In this episode, Mariko O. Thomas and Melissa M. Parks join us to share some of their insights on plant communication, and from and process of writing the book “Storying Plant Communication. More-than-Human Relationships in New Mexico”, available for pre-order now, and to be published in October. As the book description explains, the book “explores the narrative accounts of southwestern herbalists, healers, teachers, farmers, and other plant enthusiasts who maintain deep and reciprocal relationships with the local flora.”
Mariko Oyama Thomas is Teaching Faculty at Skagit Valley College, USA. She holds a PhD in Environmental Communication from the University of New Mexico and is Co-Founder of the arts and ecology collaborative Submergence Collective.
Melissa M. Parks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. She is also the Associate Director of the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities Education in Centennial Valley, Montana, USA.
For the podcast, Mariko and Melissa build on the fact that it seems much easier to imagine more-than-humans as animals than as plants, and how then, in the field of communications, they sought for a way to include plant communication in the picture and in their teaching as well. They describe of how they found storytelling as the best method to study plant communication from a social science perspective (a method we’ve come across a few more times in Planetary Planning, with previous guests such as Jamie Wang, Isabelle Doucet, and Phoebe Wagner, among others). They share several practical examples of how anyone - including planners! - can engage in plant communication, and plant awareness wherever they are.
We discuss the language we use to speak about plants, the ways we can study plants through the stories told about them, and the potential that signage can have if it would use storytelling to speak of plants. They speak of the rhythms of plant communication and the need to de-centre the ego of academic work to be able to engage with this topic.
Key take-aways for planners:
* Allow ourselves to tell stories, and listen to other stories, to help break out of binaries and embrace a more multi-species and commons approach to the world
* Remember to consider perspectives that can’t verbally tell their stories
* We need all hands on deck and all disciplines on deck
* We need to get comfortable with the lack of egoism that is necessary to work in groups
References
Thomas, M. O. & Parks, M. M. (2025) Storying Plant Communication. More-than-Human Relationships in New Mexico. Bloomsbury.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books: https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com/books (mentioned in relation to the grammar used surrounding plants and other more-than-humans)
