Thinking with Plants and Fungi

By: Matthew Battles / Edited by: Russell Powell Corn and beans, corn and beans, the refrain of childhood summer drives into the country, up out of the folded town, up and out of the river valley, up into an Illinois dizzy with its endless contours, its...

By Emily Leon / Edited by Rachael Petersen Spiritualism is a system and a movement that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, asserting a spirit world alongside our reality. Followers believe this realm can be accessed through mediums, who function as...

Evenings at the Wolf Conservation Center of New York were always marked by the howling of the 30-odd wolves under the non-profit’s care. After a long day of plant identification and foraging, our group would gather around the campfire, beside a garden...

A previous version of the text was published as: “Divinity Tree: Dryad tales and storytelling through the looking glass” in Remediations, Hors-Sujet, Zurich, CH, 2023 Since Plato’s allegory of the cave, vision and the visual have held a central place in...

By Giulia Carabelli / edited by Rachael Petersen In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, fortunate to be working from home, I lived for extended periods of time alone with many houseplants. This changed my relationship with them dramatically. I...

Before his residency at MIT as a 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism Fellow, Aaron Scott (not relation to Natalia Schwien Scott) hosted the podcasts Short Wave from NPR and Timber Wars from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Aaron also joined the recent Thinking...

When hundreds gathered at the Harvard Divinity School in May for a three-day conference on the sentient lives of plants and fungi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and generations of Indigenous people may not only have recognized...

Postdoctoral fellow Elitza Koeva presented her artwork at "Phantom Tree," an exhibition at 92 Seattle Street in Allston, MA as part of the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference. The exhibition and the conference explored how plants and fungi help us...

By Giovanni Aloi / edited by Rachael Petersen Ten-foot-tall hostas and bright teal blooming geraniums, purple sunflowers, blue pampas grass plumes, black marigolds, and rainbow roses—the list is endless. Social media platforms have recently become...

By Lisa Sideris / edited by Russell Powell To open one’s mind to the mere existence of a superbloom shreds all kinds of narratives: the end of nature, the hopelessness of our times, the loss of wildness. – Thomas Ranier, “The Superbloom in an Age of...