Over the years, the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) has encouraged student-led reading groups that center around a topic, author, or text. Groups meet twice monthly throughout the academic year. Reading groups have included, The Divine Feminism and Its Discontents, Animism, Orientalism and Religion, and Modern Psychedelic Spirituality in Historical Context. The 2023-24 academic year will host the continuation of the Plant Consciousness Reading Group and will be adding Psychedelics, Sacred, Subversive: A Reading and Learning Group Exploring the Altering of Religion. Last year, Plant Consciousness drew a particularly robust and enthusiastic gathering. The CSWR spoke with co-founders of the group, Natalia Schwien and Rachael Petersen.
CSWR: What is the origin story and history of the Plant Consciousness Reading Group?
Petersen and Schwien: The origin of the Plant Consciousness Reading group has tangled roots. It grows, in part, out of past programming at the CSWR, as well as the life and work of its co-founders, MDiv student Rachael Petersen and PhD candidate Natalia Schwien. It also blossoms in response to a moment in which the sciences, as well as the humanities, are exploring the sophisticated ways in which plants and fungi sense, make sense of, and interact with the world. What ties these threads together is a commitment to ways of knowing that honor the radical agency, intelligence, alterity, and personhood of our leafing, flowering, rooting kin.
Work of scholars such as forest ecologist Suzanne Simard and evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano have made mainstream notions that mere years ago were preposterous within the academy: that the plant and fungi world communicate, behave, and cooperate in ways previously unimaginable. As a result, some scientists have even argued that plants have agency, individuality, and intelligence. In popular culture, the success of books like Finding the Mother Tree, Braiding Sweetgrass, and The Secret Life of Trees speaks to a moment in which more and more people are looking to understand, learn from, and be inspired by nature, in spite of—or perhaps because of—mounting threats to the planet’s ecosystems. This research in many cases confirms ancient wisdom that has been safeguarded by indigenous and folk traditions throughout the world. Those traditions have often been marginalized and even denigrated by mainstream science, so this recent turn also provides opportunity for reckoning and reflection on the West’s ontological and epistemological biases. This group formed in response to this exciting moment in plant science, as well as the concurrent “more-than-human” trend in the humanities.
The co-founders, Natalia and Rachael, have pursued complementarity aspects of the inquiry into plants. Professor Charles Stang, CSWR director, connected us and (rightly) suggested we might enjoy collaborating on this reading group.
Before Harvard, Rachael led a decade-long career in environmental policy with a focus on conserving tropical forests. Through policy work in Washington, D.C., and fieldwork in Brazil, Uganda, Peru, Borneo, and elsewhere, she advocated to conserve irreplaceable tropical ecosystems. A period of burnout, and a series of non-ordinary experiences, inspired Rachael to explore spiritual practices and philosophical themes related to her work, ranging from topics in panpsychism, animism, and the often-unspoken ontological claims at work in science and policy.
Similarly, Natalia’s doctoral research is around expanded ontologies of personhood, posthuman ethics, and spiritual diction in scientific discourse. She concurrently serves as the associate director for Harvard Divinity School's Program for the Evolution of Spirituality under Dr. Dan McKanan. The aim of the program is to support the scholarly study of emerging spiritual movements, marginalized spiritualities, and the innovative edges of established religious traditions. In addition to her academic work, Natalia is an herbalist and wildlife rescue and rehabilitation apprentice.
The reading group first convened in the fall of 2022 and completed its first year in the spring. We met every other week to discuss 1-3 readings on the topic.
CSWR: What is the mission or goal of the group?
Petersen and Schwien: Our mission is to discuss the fundamental questions raised by plant scholarship, ancient and modern, scientific and philosophical. These questions include (but are by no means limited to): What is mind, where does it extend, and how? What is matter, and what does it mean to label it “animate” or “inanimate”? How do plants and fungi trouble our understanding of “thinking,” and perhaps cause us to reconsider what it means to be human?
We convene an interdisciplinary conversation, attracting students from the Divinity School alongside students, faculty, and staff from other departments. We also aim to bridge theory and praxis. With each reading, we ask questions like, "How would our lives be different if we internalized what this reading is telling us? What might be required of us, given this claim? What sort of practices or ways of relating might we adopt with plants?” Participants often share stories from their own deep relationships with place, plants, and other more-than-human beings. In the future, we hope to organize more guest speakers, field trips, and artistic engagement to bring readings alive.
