Abstract
Bioenergy derived from plants is typically defined by its capacity to act as a sustainable substitute for fossil fuels. Yet plants might also help us to rethink the very purpose of energy in the Anthropocene, with implications for prevailing attitudes toward growth, productivity, waste, and even pleasure. Drawing on resource and vegetal geographies, the energy humanities, and posthumanist accounts of capitalist production, this provocation begins by highlighting the shared reliance of bioenergy and fossil energy on the work that plants do while photosynthesizing and growing. Recognizing bioenergy as dependent on vegetal labor, rather than as a free gift of nature, serves to foreground the inherent contestability of plants’ use as energy feedstocks. By attending closely to the temporalities and rhythms of vegetal labor, the article argues that we might work with plants not just to restructure incumbent energy systems but also to reshape underlying energy cultures. A closer attunement to plants, the article concludes, could enable society to imagine and embrace new habits of energy consumption. Such habits would reify not continuous expansion or growth, nor even sustainability, but rather the patient anticipation of more transient episodes of deliberate squander and excess.
Burning plants is a prehistoric practice that has fueled all human civilizations. Absent plants’ “wily aptitude” for photosynthesis, oxygen in the atmosphere would be virtually absent, multicellular life-forms might never have emerged, and the concept of energy could not have been invented.1 In contemporary energy policy discourse, however, the combustion of ostensibly carbon-neutral fuels derived from plants—the use of bioenergy—is more often defined by its “generic capacity [to act] as an alternative to fossil fuels” than in relation to the vegetal world’s own characteristics.2 Indeed, as part of the race to render existing energy systems more sustainable, governments and corporations are increasingly replacing the industrial-scale burning of coal, oil, and gas with the industrial-scale burning of plant-based biofuels. By treating biofuels as a straightforward “drop-in” technology, this modern “bioenergy boom” pays scant attention to the diverse natures of the vegetal life-forms it draws on, thereby stifling any potential for plants to put their own stamp on societal relationships with energy.3
In this article, I argue that a closer attunement to the work plants perform in generating fuel feedstocks could yet serve to transform these relationships, with implications not just for the scope of future bioenergy use, but the meaning and purpose of energy consumption of all kinds. Undergirding my argument are important distinctions between bioenergy and other prominent renewable energy resources like solar, wind, and hydropower. Fundamentally, bioenergy’s dependence on the metabolism of living organisms contrasts with the abiotic nature of solar radiation, winds, rivers, or tides. This reliance on living organisms not only enables bioenergy resources to be replenished over time, but it also forces society to reckon with the time-consuming, nonlinear temporalities in which plant metabolism and growth occur in practice. As a result, unlike solar radiation, the winds, or hydrological flows, plants offer a source of energy that is neither finite in extent nor immediate in its environmental availability. Furthermore, as photosynthesizing life-forms, plants—again, unlike other renewable resources—serve not strictly to produce or convert energy from one form to another but in large part to bring energy to rest as stable organic matter. Finally, plants are ultimately indifferent to the end uses to which they are put, whether ostensibly efficient or wasteful on the surface. When taken collectively, these characteristics of plants—their theoretical inexhaustibility, the time-consuming nature of their growth, their tendency toward rest at least as much as to exertion, and their indifference to notions of use, efficiency, or waste—offer distinct political affordances among major energy resources available to society today. The twin aims of this provocation are first to offer a conceptual account of bioenergy that foregrounds these affordances more clearly, and second to enumerate some of the ways in which those affordances might reshape the terms of energy-society relationships in the Anthropocene.
Drawing from resource and vegetal geographies, the energy humanities, and posthumanist interpretations of the nature-capital dialectic, the article begins by unsettling the apparently clear-cut distinction between living bioenergy and dead fossil fuels and emphasizing the reliance of both resources on the “work that plants do” in growing, photosynthesizing, and sequestering carbon dioxide.4 Subsequently, I argue that if the modern bioenergy boom is to be effectively challenged, it will be necessary to explicitly recognize bioenergy as the product of vegetal labor, and not as a “free gift” of nature.5 Far from being a mere conceptual move, recognizing bioenergy as a product of vegetal labor draws attention to the contingency and contestability of incumbent “colonial-capitalist” logics of bioenergy production, which normalize the intensification of plant metabolism for profit, as well as the appropriation by affluent, developed nations of increasing volumes of biomass cultivated overseas.6 Then I set out how I believe a closer engagement with plants could be central not just to restructuring incumbent global energy systems, but also to reshaping historically dominant, European-imperialist energy cultures. Overall, the core contention of the article is that plants can help us to rethink the purpose of energy itself, with implications for prevailing attitudes toward growth, productivity, waste, and even pleasure.
