really in the realm of asking "What if?" And I think that asking that question requires a certain level of suspension of disbelief in terms of the assumptions underlying the present. By living in the possibility space of many possible futures, we can direct ourselves toward those futures that we would want and away from those that we would not.
HJ: It resonates with me on so many levels. First of all, this Civic Imagination Project has spent the last five, six years going around hosting conversations and communities across America and around the world about the future. And one of the game rules we set for ourselves is that we're not trying to resolve contradictions.
We're brainstorming communities of people about what the ideal world of 2060 might look like. But as we do so, we're not trying to create a singular vision for the future. And I think one of the problems we have, politically it's an all-or-nothing binary, right? We either totally agree about where the world should go, or we don't. And as a result of that, we can't agree and we're at war with each other.
If we accept the idea of multiple possibilities, multiple directions, and let those coexist and explore around that for a while, we may find more common ground.
Los Angeles has been the future of America in so many ways. Maybe multiculturalism is the one that L.A. takes the most pride in. But L.A. may also be the future of global warming, and what it is to live in a desert, what it is to live in an urban environment where there are no plants. And maybe our city is the place where we should start off thinking about how we relate to plants and animals in a different way, as our supply of water and oxygen is used up at an alarming rate.
JK: I think that we are still really only at the outset in terms of understanding how to engage plants in ways that are intelligent, in ways that are fully true to the plants on their own terms.
HJ: Our work is so grounded in the participatory. So, what I wanted to do through this space is to explore what an open ended participatory conversation amongst the citizens of Los Angeles might look like. And beyond about, what plant based democracy might look like. I'm hoping [they] will bring us questions and that together, we can have conversations that will help us think through these questions differently.
