A dream of plants & people where we are entwined; white Europeans visit another continent and return with news of the first consensus democracy. A review of “Seeds of Knowledge” for 4Columns.

Surprise, it is not how it turned out. “Seeds of Knowledge” at the Morgan Library celebrates early modern herbals, guides to plants and plant medicine published between 1480 and 1613, just after Gutenberg’s Bible, on the cusp of capitalism, colonization and conquering. The exhibition doesn’t question that moment, doesn’t even flag that date range which dovetails with Columbus and the first enslaved people being brought to Virginia. Instead the exhibition is a show of men, white men, and the birth of botany, the growth of the individual in both the Protestant Reformation and Western science. But, I dream of a speculative alternative history. I also told my grad students this week that writing the world as we want it to be is the only way to conjure it into being. Read more here at 4Columns and more of my hopes below after seeing the Morgan’s Living Land Acknowledgement in the atrium outside the gallery:

Reading the acknowledgment, I dream of a counternarrative: men sail to America (it is never called that, the original Indigenous terms remain) and bring back home a new philosophy. The Europeans meet the Lenape, who are matrilineal and live collectively. Henry Hudson travels up a river that never gets his name. The Haudenosaunee instruct him in the world’s first consensus democracy, which they created in the twelfth century. He broadcasts this good news from the “new world,” including a vision of botany where we and plants are intertwined. Instead of domination, it’s a realm of radical equality, where plants are our teachers.

In a time when our power to control our bodies is ever more in doubt, plants offer possibility. They help regulate our hormones and even provide something like a morning-after pill. Which makes plants seem like allies against the current regime of white male power. To breathe is to be plant; our air comes from plants. They feel pain and communicate, and have evolved to be bisexual and asexual and with multiple other sexualities. What if these explorers had returned to Europe with new ways of being multiple in the world? I could say it’s not too late to learn. And, I can only hope.