Theorizing Bioenergy: From Vitalism to Productivism
On the surface, plants’ growing use as energy resources today can be justified by pointing to their apparently inexhaustible capacity to regenerate, hence transcending limits of resource depletion associated with fossil fuels. Deriving energy from plants appears here as basic common sense; put simply, why rely on fossil resources that will run out, when better use could yet be made of the abundant free gifts continuously provided by plants at the earth’s surface? On a very basic level, concerns about global heating do not invalidate these arguments. Indeed, it is precisely because plants are alive—because they metabolize solar energy arriving in real time—that they are able, theoretically at least, to preserve a balance between the volume of carbon dioxide removed and reintroduced to the atmosphere by the diverse human activities they power.7 Clearly, the fact that plants are alive matters greatly to the politics of the energy systems they engender. Yet to presume that bioenergy’s animacy alone renders it inherently desirable is, I argue, symptomatic of a deep-seated conflation between ideas about the energetic basis of life itself and about the ultimate hallmarks of a life well lived.
To associate energy with life is hardly radical. Charting the philosophical forebears of modern understandings of energy, Cara Daggett highlights Gottfried Leibniz’s conviction that the essence of substance resides not in its measurable spatial or temporal extent (à la Descartes) but rather in the magnitude of a more intangible, invisible property—its vis viva, or life force.8 Marx, admittedly more communist than cosmic in outlook, evokes a similar idea when describing human labor power as derived ultimately from a body’s “vital force.”9 Intriguingly, even the very science of life—biology—has been shown by Foucault to have emerged from a turn away from taxonomic classifications based on the visible, surface-level differences between species, toward instead “the internal laws of the organism.”10 As Jeffrey T. Nealon eloquently explains, in biology “life is not representable . . . [it] is in fact a kind of unplumbable depth, animating the organism from a hidden origin somewhere within.”11 Much like energy, then, life as conceived in modern biological terms cannot be held in the palm of one’s hand, or even seen as such. But if “life” and “energy” share an ambiguous status in this respect—at once inherently ungraspable, yet also key building blocks of Western scientific knowledge—this alone cannot account for prevailing views of bioenergy as a force for societal and environmental good. Instead, what matters here is the relationship between these understandings of life and energy, on the one hand, and contemporaneous theories of economic value production emerging from European industrial societies, on the other. To tarry with Foucault a moment longer, it is not just Western biology’s move to locate life in the hidden recesses of the organism that should concern us, but that move’s symmetry with developments in classical European political economy, wherein value is seen to reside “behind the surface effects of exchange, in the time-processes of force, labor, and fatigue.”12
From the early nineteenth century onward, just as life comes to be understood in Western industrial societies “as a process of evolution and ontogenetic development”—a process of growth—human exertion, harnessed as labor power, comes to be understood as the principal source of economic value and, consequently, of economic growth.13 Henceforth, life, wealth, and ultimately human progress writ large are all recognized in these cultures as originating from hidden, unrepresentable forces. Small wonder that it is also in the nineteenth century that a new Western science of those forces—a science of energy—first emerges to help bring greater order, dignity, and control to those seeking to govern populations and the economy alike.14 Yet the establishment of a shared energetic basis for understanding life and the economy has normative as well as descriptive implications. In developing the concept of the biosphere in the early twentieth century, for instance, the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (as succinctly captured by Melinda Cooper) defined life according to “its ability to transform solar radiations into new chemical compounds, thus accumulating a relentless surplus of free energy over and above the chemical deposits already available on earth.”15 Such a perspective doesn’t merely view life as energetic; it imbues life with unashamedly capitalist traits—the capacity to accumulate a surplus effectively for free. Attributing life and economic growth alike to hidden energetic forces blurs the boundary between descriptive questions about how life and the economy work, on the one hand, and normative questions about what life and the economy should be for, on the other. Western industrial ideas about energy serve, in other words, to conflate vitalism with productivism and invoke life’s energetic basis as justification for the pursuit of continuous economic expansion and growth, while making the pursuit of continuous economic expansion and growth the primary objective of life.16 Ultimately, it is this conflation, rather than the animacy or liveliness of plants per se, that underpins views of modern bioenergy as an inherently desirable project for humanity today.17
To effectively counter these ideas, it is necessary first to reject the neat “discursive line between clean, green, lively bioenergy and dirty, black, dead fossil fuels.”18 From the vantage point of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, this distinction appears rock solid. Take a longer view, however, and the seemingly impermeable boundary between organic and minerals-based energy resources begins to crumble.19 After all, fossil fuels are the geological remains of formerly living plants and phytoplankton—in short, the long-buried products of prehistoric photosynthesis. As environmental historians have shown, these origins of fossil fuels have long been appreciated, giving rise to pithy descriptions of coal, oil, and gas reserves as “subterranean forests” or “buried sunshine.”20 Though apparently playful, the implications of such descriptions for efforts to distinguish bioenergy from fossil fuels are stark. What separates these resources in the end is not vitality but time. The difference, in short, lies between photosynthesis driven by solar energy emitted hundreds of millions of years ago and photosynthesis driven by “immediate circulations of solar energy” arriving in the present day.21 To describe today’s global energy systems as drawing increasingly on plants, from this perspective, overlooks that those energy systems have relied heavily on plants throughout the fossil fuel era, too.
