Posthumanist perspectives on Plant Conservation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15451/ec2026-03-15-08-1-13Keywords:
Plant conservation, Critical ecology, Posthumanism, Plant blindness, care ecologyAbstract
Plant conservation remains one of the most neglected areas of environmental governance. Unlike animal conservation, which has mobilized political and public support, plants are still rendered invisible through plant blindness. This invisibility is reinforced by technocratic approaches that reduce conservation to population models and ecosystem services, overlooking its cultural and political dimensions. Meanwhile, critical humanities have advanced posthumanist frameworks, as a Plant Turn, that emphasize vegetal agency and propose moving beyond human-centered narratives. However, even this recognition risks being absorbed into anthropocentric logics that reduce plants to their usefulness alone. This article argues for a critical ecology of care, drawing on ecofeminism, Indigenous ethics, eco-Buddhism and Latin American political ecology. We propose care as a political and practical category to reorient plant conservation toward reciprocity, responsibility, and multispecies justice in a more-than-human world. This review contributes to ethnobiology and conservation by proposing a relational and posthumanist framework— a critical ecology of care—capable of reorienting plant conservation beyond technocratic and anthropocentric paradigms.
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