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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Dan Barber

This quote reminded me a lot about this show I have been watching called Chef’s Table and in particular this chef called Dan Barber. According to the show, Dan Barber is seen as kind of the face of sustainable cooking and basically what makes him interesting is that he focuses very intensely on creating a perfectly balanced, harmonised symbiotic system of food production. There are the chickens, which spread the manure of the cows over the fields, which improves the health of the grass, which is eaten by the goats, which keeps back the forest… and so on. He very much takes a backward step as the human and leaves a lot of the ‘cooking process’ up to non-human elements. The dishes he serves in his restaurant are sometimes just single pieces of vegetables, as though he were serving to his guests the essence of a carrot or a radish or a turnip. (see picture)

His whole approach initially struck me as an interesting example of the sorts of things that contemporary art and culture can do to reintroduce nature to us.

The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to think that the whole reason Dan Barber is able to create such a system (and foreground nature and vegetables in the way he does) is because he has large amounts of resources (land, time, money, fame) at his disposable. It is quite ironic that he is seen as the face of sustainable cooking when his techniques are not really transferable into any sort of larger, more global systems.

This page is referenced by:

The Plant Contract and Life of plants and the limits of Empathy Annotated by Cale Leishman

The Plant Contract: Art's Return to Vegetal Life (Prudence Gibson, 2018)

This article, published in 2018, examines the way that plants and representations of plants have been “forgotten” in contemporary society. It interestingly suggests that contemporary art and culture can reintroduce nature, and more specifically plants, to us.

The article provides a very interesting and effective example to show how humans have come to disregard plants in favour of anything else, particularly animals: “Humans will always see the bear not the woods, the lion not the grasslands, the camel not the desert dunes”. I also found it interesting how the author described plants by suggesting that they have different personalities: “some plants are wicked, some are defiant, and others cannot be controlled.” This point could be useful for the project as we think about different perspectives of seeing plants and the personification of plants. She goes on to suggest that if we allow plant worlds to be bigger than ourselves, it is a humbling but extraordinary experience: “Respect and maybe even a little fear for plants reminds humans of our true place in the world”. This reminds us that even when we do “forget” about plants as the article suggests, they have always been there in a form that transcends time and space. The point raised, though, is that because humans have contributed to the ecological destruction of plant life, we no longer recognise “the seasons, the weather, or vegetal life”.

The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy (Michael Marder, 2012)

This article explores the idea of treating plants in an ethical, empathetic way. It crucially asks, though, whether this type of treatment disregards the intrinsic nature of plants. As plants are a part of nature, it suggests that human intervention with the natural processes of plant worlds actually disregard plant ontology (their mode of simply ‘being’). The author therefore suggests that there must be a limit to our empathy towards plants.

The article raises an interesting point about why people empathise with plants to the degree of protesting against a forest being cut down for timber or to make room for a highway. Apart from the obvious narrative of a forest being a legacy for future generations or the environmental benefits of sustaining a forest, the author argues that it may not necessarily be the intrinsic, ontological attraction to plants that one loves, but the fact that they symbolise life and growth - something that humans empathise with - “recognize in ourselves
certain features of vegetal life” (p. 265)

An idea that is interesting to me is whether plants should be left on their own to provide oxygen, food, medicine, regulate the water cycle, be the backbone of animal habitats, etc. or whether humans should intervene in this natural process in order to preserve plant life where possible. Is it more humane to leave a plant to its own natural devices, or to nurture it when needed? A line that I take away from the article, and something that would be useful to think about for the group project is, “What on earth is a living thing if the spirit of man does not breathe life into it?” (p. 270).