Despite this, plants are radically distinct from fossil fuels. One obvious difference lies in the amenability of plants to deliberate modification.22 In dominant policy visions and scientific assessments of the scale of the energetic resource that plants might embody in the twenty-first century, the innate renewability of plants is only half the story; what matters just as much is the potential for scientific research and innovation to bring into being ever more vigorous and robust cultivars. For political economists of agriculture and forestry, these affordances of plant life are already well known.23 Where bioenergy production specifically is concerned, however, an even more mundane characteristic of plant life—the fact that its growth can be observed on timescales meaningful to humans—also forms a crucial difference with subterranean fossil fuels. Living plants, indeed, arguably serve as embodiments of the very processes of expansion and growth so fetishized under capitalism. Viewed from this perspective, modern bioenergy projects might even be said to put plants to work not just as increasingly productive (and hence profitable) energy carriers, but also as metaphorical vehicles for long-standing European ideas about the innate virtuousness of ever-more efficient and productive energy use.24 In other words, as living embodiments of expansion and growth, plants tacitly reinforce prevailing Western views of human progress as an achievement linked directly to the consumption of ever-expanding quantities of energy.25 Paradoxically, therefore, while the industrial-scale use of plants as modern bioenergy providers today may hasten the demise of an era of fossil fuels, it nonetheless threatens to further embed the economics, politics, and cultures of resource use that have characterized the era of fossil energy.26 But even if modern bioenergy logics are ultimately more productivist than vitalist, it remains rare for scholarly attention to be paid to the differences between vegetal life and vegetal work.
Putting Plants to Work? Bioenergy as Vegetal Labor
Within many theoretical accounts of the role of nonhuman natures in capitalism, while nonbiological materials are viewed as inherently resistant to change, biological systems hold out the prospect of enabling the “real subsumption of nature,” of being “made to operate as productive forces in and of themselves.”27 Especially in theories of resource making, the concept of real subsumption enables biological nature to be apprehended as a realm of opportunities and surprises, and not merely as an obstacle to value production.28 In this respect, the concept arguably presages much “new materialist” scholarship, wherein the “generative capacities of biophysical processes” and the inherent “inventiveness” of life are recognized as constitutive components of resource making itself.29 For those seeking to transcend strict dichotomies between nature and society (or capital), new materialism appeals for its avowedly posthumanist take on agency—or agencement—as a relational achievement derived not from the separate capacities of individual subjects but from “the coming together of things.”30
Yet an equally fertile route around the nature-society dichotomy might also be found, I contend, in the real subsumption of nature’s own theoretical heritage, as a scion of Marx’s original distinction between the formal and real subsumption of labor.31 After all, if plants are increasingly being made to do the work previously performed by fossil fuels, pinpointing the full political stakes of these developments demands more than simply highlighting their dependence on the innate generative capacities or inventiveness of vegetal life-forms. Rethinking the agencies involved in modern bioenergy production may quite literally be vital, but it is also necessary to scrutinize the end goals and underlying logics of intensifying efforts to burn plants on an industrial scale. My contention here is that understanding plant photosynthesis, growth, and carbon sequestration as forms of vegetal labor in their own right, contributing actively to capitalist value production, offers a starting point both for rethinking the metabolic contours and rhythms of plant-based energy economies and for scrutinizing their fundamental desirability in a post–fossil fuel world.32
Given conventional understandings of labor as a distinctively human capability, bound up with notions of preconception and intentionality, to classify plants as sources of vegetal labor may seem perturbing.33 Yet critical Marxist scholarship has long kept on trial the idea of labor as not just a defining capacity of humans but also a process that must necessarily be linked to individual subjects of any kind. For Morgan M. Robertson and Joel D. Wainwright, for example, Marx’s writings emphasize labor power as “a metabolic relation between nature and society: not a thing, but a socionatural relation.”34 Neil Smith, meanwhile, avers that even if labor constitutes a process “by which the form of nature is altered,” this transformative, metabolic capacity belongs no more to humans than it does to nature writ large.35 To be sure, a strict focus on metabolic processes may struggle to account for the diverse forms of work—especially those reliant on emotional or immaterial forms of labor—that animate contemporary economies today.36 Accepting that labor’s outputs may not always be tangible, however, need not automatically rule nonhumans out of the workforce. Indeed, when it comes to animals, influential contributions have highlighted a historical dependence, across sectors like farming, forestry, and manufacturing, on the brute force and metabolism of horses, cattle, and other domesticated species.37 Other interventions, still more provocatively, have posited that even more intangible, affective encounters with nonhumans—whether as domestic or exotic pets, as the linchpins of wildlife and conservation tourism, or simply as visual icons used to generate demand for commodities—constitute sites in which surplus economic value emerges partly from animal work (and not just human labor).38
