The Wisdom of Trees - with david Macauley and Laura Pustarfi
The Wisdom of Trees: A Conversation with David Macauley and Laura Pustarfi
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
12:00 - 1:00 pm Central US Time
Join this conversation with the editors of a new book applying interdisciplinary philosophical thinking to trees and forests.
What are some new ways of thinking of trees and forests in the environmental humanities? How can we start to think of trees more sustainably and respectfully? Do we have ethical obligations to trees, and what are these?
Explore these and other questions with David Macauley and Laura Pustarfi, editors of the new book The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality published by SUNY Press.
The event will be moderated by Plant Initiative board member Keith Williams.
About The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality
This book contains pioneering essays that reveal the significance of new interdisciplinary understandings of trees and forests, especially in terms of their philosophical and ecological dimensions and their importance for addressing the climate emergency.
This is the first book to apply philosophical thinking to trees. Through a series of sixteen diverse essays by leading scholars and writers, along with an in-depth introduction to the key issues and ideas, it examines the new and emerging understanding of trees in science and society.
Contributors show how these developments encourage a revisioning of philosophical thought and a more sustainable relationship with trees and forests-a reconceptualization with important ecological and social implications for responding to deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, and the climate emergency. The interdisciplinary contributions in this collection investigate the many interconnected dimensions of arboreality, focusing on subjects related to time, mind, truth, memory, being, beauty, goodness, silence, wisdom, personhood, and death.
The volume engages in a conversation about why trees matter, how they can best be protected, our obligations to them, and even what or who they are. Most of the chapters are informed by natural history or ecological science and many share a particular emphasis on continental philosophy and the environmental humanities.
The publisher, SUNY Press, is offering a 30% discount on print copies of this book when ordered through their web site www.sunypress.edu using code SNWS25 (add the discount code at checkout)
Join us for this free interactive program!
There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. This free program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.
About David Macauley and Laura Pustarfi
David Macauley, PhD, is Academy Professor and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Penn State University, Brandywine. He has taught at Oberlin College, Emerson College, and New York University and was a Mellon Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.
Macauley is the author of Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas; editor of Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, co-editor of The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives; and co-editor of The Wisdom of Trees. He has published articles on ethics, aesthetics, politics, Greek philosophy, and Continental thought.
Laura Pustarfi, PhD, is adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her scholarly work examines trees and plants in Western thought with particular focus on philosophical literature in order to explore an arboreal and vegetal ontology and ethics that respects plants themselves.
Laura has presented at several academic conferences including those of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP), TORCH Oxford, the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (PACT), and the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE).
Strangers at Home: Plant-Human Migrations
A conversation with Yota Batsaki and Giovanni Aloi
Strangers at Home: Plant-Human Migrations, a conversation with Yota Batsaki & Giovanni Aloi
Thursday, September 18, 2025
12:00 - 1:00 pm Central US Time
Join a fascinating conversation with humanities scholars Yota Batsaki and Giovanni Aloi about plant-human migrations and invasive species.
We think of plants as rooted to the spot, but they travel constantly through their adaptations or the actions of humans. The travels of plants, in turn, have precipitated vast voluntary and involuntary human migrations. Among plants on the move, no category lends itself to more negative personification than invasives, which often trigger violent fantasies of eradication.
Join this conversation with plant humanities scholars Yota Batsaki and Giovanni Aloi examining the cultural histories of two invasives, across two continents, as windows into our current social and environmental predicament: kudzu, or Pueraria lobata, in the United States, and Agave americana in Greece. Both became icons of nation building in the 1930s, one literally holding up the soil of the nation, the other used to project the nation’s imagined community.
Examined both through their histories and through the lens of art—for kudzu via the recent installations of multimedia artist Precious Okoyomon, for agave through the work of pioneer Greek photographer Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari—both plants reveal the trauma and resilience of human and more-than-human migrations. While Okoyomon’s work with kudzu speaks to the environmental and human harm of forced migration in the American South, Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari’s photos record the violent dislocations of nation building in the Aegean a century ago, during a mandated population exchange that provided a blueprint for the later partition of India and Pakistan. Ultimately, the talk will argue that thinking together human and plant migrations through the lens of invasive species has the capacity to disrupt our notions of purity and belonging, helping us to imagine novel forms of community.
Join us for this free interactive program!
There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. This free program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.
About Yota Batsaki and Giovanni Aloi
Dr. Yota Batsaki is the executive director of Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard research institute, museum, and historic garden located in Washington DC. At Dumbarton Oaks, she also directs the Plant Humanities Initiative, originally seeded by a Mellon grant. Through an open access digital platform, the Plant Humanities Lab, and related scholarly programming, the initiative helped pioneer, and continues to support, the emerging field of plant humanities. Batsaki has written several volumes and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University. Previously, she taught English literature at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. He is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and has authored a number of recent books. Aloi has contributed to BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature. He is also a board member of The Plant Initiative. His website is www.aloi.info.
the Plant Initiative's 2024 annual report
Check out The Plant Initiative's 2024 annual report to learn more about our work in the past year!
2024 was another year of growth for The Plant Initiative! As described in this report, we hosted 7 free online events, 2 podcasts, awarded 13 grants totaling $6,500, sent out our monthly e-newsletter to over 3.400 subscribers, and further built our presence on social media.
