2011, Ryan, John C

This paper examines the relationship between language, particularly language that expresses aesthetic experiences of plant life, and corporeality. The theorisation of language is a keystone towards conceptualising participatory relationships between people and the botanical world. A comparative reading of the works of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Heidegger provides a framework for approaching language as embodied participation. Despite political differences, Thoreau and Heidegger shared a mutual conviction about the generative powers of language. Thoreau's literary practice partly involved immersion in places such as swamps and forests. Fittingly, Heidegger's explication of Rilke's concept of "the Open" mirrors the participatory aesthetics of Thoreau. Both thinkers looked towards the capacities of poetics to galvanise the evolution of language. In response to the increasing dissection offered by contemporaneous theories of linguistics, Thoreau and Heidegger held the notion of language as a body in itself, one brought to life through immanence between sensuous bodies in the world. For each theorist, language was both bodily and a body. Their works evidence that multi-sensorial encounters with the natural world can be captured in language. The body of language may be engaged with as a whole living phenomenon rather than a dissected corpse as this comparative reading of Thoreau and Heidegger will intimate.

2013, Ryan, John C

If fungi comprise "the forgotten kingdom", then poetry that takes fungi and the discipline of mycology as its subject matter could be - by association - the forgotten ecopoetry (or perhaps "mycopoetry"). As the third "f" in contemporary biodiversity conservation, languishing behind fauna and flora, fungi occupy a comparably liminal and, possibly, marginal position in literary history and ecocritical studies. In particular, fungi straddle a largely unnavigated terrain between the recent "human-animal studies" and its literary counterpart "zoocriticism" and the emergent "critical plant studies" and its budding complement "vegetal ecocriticism". As a consequence, even amongst ecocritics, fungi have been grouped into the latter category, mirroring a tendency in the history of the biological sciences to aggregate fungi and plants. Yet, as neither plant nor animal - that is, existentially in-between the other two "f"s - fungi lack the powers of photosynthesis synonymous with green plants, and also proliferate through radically different mechanisms. I, therefore, suggest that the ecocritical reading of mycotal poetry should be performed in the context of the unique otherness of these organisms.

2010, Ryan, John C

Green tropism is a gravitational leaning towards biological and metaphorical greenness. The colour green is symbolically linked to fertility and productivity as a metonym for nature. In contemporary discourse, greenness is a trope for the environmental and sustainability movements, as well as political eco-consciousness. American author Wallace Stegner, however, remarks on the difficulties of green speak, considering the perceptual inversions that occur in dry landscapes. To become appreciative of arid country and attain xeri-consciousness, he asserts, 'you have to get over the color green.' This presentation explores greenness as it occurs in historic and literary representations of Southwest Australian flora. Drawing from A.D. Hope's poem 'Australia' and the journals of early European explorers to the Southwest of Western Australia, I note the prevalence of green tropism and its at times nefarious consequences for botanical conservation at biodiverse places such as Mt. Lesueur. Getting over the colour green in the Southwest has required the responses of writers and scientists such as Barbara York Main, George Seddon and Alex George, all of whom reconfigure the perception of green through an expanded descriptive vocabulary of indigenous flora towards a regional aesthetics of plants.

2017, Gagliano, Monica, Ryan, John C, Vieira, Patricia

Plants are perhaps the most fundamental form of life, providing sustenance, and thus enabling the existence of all animals, including us humans. Their evolutionary transition from Paleozoic aquatic beginnings to a vegetative life out of water is undoubtedly one of the farthest reaching events in the history of the earth. It was the silent yet relentless colonization of terrestrial environments by the earliest land plants that transformed the global landscape and radically altered the geochemical cycles of the planet. This resulted in lowered concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and thus set the scene for the emergence of terrestrial animals about 350 million years ago. Over the subsequent circa 200 million years, as Mesozoic forests of ferns, conifers, and cycads flourished and the first flowering plants made their appearance, so the first reptiles, and then mammals and birds emerged.

2018, Ryan, John C

Examining how poets engage with and mediate botanical life, 'Plants in Contemporary Poetry' affords a glimpse into the ontologies, epistemologies, and semiospheres of flora and, by extension, the natural world. Highlighting the botanical obsessions of seminal poets writing in English today, the book calls attention to the role of language in deconstructing the cultural codes that limit an understanding of plants as intelligent beings. Ryan argues that, as poetic thought harmonizes with vegetality, writers gain direct knowledge of, and profound inspiration from, the botanical world. Plants in Contemporary Poetry provides a timely intervention in the prevailing tendency of ecocritical scholarship to date to examine animal, rather than plant, subjectivities and life-worlds. A sensuous return to vegetal being is actualized in this study through a focus on the contemporary poetries of Australia, England, and the United States.The lively disquisition traverses a cross section of contemporary poetic genres from confessionalism and experimentalism to radical pastoralism and ecopoetry. Through readings of eight poets, including Louise Gluck, Les Murray, Mary Oliver, and Alice Oswald, Plants in Contemporary Poetry centers on the idea of the botanical imagination and proposes a unique conceptual model the author calls vegetal dialectics. Drawing from developments in neuro-botany and contributing to the area of critical plant studies, the book also develops phytocriticism as a method for responding to the lack of attention to plants in ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the environmental humanities.This ground-breaking study reminds readers that poetic imagination is as important as scientific rationality to appreciating the mysteries of plants on an increasingly imperiled planet. The book will appeal to a multidisciplinary readership in the fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetry, environmental humanities, and ecocultural studies, and will be of particular interest to students and researchers in critical plant studies.