If efforts to parse the diverse “living potentials that capital parasitizes upon in its quest to expand and reproduce” have often permitted a view of animals as workers, however, the idea that plants might labor remains more contentious.39 In many ways this is unsurprising. If the idea of animal work unsettles conventional definitions of labor as a preconceived, intentional act, then plants—the vast majority of which are sessile, incapable of closing themselves off from external stimuli, and frequently difficult even to distinguish as individuals—would seem to shatter such notions altogether.40 From the perspective of critical plant studies, vegetal life’s “never-fully-predictable alterity” is sufficiently profound that to even attempt to discern quasi-human characteristics is already to succumb to “an injurious and narcissistic anthropomorphism.”41 From this standpoint, the concept of vegetal labor appears no less problematic than other apparent projections of the human onto the vegetal, as embodied, for instance, in certain popular accounts of plant intelligence, sentience, communication, or consciousness.42 Yet, as geographer Anna Lawrence counters, “interrogating the challenges involved in ‘knowing’ plants does not lessen the imperative to make the attempt.”43 Moreover, as Western philosophy and social theory increasingly undergoes a plant turn, any effort to develop an authentic “ontophytology”—to come to know plants from their own perspectives—must beware not just the risks of anthropomorphism.44 Equally vital is the need not to presume the inferiority of long-standing, close attunements to plant life that have been cultivated by Indigenous communities across diverse contexts, often as part of explicitly relational cosmologies predicated on notions of care, kinship, conviviality, and mutual flourishing.45 If it is effectively impossible for us to really know plants, such cosmologies might suggest that this has less to do with our being human per se than with the fact that all forms of life are continuously co-constituted through messy, situated, and open-ended interconnections and entanglements.
Without wishing to dismiss out of hand the dangers of a naive anthropomorphism, I contend that the apparent incompatibility of plants with conventional Western understandings of labor may owe more to conceptual intransigence than to any underlying truth about the nature of labor itself. After all, even if plants may exceed attempts to discern individual from collective work or to disentangle subconscious instinct from deliberate intention, this does little to undermine a view of all labor as fundamentally relational—as “the attribute not of individuals closed in on themselves but an activity enmeshed in heterogenous entanglements.”46 Labor power, from this perspective, has never been something that can be said to be possessed innately by individual bodies or beings. Rather, it is always a collective, hybrid achievement.47 In the burgeoning field of vegetal geography, such a relational view of the labor process has already begun to inform detailed empirical studies of human-plant interactions. In examining the enrollment of plants within urban park maintenance regimes in Switzerland, for example, Marion Ernwein suggests that “laboring relations” are structured through the integrated governance of more-than-human “work collectives” rather than the separately delineated management of human park employees, on the one hand, and plants, on the other.48 In the commercial “working forests” of the US South, not dissimilarly, I have argued that the production of economic value from diverse wood-based commodities relies crucially on optimizing more-than-human interactions, not just among trees themselves but also between trees and the human workers employed to intervene in forest stands at propitious moments in the timber production life cycle.49
Yet if labor is to be reconceived, not as an exclusively human trait but more generously as any “material process of transformation oriented towards the generation of capitalist value,” for what purposes is it ultimately useful to acknowledge diverse living entities—whether animals, plants, algae, or even microbes—as active contributors to the labor process?50 A view of capital as always dependent on what Alyssa Battistoni explicitly terms “hybrid labor”—the “collective, distributed undertakings of humans and nonhumans”—is not merely helpful for revealing the interconnection and relationality animating the so-called web of life.51 Rather, what is at stake in this claim is the contingency and contestability of the historically specific arrangements within which diverse forms of life have been apprehended, brought to heel, and enrolled within processes of economic value production. Labor, at its core, is never an end in itself but a means to an end; “a partial descriptor of lives, relationships, and activities,” not a justification for them.52 Unfortunately, this crucial possibility of working expressly toward other ends, of seeking to produce another kind of world, is today crudely expunged from almost all scientific and policy debates about the deepening environmental crisis by reductive, instrumental concepts like natural capital and ecosystem services.53 Within such frameworks, nonhuman life is conceived a priori as subservient to existing modes of economic organization, while the driving logic of capital—a logic of efficiency, productivity, expansion, and growth for the sake of growth—is left entirely unchallenged.54
