Growth

Ideas of “growth” are ever present in our lives. Whenever this term, which is borrowed ostensibly from biological science, appears outside of an original context (i.e., sociocultural, economic, political, and historical discussions), growth is gauged in terms of achievement, gain, increase, acquisition, and/or victory. It is simultaneously and implicitly placed in opposition to loss, decline, recession, reduction, regression, retrogression, and/or defeat. In contemporary parlance, growth in turn signifies promises of expansion of influences and territories, intensification of labor, and maximization of resource extraction, as well as accumulation and redistribution of capital. Literature warning of the destructive growth-oriented model has existed since the publication of The Limits to Growth—a study famously commissioned by the Club of Rome in 1972—and Tsurumi’s 1992 address at the UNESCO forum, in which she questioned the dichotomous theorization of science vis-à-vis animism by describing a more symbiotic and sustainable fishing method practiced by traditional Japanese fishermen.^[1]More recently, galvanized by the 2015 adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),^[2]those who advocate for traditional knowledge by breaking away from the usual exploitive and extractive paradigm of growth are finding sympathetic voices in ideas like “degrowth” and “degrowth communism.”^[3]By now, use of this term has become so routinized that not only is growth undeniably synonymous with a progressive movement in time and space, but the measurability of growth to provide analyzable data for speculative potentialities is also naturalized.^[4]This slipperiness should give us pause: How has growth become so unequivocally ensconced as such? There is, however, a field in which scholars and researchers have not been able to reach a consensus on the signification of this term: plant studies.

Plant studies tend to be polarized into two competing narratives on growth: Either plants are relegated to inert, passive, lifeless objects, whose response to environmental stimuli merely indicates unconscious reflexivity, or they are embodiments of disruptive, rampant, wilding vitality. Except for manifest deficiency and/or excess, which are themselves innate attributes, plants in plant studies are historically deprived of consciousness and agency. Against this backdrop, some have proposed to expand the scope of investigation by arguing for plants’ ability to demonstrate a form of correspondence, not simply to tellurian but to planetary movement.^[5]For them, plants are “a critical design medium” and “live matter.”^[6]Thus, rather than yielding to a habitual compulsion to taxonomy (i.e., Linnaean classification), we need to study the “behaviour of plants as an active series of temporal and developmental processes.”^[7]Recommendation to grapple with a temporal vector resonates with our current aspiration to track changes more effectively across different phases and iterations of growth. Here, Imanishi’s 1940 thesis on “living things” (seibutsu) offers a refreshing perspective.^[8]

Evaluating plant growth is a tricky business. On the one hand, the way we track the quantitative growth of plants is relatively straightforward. As mentioned before, it is typically measured by an increase in height, width, and thickness; habitat expansion; and a growing number of annual rings, buds, and flowers. Alternatively, absence of growth is equally routinely identified by habitat contraction, stunted development, and sterility, and evidence of discoloration, withering, and disease. On the other hand, the qualitativegrowth of plants is harder to ascertain. It warrants answers to such questions as (1) how we might evaluate natural growth differently from growth aided by active human interventions, like the one spurred on by grafting, cutting, and splicing, or (2) whether we should insist on a categorical distinction between mutation and abnormal, inappropriate growth, such as a tumor, and healthy, normal, appropriate growth, and finally (3) what far-reaching ramifications such categorical differences would entail in the way we understand plants, etc.

Part of the challenge lies in the epistemic question concerning what constitutes plants: Are a plant’s seed, stem, leaves, and flowers one and the same entity? Or are they separate things coming together as a formation? Plants that start out as hard-shelled seeds in soil will, given time and under favorable conditions, germinate. For many plant species, a period of dormancy is a prerequisite for subsequent development. Plants’ labor of living, or “life activities,” to borrow Imanishi’s term, hence begins underground, far away from light, well before germination can be observed aboveground. Imanishi not only believed the life activities of living things to be animated by their orientation toward assimilating environments but also their assimilation of environments to be reciprocally “the environmentalization of subjects.”^[9]In sum, the labor of living things is manifested in their continuous attempt to adapt to their living environments, which is expressed outwardly through the different forms and figurations they take on throughout their lives. We might compare this ongoing process to a series of nonlinear, ontogenetic development, whose phases are marked by a wide range of acclimatization and attunement work done by living things, like plants, themselves. Yet, to untrained eyes, such transformations too often bear no telltale signs of visual or physical resemblance. We are hence left with a question of how to recognize and track stages of plant growth, to say nothing of measuring such growth.

