Along the Mississippi are miles of agricultural sites covered with greenery that is, actually, predominantly mono-species crops covered in toxic pesticides and herbicides producing a strangely green death zone for everything but the crop of choice. Though this is hardly unique for the United States or for any nation practicing industrialized agriculture, the fields along the Mississippi dump toxic waste (fertilizer runoff) from the farms into the river, the main water artery of the country connecting the northern-most states with the Gulf of Mexico. While the resulting dead zones in the seawater are receiving increasing attention, many fewer people ask directly what these circumstances mean for the plants themselves: altered, toxic to their co-species, isolated, and often infertile and reliant on human beings to reproduce.

Additionally, we might ask what these death zones of green fields of food mean for us, our bodies, human and non-human beings alike, when the vegetal substance of our lives—food for us, food for the animals we eat, and living systems that direct the local water cycles and produce the oxygen we need to live—is being so radically altered along such a massive, interconnected river system, as well as more broadly across all continents in the Anthropocene. Since we are always and have always been immersed in a world of plant production, green bodies, and waste products like oxygen, our various forms of culture emerge in specific forms according to the kind of access to plant energy that we have and can cultivate.

Indeed, most humanly-inhabited spaces are actually “plantscapes,” according to Matthew Hall, in that plants have covered much of the originally bare, rocky zones of ancient Earth, making space and food for other species to occupy. Hall writes: “Most places on Earth which contain life are visibly plantscapes […]. In fact, the bulk of the visible biomass on this planet is comprised of plants.”11Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. New York: State University of New York Press, 2011, Kindle edition, location 42-46. Furthermore, we live in what Johann Wolfgang Goethe describes in his lectures on physics as a “plant-ocean” and an “air-ocean.” He writes: “The entire realm of plants, for example, will appear to us as a massive ocean, which is just as necessary for the existence of insects as are the world’s oceans and the rivers for the existence of fishes. And we will see that a massive number of living creatures are born and nurtured in this plant-ocean.”22Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Physikalische Vorträge,” in Schriften zur allgemeinen Naturlehre, Geologie und Mineralogie, vol. 25, ed. Wolf von Engelhardt and Manfred Wenzel. Frankfurt/Main: Klassiker, 1989, p. 65, translation mine. These creatures include us human beings. Surrounded by plants, immersed within and breathing their output, eating their bodies or the bodies of plant-eating animals, we have now also extended our plant-energy use by tapping aggressively into ancient forms of plant bodies with very modern consequences. The fossil fuels energizing and changing not only industrial agriculture but all industrial cultures and our very climate are composed of plants; that is, of rotted, ancient corpses of plants unearthed and burned to release their carbon. In so radically altering our plant basis—the vegetal world upon which all other animal/human/insect/bird/etc. lives depend—we alter ourselves. Releasing plant-body energy as we drill for, and burn, oil and coal, spreading radioactivity and other industrial pollution, and modifying plant life to survive all terrible poisons like Round-Up herbicide, we literally re-shape our own bodily lives.

These changes I call the “dark green.” It’s still “green,” as in ecological vegetative, or we wouldn’t still be eating and breathing, but also encompasses oily-dark, radioactive, pesticide-and-herbicide-laden, invasive, and resistant forms like the thriving plants around Chernobyl, the unconquerable and invasive kudzu vines, and the pigweed plants taking over vast swaths of industrialized agriculture along the Mississippi, especially in Arkansas and the Southeast.

While huge numbers of plants are now endangered or going extinct as part of the current mass extinction event—the sixth on Earth as Anthony Barnosky, Elizabeth Kolbert and others note33Anthony Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?“, in Nature, 471, 2011; Elizabeth Kolbert: The sixth extinction: an unnatural history. New York: Henry Holt, 2014.—plant deaths remain mostly unnoticed in contrast to the more charismatic megafauna. Plants are perishing over extended periods of time due to, for example, bark beetle infestations, deforestation, pollution, and climate change. Yet other plants are thriving, growing, and expanding. Indeed, plants are by no means merely passive forms manipulated and dominated by human actions; instead, plants are particularly powerful in terms of not just impact but also the formation of local ecological systems, and they spread wildly given time. In short, their vegetal alteration of so much of the Earth’s surface has had the most widespread, massive biological impact on Earth (at least until recently, when human beings discovered the power of buried plant corpses in oil and coal). Indeed, industrial agriculture is fueled by petroleum products in the pesticides and herbicides, which is dramatically changing all this vibrant plant-life.

Change is not new to vegetal existence, of course; plants and their predecessors were the exuberant force that re-made the Earth’s surface and atmosphere in their wake, and they continually evolved strange new options to maximize their growth like flowers and fruits. Even before the plants, the pioneering cyanobacteria started to settle on the terrestrial surface about 1.2 billion years in the past, and they were followed by plants and fungi that took over with a fury around 500 million years ago and eventually colonized the earth.44Some of the following discussion is excerpted from my recent essays on the dark green; see, especially, Heather I. Sullivan and James Shinkle, “The Dark Green Ecology in the Early Anthropocene: Goethe’s Plants in Die Metamorphose and Triumph der Empfindsamkeit,” Goethe Yearbook 26 (2019), 143-62; and Heather I. Sullivan, “Petro-Texts, Plants, and People in the Anthropocene: The Dark Green,” in Green Letters 24.2 (2019), 152-167. The vegetal takeover changed everything: the plants transformed the soil, the water systems, and the atmosphere into the ecological systems from which we and our animal kin emerged. While their ancient remains transformed into fossil fuels, plants’ ongoing production of sugars and oxygen remain the obvious yet typically ignored energy basis of our lives. As the editors of The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Viera note:

Plants are perhaps the most fundamental form of life, providing sustenance, and thus enabling the existence of all animals, including us humans. Their evolutionary transition from Paleozoic aquatic beginnings to a vegetative life out of water is undoubtedly one of the farthest-reaching events in the history of the earth. It was the silent yet relentless colonization of terrestrial environments by the earliest land plants that transformed the global landscape and radically altered the geochemical cycles of the planet. This resulted in lowered concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and thus set the scene for the emergence of terrestrial animals about 350 million years ago.55Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Viera, eds. “Introduction,” to The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017: vii-xxxiii; here vii.

Even as plant-energy has changed the world, literally, plants tend to be perceived merely as the silent stage for human culture. Such inattention to the vegetal basis of our biospheric existence relegates the green foundation of our living bodies to mere background. That is, as Michael Marder describes it in Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, “If animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of Western thought, then non-human, non-animal beings, such as plants, have populated the margin of the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity undetectable on the radars of conceptualites.”66Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2013, 2. Plant scientists have similarly claimed that human beings suffer from a kind of shared “plant blindness,” as formulated by James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler and noted in The Language of Plants and a recent discussion of “plant intelligence.”77See pg. viii in The Language of Plants, and Laura Ruggles, “The Minds of Plants,” Aeon December 12, 2017. Accessed January 12, 2018. On “plant blindness,” see: J.H. Wandersee and E. Schussler, “Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness,” Plant Science Bulletin 47 (2001): 2-9. Plant blindness means that human beings perceive the surrounding greenery, however, sparse or lush, as “mere” background, since the potential predators lurking among the trees, like snakes, for example, grab our attention much more than the wending branches and vines that quietly fuel our existence.

Of course, plant blindness to the landscapes along the Mississippi can only occur with practiced overlooking: the green swaths along the river and the miles upon miles of agricultural landscapes mark the riverscape as “dark green”; perhaps we should look again and consider the implications of industrializing human and plant lives, of feeding ourselves plants fueled by petroleum-based products which run-off into the Mississippi and onwards to the sea.