The point of the concept of vegetal labor, then, is not to assert that trees and crops engage in conscious, deliberate work but rather to denaturalize the end goals of the various projects within which plant growth is today enrolled to help generate value—whether as a supposedly sustainable alternative to fossil fuels or as the basis for any number of other so-called nature-based solutions to environmental problems.55 With specific respect to industrial-scale bioenergy production, insisting on a view of plants as vegetal laborers transcends critiques of such production that focus on localized economic and environmental injustices, mounting instead a direct challenge to the key political claim that undergirds modern bioenergy as a global-scale project.56 This is the claim that the deleterious environmental effects of putting fossil energy to work—of mobilizing the “dead labor” of prehistoric plants—can best be countered not by pausing to consider which forms of work will be most necessary or desirable in the future, but by putting more of the living nonhuman world to work in place of the dead.57 The concept of vegetal labor, by insisting on the open-ended potentials of plant growth—on the possibility for humans and plants always to collaborate in alternative ways and for alternative purposes—refuses to condone the productivist idea that just because plants can be used to generate energy, their enrollment as energy resources should automatically be viewed as virtuous. Recognizing the open-endedness of plant growth, moreover, highlights the vegetal kingdom’s innate lack of telos, forcing us to reckon with the indifference of plants toward particular end goals and perhaps even to “the exigencies of self-preservation.”58 To insist on a view of modern bioenergy as the product of vegetal labor, then, is not simply to question the desirability of burning plants for energy. It is also an invitation to “attune ourselves more closely to plant difference” and, in so doing, to recognize the power of plants to make us think again about what energy itself could and should ultimately be for.59
Power Plants: Toward Postproductivist Energy Cultures
This provocation cannot purport to offer an exhaustive account of the ways in which dominant, European-imperialist energy cultures might be reshaped by a closer attunement to the natures, capacities, and potentials of plants. Nonetheless, by drawing on examples of plants already widely enrolled within international regimes of industrial-scale bioenergy production, it does aim to sketch out some tentative pathways along which a greater openness to vegetal natures could serve to provoke deeper reflections on the place and purpose of energy in the Anthropocene. More specifically, my aim in this penultimate section is to speculate on the work plants could yet do—if allowed to shape human energy cultures on their own terms—to alter prevailing societal attitudes toward questions about energy’s availability and immediacy, about its links to productivity and growth, and finally about its relationships with concepts of scarcity and waste.
Availability and Immediacy
In a world that is growing steadily warmer, windier, and wetter, there is a certain irony to be found in mainstream depictions of bioenergy—dependent as it is on the continued productivity of increasingly stressed agricultural and forestry systems—as a more reliable source of power than intermittent renewables like solar, wind, or hydroelectricity. A focus not on sites of energy demand but on geographies of energy availability serves to expose this idea as absurd, despite its hold over energy policy discourse. Flow-based renewables are only intermittent to the extent that local weather conditions are changeable. On a planetary scale, solar radiation, wind, and hydropower are available to such a continuous and widespread extent that all current human energy demand pales into insignificance.60 The environmental availability of bioenergy feedstocks, by contrast, is anything but immediate. In the UK and European electricity sectors, for example, the ongoing phaseout of coal combustion has relied crucially on the burning of millions of tons of imported wood pellets derived from trees grown in commercially managed forests overseas.61 Among the most prominent feedstocks for this burgeoning form of modern bioenergy is the loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) of the southern United States, a fast-growing species whose vigor scientific and corporate actors have long sought to improve through selective breeding. Despite these efforts, however, the loblolly pine ultimately still takes ten to twelve years to reach a size deemed marketable for conversion into exportable biomass fuel.62 In other contexts, even where modern bioenergy production relies on perennial crops rather than trees, fuel feedstocks do not emerge instantaneously. Ethanol-based biofuels derived from various cultivars of sugarcane (Saccharum X), for example, which have long served as large-scale replacements for fossil-based petrol in Brazil, cannot short-circuit this plant’s typically yearlong growing cycle.63
While the exigencies of what might be termed “biological time” thus remain a stubborn impediment to the immediate production of biomass feedstocks, mainstream understandings of bioenergy’s properties emphasize not the vegetal labor or time required to harness this energy but rather the material similarities of biofuels to fossil fuels.64 Both, after all, constitute stable stocks of combustible hydrocarbon matter, whether in liquid, solid, or gaseous form, capable of being amassed into large reserves and deployed on demand. Focusing only on bioenergy’s use conceals the diverse temporalities and socioecological contexts within which plant life-forms draw carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere and stabilize it into combustible organic matter—whether in forests in the US South, Brazilian sugarcane plantations, or eastern European wheat fields. Focusing on bioenergy’s making, by contrast, requires us to acknowledge that plants do not simply appear on command but take time to grow; in other words, all plants demand our patience as they “make [us] wait” for solar energy, water, and carbon dioxide to be reassembled into hydrocarbon compounds.65 By offering a source of fuel that is neither strictly exhaustible nor immediately replaceable, plants invite us to acknowledge the time-consuming metabolic work required for combustible fuels to be brought into being. Through a closer attunement to not just the innate inexhaustibility of plant growth but also its slower resource temporalities, when compared to alternative renewables, we might perhaps come to appreciate fuels themselves as a reward to be earned through patience rather than as a gift already given by nature to be hoarded and exploited at will.