We are not alone in broaching this issue. Questions concerning a proper investigation into observable plant-life activities also occupied Goethe; he, too, was captivated by changing forms and their functions.[10] With regard to plant morphology, he concluded, “All organs of the flower—calyx, corolla, stamens, and fruit buds—are transformed leaves. Hence, they are leaves that are essentially alike, differing only in their morphological potentialities.”^[11] In other words, he maintained that all potentialities—which are not yet actualized, but are inherently capable of becoming—are always already present in leaves. We might extend this thinking to suggest that all potentialities are indeed present in seeds. Through germination and development, the seed actualizes its potential when it is fully developed. By insisting on morphology, thus moving away from taxonomy and its tendency to arrest and stabilize the process of growth, Goethe foregrounded plants’ mutability as an expression of plants’ activities and process of life, so that he might chronicle the cyclical nature of plant growth more thoroughly.

Goethe, however, was not immune to deep-rooted historical biases. While he was concerned with plants’ skyward movement, he paid little to no attention to their earthbound activities. Similarly, his preference to study flowering plants and corollary lack of interest in nonflowering plants may have steered him to prioritize life (and growth) exclusively through sexual reproduction.^[12]Significantly, plants’ mutability also fascinated Darwin. By giving both root (gravity) and shoot (sunlight) due attention, Darwin managed to shift our focus away from the passivity previously associated with plants and rather daringly ascribed them more agency than formerly permitted. While it is noteworthy that Darwin’s discovery concerning plants’ response to the absence, presence, and amount of light prompted him to liken plants’ agency to “the nervous system of animals,” his thinking was still bound by an analogy between human and animal reflexivity. Consequently, plants were deemed to correspond to less sophisticated (i.e., less complex) animal species placed at the lower rung of an evolutionary hierarchy.^[13]The fact that Darwin’s search for a source of plant movement motivated him to identify a “perfect receptor” in the radicle further reveals that he was operating on the assumption that a sequential line of cause and effect existed somewhere. If a line of cause and effect did exist, it was up to a keen observer, like himself, to detect it successfully. Once such a discovery became thinkable, so did determining the source of growth (cause) and, in turn, a manipulation of growth (effect).

Despite Darwin’s theory regarding a plant-environment correspondence, he was unable to openly question the mainstream creationist argument during his time by endorsing a more substantive role to environmental (material) conditions in plants’ growth.^[14]Bearing in mind our own blind spots, we nevertheless hope to find ways to appreciate plants’ range of distinctive adaptations and growth across space and time: something like a nonlinear, diachronic inquiry that cuts across time and space without reducing it to either one. We are as concerned with specificities, be it species, anatomies, or relations to soil, water, sunlight, and nutrients (or lack thereof) in the environments as we are interested in maintaining planetary influences on the development of form and functions of living things. An approach we wish to cultivate is a wholistic one in which our investigative mode finds expression at the nexus of plant morphology and philosophical botany, perhaps in an unlikely place like decay. Brisini’s idea of growth echoes Imanishi’s thinking: “Plants, that is, behave by growing or shedding elements of themselves, and in so doing, permanently alter their phenotypic structures. In this way, many plant behaviors are not simply something that plants do but are simultaneously the means whereby plants materialize themselves into existence. The form of plant structure is the function of plant behavior, which renders phenotypic plasticity the embodied grammar of plant behavior.”^[15]

If growth is a sign of plants’ relentless movement and an expression of their assimilation of environment, could the lack thereof be a sign of their death? At what point do we declare plants dead? And can annuals ever die if they are bound to return in spring? How do we account for a dormant period, which is known as a “state of temporary death”? Finally, is the death of a living thing really death if it nourishes and enables another to perpetuate its life? According to Imanishi, plant growth is nothing like our own: “Although the various organisms originally divided and developed from one thing, it would be a mistake to conceive of the history of this world of living things as one species’ linear development like the gradual continuous growth of our body. If we look at the paleontological fossil record, it is immediately apparent that the so-called whole community has encountered radical changes and been rebuilt anew many times.”^[16]It is neither discernible by stages of morphological development or magnitude of expansion of its habitat space; growth is rather a series of life and (sometimes abrupt) death. For Imanishi, living things are continuously working to assimilate environments through predation, consumption, photosynthesis, etc. while simultaneously expending energy. Thus, his conception of a cycle of life-death-rebirth is not dictated by a thermodynamic law of entropy where energies are merely being transferred from one entity to another. Mutations and transformations are ultimately expressions of living things’ continuous life activities.^[17] If assimilation of the environment is an expression of life for living things, so is growth, irrespective of species. The following passage from Whitehead’s elaboration of “expression” feels especially redolent of Imanishi’s thought on this point: “Expression is the diffusion, in the environment of something initially entertained in the experience of the expression. No conscious determination is necessarily involved; only the impulse to diffuse.”^[18]Insofar as we are inherently oriented toward living, and our living is manifested in our assimilation of the environment, we are internally an amalgamation of “externally sourced” things. It follows then that growth experienced via assimilation, adaptation, and absorption must also be a particular moment of life, seen as an expression of a situated body of here and now. Like ripples across water, this amalgamation reveals no direct line of cause and effect.

