Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
Arboreal Ruderality: Vegetal Invasion and Ecological Osmosis as Told by Tree of Heaven
Authored By — Sydney Kale

Abstract

Invasive plants are becoming more invasive, more prominent in the spaces humans inhabit, and more agentic. The dominant, antagonistic discourses surrounding invasive plants and their ecologies are not working if the goal is to achieve balanced and functional relationships. The tendency to ascribe human morality to invasive behaviors overshadows the amoralistic ecological origins of a plant's presence in an ecosystem. This article attempts to represent vegetal invasives on their own terms within a narrative that favors relationality over morality, as storied by Tree of Heaven. Lively ethnography, a methodology of engaging with multispecies and more-than-human storytelling as meaningful and world-making, opens new conceptual ground for understanding and responding to invasive ecologies. This article evokes phenomenological and posthumanist thinkers such as Jane Bennett, Thom van Dooren, Anna Tsing, and Jochen Bockemühl to reconceptualize invasive ecologies. Phenomenological and narrative research, incorporating first-person, subjective knowledge of Tree of Heaven, employs multispecies storytelling to decenter the human within invasive ecology discourse. The concepts of the ruderal plant - a plant with the capacity to inhabit disturbed and largely unsuitable landscapes, such as those present during early-stage ecological succession - and ecological osmosis presented in this paper moves discussions of invasive species away from blind contempt to better understand the whys of their emergence. The narrative that arises is one of fluidity, examining the parallels between water and ruderal governances and ecological movements. Tree of Heaven as a case study demonstrates how engaging with multispecies storytelling as a mode of listening can alter how we know invasive plants and how we talk about and with them.

Keywords

Ruderal, Invasives, Ailanthus, Tree of heaven, More-thanhuman, Phenomenology, Lively ethnography

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