Productivity and Growth
Whether we like it or not, we must be patient as the clock of solar time is slowly “wound up” by plants, slowly bringing combustible fuel feedstocks into being.66 Being made to wait for fuels, moreover, may offer scope for reflection not just on the fast-paced tempo of prevailing European-imperialist energy cultures but also on their ultimate obsession with continuous expansion and growth, to be achieved by “consuming ever more power and deploying it ever more efficiently.”67 After all, even if plants might seem on the surface to act as natural embodiments of these productivist ideals, in reality they do not always look to work harder, faster, or better. Left undisturbed, for example, the loblolly pine’s prodigious initial growth rates soon give way to a more measured, mature phase of gradual expansion, tending ultimately toward stasis—while a 25-year-old loblolly is typically already 30 meters tall, 250-year-old individuals rarely exceed 50 meters.68 Even sugarcane, the world’s most prolific industrial crop when measured by overall harvested volume, renowned for its photosynthetic efficiency, exhibits a seasonal growth cycle that tends, like all perennial plants, just as naturally toward dormancy as toward activity when assessed across a full calendar year.69 Moving beyond these kinds of age-based and seasonal variations in vegetal growth rates, plants also pose an arguably more fundamental challenge to the reification of continuous production in that they do not strictly produce energy at all, but rather bring it to rest. While leaves may sometimes be described as nature’s solar panels, there is a world of difference between photovoltaics, converting solar energy into electricity, and photosynthesis, converting that same energy into stable organic matter. If we are to learn anything about energy from the vegetal world, perhaps it is that work, dynamism, and growth are not always the answers to what it means to live life well. Indeed, plants arguably provoke us no more readily to valorize growth or production per se than they do to appreciate the necessity of interchanging these states with equally vital periods of rest, stability, or even idleness. Perhaps in cultivating a closer attunement to these nonlinear temporalities of plant growth—indeed, to the deeper tendencies of plants toward rest at least as much as to work—we might come to question the desirability of our own pursuit of continuous growth and production for their own sakes in the Anthropocene era.70
Scarcity and Waste
As Cara Daggett has shown, the inherent finitude of fossil fuels and fears about their imminent depletion have exerted a profound influence over European-imperialist ideas about the purpose of energy since the Victorian era, elevating the twin goals of maximizing work and minimizing waste to a near-sacred status.71 While today’s modern bioenergy production regimes rely on a source of labor that is living rather than dead, they typically do not question but rather reinforce the imperative to derive as much value as possible from each marginal unit of combustible matter. Ongoing scientific research dedicated to the genetic modification of sugarcane, for example, seeks to alter this plant’s metabolic pathways so that it generates not only sugar but also significant volumes of combustible oil for use in a range of industries, including as an alternative to fossil-based aviation fuel.72 Within such projects, plant bodies are effectively viewed “as factories” playing host to malleable forms of metabolic work, the reconfiguration and optimization of which promises to yield “many useful products from a single source.”73 While such research agendas may attract considerable public funding and investment, their aim is simply to manipulate the vegetal world to meet preconceived expectations of increasingly efficient and productive forms of growth, rather than to accord plants a more active role as coauthors of alternative energy-society relationships. If we were to “listen” more attentively to plants themselves, the specter of persistent biological redundancy that is embodied by unusable plant matter—whether encountered on the level of the individual plant or within the ecosystem at large—might be viewed as a prompt to reflect on the limits of the very notion of usefulness itself.
