Storying Plant Communication

Embedded in vibrant and richly textured New Mexican landscapes, Storying Plant Communication: More-than-Human Relationships in New Mexico explores the narrative accounts of southwestern herbalists, healers, teachers, farmers, and other plant enthusiasts who maintain deep and reciprocal relationships with the local flora. Reflecting on plant relationships, place-making practices, and a breadth of other topics, the storytellers describe their transformative perspectives that frame plants as intelligent, relational, and communicative. The Land of Enchantment is steeped in stories, and narratives captured here show how attitudes and practices related to plants can trouble dominant, often harmful beliefs of human exceptionalism, and gesture toward more ecocentric pathways in an era of environmental uncertainty. Employing auto/ethnographic methods that put storytellers' experiences in conversation with a range of interdisciplinary literature, Thomas and Parks highlight ways in which plant studies offer a rich and timely direction for communication research. Ultimately, the co-authors argue that story-based methodologies offer a fertile starting point for scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences to venture into the realm of plant communication.

Mariko Oyama Thomas is Interdisciplinary Scholar and Teaching Faculty at Skagit Valley College, USA. She holds a PhD in Environmental Communication from the University of New Mexico and is also Co-Founder of the arts and ecology collaborative Submergence Collective.Melissa M. Parks is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah and Associate Director of the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities Education in Centennial Valley, Montana, USA.