CSWR: Why is the CSWR the “right place” for this reading group?
Petersen and Schwien: Institutionally, the plant consciousness group extends both previous and ongoing programming at the Center. The CSWR is home to the series “Matter and Spirit: Ecology and the Non-Human Turn,” and under this banner, Professor Stang and his team have hosted a series of speakers who were engaged in precisely this kind of thinking with plants and fungi: Eduardo Kohn, anthropologist and author of How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human; Michael Marder, philosopher and author of many books, most notably Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life; Leah Penniman, founder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black; together with the Harvard Environment Forum at the Mahindra Humanities Center, a dialogue between indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, and novelist Richard Powers, author of The Overstory; Rachel Sussman, author of The Oldest Living Things in the World; and Graham Harvey, author of Animism: Respecting the Living World; and David Abram, author of Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous.
The Center’s commitment to featuring thinkers like those above makes it the ideal locus for our reading group; a place where scholars and practitioners from many different ontologies and research fields can come together and thoughtfully engage with texts and with one another.
CSWR: What were some highlights from the 2022-23 academic year?
Petersen and Schwien: The highlight of the past year has really been the people and their love for plants. At each meeting, scientists from the natural sciences, scholars of religion, architects, graduate and undergraduate students, HDS staff members, artists, authors, and others share not only their experience digging into our assigned readings but share how their field and their vision of the world intersects whatever text we’re discussing. The far-reaching epistemological roots in the conversations leave one with an ever-growing reading suggestion list and a desire to feel through fresh methodologies of relationship and research. We were lucky to have illustrious participants from across campus, including Michael Pollan and David Abram.
Beyond our bi-weekly meetings, the community cultivated through the Plant Consciousness Reading Group evolved into a nurturing space for creativity and inquiry, spawning and supporting other events throughout the academic year. These included a night of storytelling around a bonfire, three seasonal homemade feasts, medicinal plant tastings, a screening of renowned animation director Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” hosted by David Abram, and a gathering for the opening of recent MDiv graduate Dan Wells’ photography exhibit “A Journey with Sacred Trees.”
A selection of readings from 2022-23:
- Thus Spoke the Plant, Monica Gagliano
- Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard
- The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, Emanuele Coccia
- The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium, Michael Marder
- Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake
- “Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial: Consistency in Our Thinking about Humans and Other Animals”, Frans de Waal
- “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”, Eduardo Viveiro de Castro
CSWR: What can we expect to see or hear from the group in 2023-24?
Petersen and Schwien: Over this upcoming academic year, in addition to continuing scholarly engagement with academic and nonfiction accounts, we hope to branch into explorations of relationality with the more-than-human in fiction and other creative spaces. Additionally, as we’re rooted in a divinity school, we hope to dive more deeply into the roles of plants in spiritual and religious traditions.
CSWR: What else would you like anyone interested to know about the reading group?
Petersen and Schwien: Please contact us if you’d like to join. We look forward to welcoming members, new and old, next year.
Additionally, we feel it is important to note that the title— “consciousness”— is intentionally provocative. The word is fraught, used in a variety of contexts, and often abused.
There are many different definitions, though they might be said to fall into two general categories: The first refers to whether something is awake, aware— “online” if you will. “He was knocked unconscious” we say of a linebacker injured in a football game. Of course, we refer to comas as “vegetative states”, but this is perhaps inaccurate, since research has shown that plants can be put to sleep using common anesthetics (!). Put a sensitive plant in a bell jar of anesthetic fumes and it will cease its characteristic leaf movements.
But then there is the second definition of consciousness, the much more fundamental and complicated one because we can never really study it from outside, never really know it objectively. We can never observe it— not in another person, let alone, another plant. And that definition is, more or less, a “subjective experience of reality.” The fact that we have an experience of “redness” when we see a flower; that we suffer when we get hurt and delight when things go our way. We do not simply sense, we are aware of our sensations. We do not exist, we experience existence.
As part of our reading group title, the word offers productive ambiguity. First, as the “consciousness that plants possess” i.e., their ways of knowing and experiencing the world. However, it can also refer to the consciousness we have of plants. In a way, the group explores both. Not just how do plants experience the world, but how do we train our senses to tune into their movements, shapes, scents? How can we become more aware of vegetal life— less plant-blind?