THE FUTURE OF POST-HUMAN BOTANY
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is botany really so important that Joseph Paxton once defined it as “the science of the vegetable kingdom,…one of the most attractive, most useful, and most extensive departments of human knowledge. It is, above every other, the science of beauty”? (TOD 2016) This positive view on botany can be contrasted with the critical one by Ambrose Bierce, who proposed that “BOTANY, n. The science of vegetables—those that are not good to eat, as well as those that are. It deals largely with their flowers, which are commonly badly designed, inartistic in color, and ill-smelling”? (TOD 2016a)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), botany (in relation to production and consumption) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe but this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that botany is useless, or that those diverse fields (related to botany)—like agronomy, anthropology, archaeology, chemistry, economics, forestry, geology, microbiology, pharmacology, genomics, ethnology, proteomics, metabolomics, agriculture, phytogenetics, biochemistry, resource management, ethnobotany, archaeobotany, palaeoethnobotany, ethnobotany, traditional medicine, entomology, ethology, garden design, mycology, phytochemistry, phycology, ecology, physiology, morphology, pathology, demographics, geography, mythology, cladistics, and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2016) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of botany (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between production and consumption—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the transitional theory of botany) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about botany (in relation to the dialectic relationship between production and consumption) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.