Plants With a Vengeance: What Happens When We Take More Than Our Fair Share?
This article is part of a series, in collaboration with the Civic Paths working group at the University of Southern California.
When I think of plants and pop culture, the first thing that comes to mind is the video game, "The Last of Us."
One of the most visually arresting aspects of the game is the contrast between the rusty, dark, degraded metal architecture of old and the almost vengeful vegetation and plants of the new pandemic world.
The plants are a healing and possessive force in response to the rot left behind by our current industrialized society. Collapsed skyscrapers are blanketed in lush dark green moss. Spidery vines run along the windows of overturned buses and sprout out of the cracked windows of corroded taxis. Thick and imposing trees form canopies over previously treaded city sidewalks. And yet, nature offers respite from the ominous and molded interior spaces where potentially deadly spores fill the air.
The major antagonist that is at core of the game, Cordyceps, is a fungus that causes the humans infected with it to gradually develop external fungal plates over their body. In the final stages, the infected human begins to mirror a mushroom of sorts. Once the human completely succumbs to the infection, their corpse becomes plant-like in that it develops roots and attaches to the nearest surface before releasing spores.
Beyond that, as the player explores this world, the plant life is a structure in itself that must be overcome. There are places no longer accessible because of the plant life that has stubbornly grown there.
This game and its depiction of plants through wildlife and through the Cordyceps infections really encompass how I have always viewed plants and nature more generally: as a force that has been abused by humans and one that will eventually reclaim the parts of this planet that belong to them.
I intentionally personify plants because I think they have agency and awareness. And they are aware that we humans have taken more than our fair share.
At the end of the game, one of the protagonists, Joel, kills Marlene to protect the Cordyceps-immune Ellie. He reasoned that "You’d just come after her" before pulling the trigger — and I can’t help but map this fatal interaction onto our relationship with nature.
Perhaps we are the antagonists in this world — and unless we are stopped, we will just continue to use and abuse "her" (i.e., Mother Nature).
The game provokes questions around the human/nature divide. Through a gripping storyline, in which you get to kill zombies and villainous humans, I cannot help but also hear the warning the game gives about our current ecological crisis and the consequences of failing to make change.
Interested in learning more? This piece was originally written as a part of "Plant Stories," a storytelling initiative of the Civic Paths Group at the University of Southern California.