2011, Ryan, John C

Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The nature culture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective (technical, scientific, reductionistic, visual) and subjective (emotive, artistic, relational, multi-sensory) forms of knowledge. The foundations of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental studies, ethnobotany and economic botany, are undergirded by universalizing, sensory-limited visual structuring of the natural world. As the study of everyday embodied interactions of humans with flora, expanding upon the lens of cultural ecology, "cultural botany" provides a transdisciplinary research approach. Alternate embodied cultural engagements with flora emerge through a syncretic fusion of diverse methodologies.

2012, Ryan, John C

Originally theorized as a radical environmental movement, bioregionalism connects humanity to the specificities of a place. To establish greater cohesion between environments and cultures, bioregionalism endeavors to integrate societal activities and the nuances of natural spaces known as bioregions. The criticism of bioregionalism, however, pertains to the shortcomings of circumscribing culture within ecological boundaries. In light of its criticism, bioregionalism can strengthen its theoretical basis and its potential for cultural change by engaging critically with space, aesthetics, and ethics. This engagement first involves the recognition of bioregionalism as an ethical possibility based on the fundamental spatial unit of the watershed. A watershed comprises vital regional ecological processes, bearing discrete aesthetic properties and patterns. Through the sensuous possibilities of watersheds, a bioregional aesthetic can be integrated with an ethic of reinhabitation. The relation between space, aesthetics, and ethics gives form to and sustains the experience of place, which is intrinsically related to promoting the awareness of ecological sustainability.

2018, Ryan, John C

Through the interplay of the creative and the critical-in which both modes of ecological writing exist side by side, in exchange with one another-Thinking Continental presents a timely and distinct contribution to the blossoming of the environmental humanities. The volume consists of three parts, Ground Truths, Watershed Ways and Planetary Currents, each of which ends with a lyrical coda of poems from leading writers on environment, ecology, place, region and the nonhuman. Cross-disciplinary and, moreover, cross-genre, Thinking Continental enlarges the spectrum of recent theoretical work in the environmental humanities, notably Robert Emmett and David Nye's The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction and Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann's The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, both works published in 2017.

2017, Ryan, John C

In his 1826 'Observations on the Growth of the Mind', Sampson Reed wrote: "Everything which is, whether animal or vegetable, is full of the expression of that use for which it is designed, as of its own existence .... Let [us] respect the smallest blade which grows, and permit it to speak for itself. Then may there be poetry, which may not be written perhaps, but which may be felt as a part of our being."1 Since this plaintive appeal by Reed, allowing the "smallest blade" (or, prickliest spine or loveliest heart- shaped leaf) to speak has become a technological preoccupation for some. Let us begin with a typical example. Cactus Acoustics is a project that aims to allow saguaro cacti to vocalize.2 We might imagine the voice of the burly saguaro as gruff and slightly imposing. Growing to considerable proportions- up to five stories high, eight tons in weight, and over a hundred years in age- 'Carnegie gigantea' is endemic to the Sonoran Desert.

2017, Ryan, John C

In his article "A Comparative Literary History of Resurrection Plants" John Charles Ryan assembles a comparative history of resurrection plants through textual analysis of early botanical commentaries, herbal references, prose, poetry, and other sources. Resurrection plants include a diverse range of botanical species, typically of arid regions, that appear to come back to life after complete desiccation. Historical and contemporary observers-from sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard to contemporary Australian poet John Kinsella-have expressed an abiding fascination for resurrection plants' capacity to survive harsh environmental conditions. The plants court their own deaths by paring down-then restoring-physiological processes in relation to shifting ecological circumstances. While researchers over the years have attempted to reveal the mechanisms involved, the uncanny adaptations of resurrection plants remain a wonder and source of inspiration for scientists, humanists, and artists alike. Drawing from recent concepts in the field of "critical plant studies," this article concludes by asserting that listening to the lessons of plants is essential to reimagining an ethical and sustainable future. In the present era of rapid species loss worldwide, resurrection plants offer messages of hope and renewal to societies struggling to devise ways to live sustainably with the biosphere.