As Michael Marder has highlighted, all plants ultimately perform a kind of “ontological indifference” to their existence, and certainly to the particular ends to which they are put by human communities.74 The loblolly pine does not care whether it is processed into wood pellets after ten years of rapid growth or instead left to grow more languidly toward an age of one hundred years before being put to the same use. The sugarcane crop, likewise, does not condemn the agricultural regime that burns bagasse—the fibrous matter left over following sugar extraction—in the open air or feeds this matter directly to livestock rather than seeking to convert it into cellulosic biofuel. Through their indifference to the very concepts of work and waste, plants exhibit relationships with energy entirely devoid of “a calculation, a planning, [or] a goal orientation.”75 In this way, the vegetal kingdom offers a direct connection to an energy ontology that transcends the narrow, utilitarian terms of what Georges Bataille termed the “particular” or “rational economy,” opening an aperture instead for the embrace, even if only infrequent or fleeting, of modes of energy expenditure motivated precisely by the desire to squander—to engage, in other words, in a “blind spending of the intimate world.”76 To be clear, this is not an anti-ecological attempt to usher in or condone the unhindered expansion of modern bioenergy logics to encompass effectively limitless biomass burning. Rather, the point is to suggest that a genuinely vegetal energy culture might reasonably exercise patience and parsimony in its use of fuel resources not to secure ongoing societal compliance with calculative logics of global environmental sustainability, but rather to allow for the very concepts of efficiency, usefulness, and waste to be periodically and decisively rejected in favor of exuberant outbursts of decadent excess.
Conclusion: Putting Down Roots for Alternative Energy Futures
Several key characteristics of the vegetal world—its theoretical inexhaustibility, the time-consuming, nonlinear temporalities of its growth, its tendency toward rest as much as to exertion, and its ultimate indifference to the notions of use, efficiency, or waste—offer political affordances that are distinct among major energy resources available to society today. Taken collectively, these characteristics of plants invite us (1) to adopt more patient and respectful attitudes toward the making of energy resources; (2) to temper the reification of continuous production and growth—arguably inconsistent with the ideal of a sustainable resource base in any case77—with an equal embrace of stability and rest; and (3) to reject European-imperialist imperatives to maximize work and minimize waste, as well as their attendant calculative logics of efficiency and sustainability, in favor of occasional cathartic outbursts of squander and excess. Rallying cries on the part of Western academics to “ally ourselves more closely with plants” are, of course, already preempted within many non-Western ontologies, where understandings of plants as “teachers” or indeed “kin” have long animated multispecies relationships predicated on mutual flourishing rather than perpetual expansion and growth.78 Accordingly, in this provocation, the lessons that I have suggested plants might teach us about energy are intended to be neither exhaustive nor tightly prescriptive. Whatever their precise ethos, however, it is hard to imagine that closer attunements to the political affordances of plants as energy resources can ever be cultivated in a world where vast quantities of vegetal matter are routinely uprooted and appropriated, often from far-flung locations, simply in order to help “decarbonize” the energy systems we already have, particularly in existing global centers of economic wealth and power.79
If meaningful alternatives to today’s large-scale, modern bioenergy regimes are to emerge, this would seem to be imminently more likely in settings where the terms and end goals of bioenergy production have been locally self-determined rather than externally imposed. After all, if it is true that plants present vital opportunities to reflect anew on the roles that energy could and should play in shaping social and economic life in the Anthropocene, it is no less crucial to ask who should supply the answers to such existential questions on the ground. Why should commercial operations in working forests in Mississippi or Louisiana be driven, for example, by foreign interests seeking to maximize wood output for the production of “carbon-neutral” electricity abroad, instead of by local communities wishing to power activities designed to meet their own self-determined standards of functionality, prosperity, or even simple enjoyment? Similarly, why shouldn’t the agricultural landscapes of the American Midwest play host, over the coming decades, to the cultivation of modest volumes of sugarcane for use in local heat and power generation, rather than to ultraproductive oilcane fields enabling purportedly net zero aircraft to transport millions of passengers across the skies above those very same landscapes? In raising these questions, the final aim of this provocation is not to imply the innate superiority of any particular mode of bioenergy production above all others. Rather, what is being advanced is a call for greater protections to be accorded to the basic autonomy necessary for diverse, self-determined forms of place-based collaboration between humans and plants to come into being and flourish, with as yet indeterminate implications for the energy cultures that might result.80 While the seeds of such cultures may be dormant for now, their germination depends ultimately on emancipating diverse agricultural and forestry landscapes from the colonizing forces of today’s purportedly sustainable “bioenergy boom”81—a boom that, while global in ambition, serves in practice the interests only of those nations already advantaged by centuries of fossil-fuel-powered, European-imperial conquest. Once such landscapes are freed from these suffocating, productivist logics, genuinely alternative ideas about energy might begin, with a little help from plants themselves, to put down new roots.
