The hard subsoil in the Baltic Sea gradually disappeared, and with it, places where one could anchor to the ground.
However, from a coevolutionary perspective, the human species not only domesticated but was also domesticated. Following Stacy Alaimo’s call for increasing the visibility of “nonhuman agencies and trajectories” in Anthropocene narratives, I examine the Anthropocene past through the lens of a shared plant-human history, co-becoming, and sympoiesis. Following Ursula K. Heise’s observation that our human understanding of other beings and our relationship to them “becomes part of the stories that human societies tell about themselves: stories of origins, development, identity, and possible futures,” and Donna Haraway’s call for creating new stories about the interwoven histories and complex relationships of earthly beings (“It matters what stories shape worlds, what worlds tell stories”), I discuss the human desire for sunlight and the plant desire for mobility, satisfied only through multispecies and multifactorial relationships and intertwinings. The process of coevolution between plants and humans—the transformation of bodies and the satisfaction of desires—is fueled by the needs of biochemical products of photosynthesis on the human side and mobility that improves fertility on the plant side.
(Magdalena Zamorska, Bylica pospolita, “synfitonizm” i ekspozycje ludzko-roślinnych historii, Kultura Współczesna, 1(113/2021)
