Abstract
The problem of invasive species is often considered to be a human one, since their present distribution and spread also contributes to an understanding of human influence. But what of the plants themselves? How might we acknowledge that invasive plants do not merely ‘accumulate’, but remake the world differently? In this chapter I draw from posthumanist perspectives of social practice that question the assumption of the stability of organisms. I use examples from ethnographic research in Northern Australia to consider the way plants expose and drive the discontinuities in human regulatory, governance, and other structures designed to limit them. Together, these examples challenge the view of invasive plants as merely extensions of human agency, but they also reveal new avenues for deciding upon futures and priorities.
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Notes
- 1.
Although the term invasive plant is preferred, in some contexts, including for study participants, the term weed is often used interchangeably. The specific weeds examined in the research study are all recognised by weed scientists to be invasive plants.
- 2.
These examples are drawn from research on the social dimensions of invasive plant management in Northern Australia which included participant observation and semi-structured interviews with government scientists, weed officers, land managers, and Indigenous rangers. This project has been reported elsewhere in Atchison and Head (2013), Atchison (2015), Head et al. (2015), and in Atchison and Head (2017).
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Acknowledgements
The research reported here was funded by an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship to Professor Lesley Head (FL0992397). I thank Lesley and Dr Catherine Phillips for always productive conversations about plants, Stephanie Toole for assistance in the field, and colleagues at AUSCCER for engaging discussions on theories of practice.
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Atchison, J. (2019). Thriving in the Anthropocene: Understanding Human-Weed Relations and Invasive Plant Management Using Theories of Practice. In: Maller, C., Strengers, Y. (eds) Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92189-1_2
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