A big thanks to Plant Initiative board member Mya Hummel for donating the design for the report and to Betsey Crawford of The Soul of the Earth and photo-based artist Sara Angelucci for allowing us to include their beautiful photos of plants. Also, thanks to Vegan Printer for their generous discount once again on the printed version of the report.
As an all-volunteer organization with no paid staff, we have done a lot with a modest budget. Thank you for all of the support and interest you have shown over the past year!
Learn more about our work by reading or downloading the report here or by clicking on the report cover or the button below.
June 2025 Monthly e-mail newsletter
Each month, The Plant Initiative sends out an e-mail newsletter to provide timely information and resources about improving the plant-human connection as well as to keep you up to date on our work.
Here's the link to the June 2025 e-newsletter which was sent on June 15, 2025.
To subscribe to the e-newsletter, just visit our home page and enter your e-mail address on the form on that page. If you have a suggestion for a resource, event, or other item that may be of interest to subscribers, please consider sharing it with us at info@plantinitiative.org.
Thank you for your interest!
The Plant Initiative Podcast - New Episode
The Plant Initiative is posting podcast episodes on our YouTube channel.
Our fourth episode, recorded on December 13, 2024, features a wonderful conversation with Gay Bradshaw, Executive Director of the Kerulos Center for Nonviolence and Plant Initiative board member Sue Fager. Topics include Nature Consciousness, advocating for animals and plants, and thinking about how to make change.
13 grants awarded by the Plant Initiative in 2024!
We are pleased to let you know that 13 grants were recently awarded by The Plant Initiative!
These grants totaling $6,500 were provided in October 2024 to organizations working to increase respect for plants, encourage ethical behavior toward plants, and/or to support development of an effective movement toward these goals.
Grants of $500 each were provided to:
Center for Biological Diversity (Tucson, AZ) to support the Center's legal and other efforts to protect the Alaskan glacier buttercup, found only in the Kigluaik Mountains on the Seward Peninsula in Western Alaska, which is imperiled by climate change and rapidly warming Arctic climate as well as by potential mining activities and other threats.
Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (Spokane, WA) to support the Center’s staff time and travel to advance and enforce the rights of manoomin (wild rice), which has been recognized in tribal law by the White Earth Band of Chippewa in Minnesota.
The Cultural Conservancy (San Francisco, CA) to support the Conservancy's Native Foodways Program, in partnership with Intertribal community, including purchasing California ethnobotanical seeds and plant starts for ecological restoration in their land base, as well as to purchase additional heirloom seeds, fruit tree starts, and seeds for winter crop planting.
Dogwood Alliance (Asheville, NC) to support the Alliance's forest advocacy activities, which seek to protect the forests of the US South and to work in partnership with frontline communities to develop economic alternatives that work with and for the Southern forests.
Earth Law Center (Durango, CO) to support the Center in developing a policy report and blog on the concept of plants as kin and family members, as well as other innovative and ecocentric protections, and exploring legal and cultural frameworks worldwide, with the grant supporting staff time and design costs for this work.
Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (San Francisco, CA) to support GARN's work to advance the "Declaration of the Rights of the Amazon", including developing and distributing educational materials to be shared with GARN's members and allies that highlight the importance of recognizing the Amazon as a subject of rights.
Institute of Relational Being (Los Angeles, CA) to support initiatives that are focused on enhancing appreciation for plant life through community engagement events and materials for educational workshops in the Los Angeles, CA area, to help cultivate a deeper respect for plants within that community.
The Land Institute (Salina, KS) to support the Institute's sustainable agriculture work, including expanding and accelerating perennial grain research, building network,s and helping to develop perennial grain supply chains and markets.
Native Seeds/SEARCH (Tucson, AZ) to support their mission of conserving and sharing the seeds of the people of the desert Southwest and Mexico by establishing a new dedicated rainwater harvesting basin for dry-farm crop seed production on their Conservation Farm that will also serve as a crucial habitat for beneficial insects and pollinators.
Old-Growth Forest Network (Easton, MD) to help support the purchase of an ArcGIS Online subscription to help the organization to increase its mapping capabilities in order to fill a gap in the nationwide accounting of remaining old-growth forests and lands that are set aside for protection as well as to help create educational materials for visitors to their website.
Re:wild (Austin, TX) to advance the recovery of Ekman's Magnolia, a Critically Endangered tree endemic to the biodiversity-rich Tiburon Peninsula of Southwest Haiti, through working to conserve its habitat and propagating these rare trees in field nurseries for reforestation, in collaboration with the Haiti National Trust.
Seacology (Berkeley, CA) in support of Seacology's seagrass project in Las Calderas, Dominican Republic, where seagrass faces threats such as sedimentation, runoff, and coastal development, with the project supporting community patrols, educational workshops, signage, stakeholder engagement, and strengthening ecotourism in collaboration with local partners.
WildEarth Guardians (Santa Fe, NM) to support implementation of a communications and outreach plan to highlight the need to protect the Joshua Tree which is facing threats from climate change, including a digital communications campaign which will help to build extensive support in Southern California around this issue.
With your support, The Plant Initiative plans to continue to provide grants in 2025 to organizations working on behalf of plants!
The plant initiative is a friend of the journal
The Plant initiative is pleased to be included as a Friend of the Journal by The Ecological Citizen, a peer-reviewed free-access online journal that is working for an ecological civilization. Issues are published twice a year and are full of articles promoting respectful relationship with all of Earth's diverse beings.