Acknowledgments
This provocation has benefited considerably from conversations with Marion Ernwein and Maan Barua. I would like to express my gratitude to Anna Krzywoszyńska, Dolly Jørgensen, Franklin Ginn, and two anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and very constructive feedback on earlier versions.
Notes
Myers, “Photosynthetic Mattering,” 125. In Emanuele Coccia’s words, “Thanks to plants, the Earth definitively became the metaphysical space of breath” (Life of Plants, 36).
Birch and Calvert, “Rethinking ‘Drop-in’ Biofuels”; Lohmann, “Bioenergy, Thermodynamics, and Inequalities.”
The idea of a “free gift” of nature is deployed here in its critical Marxist sense, to highlight a contradiction in capitalist approaches to the environment, per Jason Moore (“Transcending the Metabolic Rift,” 12).
Bioenergy’s key advantage over fossil fuels, at least theoretically, is its exploitation of short-term rather than long-term carbon cycles. Carbon released upon biofuel combustion was only removed from the atmosphere recently, as opposed to millions of years ago.
As Daggett explains, this modern Western concept of energy “combines a materialism, in the description of activity, with moralism, expressing a bias towards dynamism over stasis” (Birth of Energy, 18).
For Cooper, “this is a vitalism which comes dangerously close to equating the evolution of life with that of capital” (Life as Surplus, 42).
See Jonsson, “Abundance and Scarcity”; Sieferle, Subterranean Forest; and Mitchell, Carbon Democracy.
See Prudham, “Taming Trees”; and Kloppenburg, First the Seed.
For the biophysicist Alfred Lotka, “evolution favored species that increased the ‘total energy flux’ of an organic system” (Daggett, Birth of Energy, 119).
Daggett describes this as the “fossil myth of fuel expansion,” wherein “humans as a species desire ever more energy, and a series of technological innovations have provided it” (“Energy and Domination,” 645).
Agrarian political economy has often emphasized “natural obstacles” to capitalist industrialization in farming, downplaying active nonhuman contributions to production. See Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson, From Farming to Biotechnology.
Marx’s juxtaposition involves the “worst architect” and the “best of bees” (Capital, 284). See also Kallis and Swyngedouw, “Do Bees Produce Value?”
On pets, see Haraway, When Species Meet; and Collard, Animal Traffic. On conservation tourism, see Barua, “Nonhuman Labour.” Diverse accounts of animal work can be found in Porcher and Estebanez, Animal Labor.
Flows of nutrients, carbon, and water facilitated by complex mycorrhizal associations between fungi and plants, for example, raise difficult questions about whether vegetal life-forms can properly be understood as separate from the soils in which they grow.
As the philosopher Michael Marder cautions, “we are sure not to hear plants speak if we continue to hold onto the anthropocentric prejudice that sees in our intelligence, cognition, and languages the gold standards of intelligence, cognition, and language as such” (“To Hear Plants Speak,” 104).
See Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; and Kohn, How Forests Think.
Krzywoszynska, “Nonhuman Labor,” 231. On algae as energy feedstocks, see Kasdogan, “Potentiating Algae.”
For Moishe Postone, capital is “the central category of a society that becomes characterized by . . . production for the sake of production” (Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 269). To speak of natural capital does nothing by itself to question this pursuit.
“Nature-based solutions” are often defined as “solutions to societal challenges that involve working with nature” (Seddon et al., “Getting the Message Right,” 1518).
According to Andreas Malm, “the rate at which the earth intercepts sunlight is nearly 10,000 times greater than the entire energy flux humans currently muster” (Fossil Capital, 367).
While for William Stanley Jevons the metaphor of a “wound up” spring served to emphasize the prodigious energetic potential of coal, his contemporary, the Irish physicist John Tyndall, instead described the “formation” of plants as a kind of “winding up,” to be contrasted with animal “formation” as a process of “running down” (Jevons, Coal Question; Tyndall, Heat Considered, 507).
As Giorgos Kallis contends, “capitalism’s imaginary of a permanent transgression of a constantly expanding frontier . . . is not only self-destructive; it is not fun” (Limits, 115).
For critics, dominant policy visions of a sustainable bioeconomy are plagued by an irresolvable tension between the twin goals of wasteless resource circularity and perpetual economic growth (Zwier et al., “Ideal of a Zero-Waste Humanity”).
Lawrence, “Listening to Plants,” 634; see also Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; and Turner, Cuerrier, and Joseph, “Well Grounded.”
On autonomy, see Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg, “Manifesto for Abundant Futures.”