For Imanishi, growth (and perhaps equally death) is about creation. During a plant’s dormancy period, the environment that surrounds seeds experiences changes such as temperature fluctuation, precipitation, and aeration. Critically, this interval is referred to as a “state of temporary death.” If the “birth” of a plant’s life necessarily begins with a form of “death,” what kind of life is plant life? Read side by side, the next two quotes seem to articulate Imanishi’s thinking on this subject well: (1) “For living organisms, living means acting, and those which are created will create those which in turn will create again. Both in the growth of the individual and in the continuation of generations, theoretically there is no simple repetition, but somewhere new things are always created. We cannot doubt that evolution is creation, and that creativity is an attribute of living organisms,”^[19] and (2) “For the species then, as for the individual, does there come a time to die? I have commented not on the origin, but on the death of species [ . . . ] In the sense that they all developed ultimately from one thing, contemporary plants, amoebae and animals must have lived through the same periods and epochs on the earth. In this sense can we say they have lived a tremendously long time, and even that they do not perish.”^[20]This type of thinking is reminiscent of an animistic understanding of life where a life taken (preyed upon, consumed, absorbed, etc.) is another life given (sustained, nourished, and grown). While theorization of different cosmologies offers a critical intervention, expressions of life as explored by Imanishi and Whitehead point to a shared path for plant studies—perhaps without repudiation or alienation?

 

Notes

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[1] Kazuko Tsurumi, “Animism and Science,” Third UNESCO Science and Culture Forum, Bélem, Brazil, 1992.

[2] This is a global call to action by the United Nations Development Programme, meant “to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity”: https://www.undp.org/sustainable-development-goals.

[3] Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno, “Can Shrinking Be Good for Japan? A Marxist Best Seller Makes the Case,” The New York Times (Online), August 23, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/business/kohei-saito-degrowth-communism.html; Kōhei Saitō and Brian Bergstrom, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, 1st ed. (Astra House, 2024).

[4] Scott O’Bryan, The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2009).

[5] Ernst M. Kranich, Planetary Influences Upon Plants: A Cosmological Botany (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1986); Rosetta S. Elkin, “Live Matter: Towards a Theory of Plant Life,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 12, no. 2 (2017): 60–73.

[6] Elkin, “Live Matter,” 60.

[7] Elkin, “Live Matter,” 66.

[8] Kinji Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things, ed. Pamela J. Asquith and trans. Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi, and Hiroyuki Takasaki (Routledge, 2002).

[9] Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature, 70.

[10] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gordon L. Miller, The Metamorphosis of Plants (MIT Press, 2009).

[11] Goethe and Miller, The Metamorphosis of Plants, 128.

[12] “Regular metamorphosis we might also call progressive, for it is this type that may be observed at work step by step from the first seed leaves to the final development of fruit. By transmutation of one form into another, it ascends as though on the rungs of an imaginary ladder to that climax of Nature, reproduction through two sexes.” Goethe and Miller, The Metamorphosis of Plants, 31.

[13] Charles Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants (John Murray, 1880), 566.

[14] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000).

[15] Travis Brisini, “Phytomorphizing Performance: Plant Performance in an Expanded Field,” Text and Performance Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2019): 12.

[16]Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature, 66.

[17] “Variation itself must be the environmentalization of the subject and the extension of the subject’s autonomy over the environment. It must be one expression of living, or rather, the expression of living well. When maintenance of homeostasis means death, then the organisms attempt to live better in whatever possible way. Because the life of organisms is thus directed, the environmentalized subject tries all the more to internalize the environment and is all the more environmentalized. The principle of adaptation probably lies here. Such notions as random variation are abstract products of considering living things apart from their way of living. Living organisms follow a certain course of living. That course is neither determined by the organisms nor by the environment. It is the directedness of creativity determined by the freedom of necessity.” Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature, 75.

[18] Alfred North Whitehead, “Expression,” in Modes of Thought (The Macmillan Company, 1938), 29.

[19]Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature, 68.

[20]Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature, 77.