Introducing Herbaria 3.0

Last updated: 30 Apr, 2018

Plants are everywhere, and everyone has a story to tell about a plant.

We are excited to introduce Herbaria 3.0, a collaborative, digital environmental humanities project, that offers a platform for sharing the stories of plants and people. Herbaria 3.0 explores how the stories we tell about plants illuminate the intertwined nature of humans and plants.

The project is being run by Dr. Tina Gianquitto (Colorado School of Mines, Colorado, USA) and Dr. Dawn Sanders (Gothenburg University, Sweden, and Plants, People, Planet Editor), who lead a team that includes Dr. Lauren LaFauci, assistant professor in environmental humanities at Linköping University, Sweden; Dr. Maura Flannery, retired professor of botany at St. John’s University (New York, USA); and Terry Hodge, graduate student in horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, USA).

We believe that such storytelling fosters sustained engagement with the green world. It also acts as a counter to ‘plant blindness’, or the inability to see the plants around us in our everyday lives. Over time, this condition renders us insensitive to both the autonomous lives of plants and to the deeply textured sociocultural history of plant-human interactions. Accordingly, if we can’t see the plants that are around us everyday – the trees that shade sidewalks, the lavender that feeds bees, the houseplant that has crawled across the windowpane – we also can’t see that plants are essential to our everyday lives in both material and non-material ways. Perhaps most significantly, though, our inability to see plants locally renders us blind to the significant consequences of human action on plant communities globally.

Continue reading on the New Phyt blog.