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

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
From Background to Foreground: Elevating Moss in Critical Plant Studies and Conservation Ethics
Authored By — Andrea Natan Feltrin

Abstract

Moss is commonplace, yet it is seldom treated as an object of sustained ethical attention, and I take that ordinary disappearance as a problem for conservation ethics: value still tends to follow size, mobility, charisma, visible expression, economic use, or forms of agency that can be compared readily with human and other animal capacities, while moss matters ecologically but falls outside this grammar of attention. I therefore use mossy entanglement to describe its surface-bound and moisture-dependent participation in shared worlds, for the agency at issue is infrastructural: through attachment, water retention, substrate change, carbon dynamics, microhabitat formation, and refuge making, moss alters the conditions under which other beings persist, and neither intention nor sovereign action is required for those effects to matter. The argument moves among bryophyte biology, philosophical analysis, and the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve in Chile: biological research supplies the material basis of mossy entanglement, while critical plant studies, posthumanism, and multispecies justice establish the conceptual dispute, and Cape Horn places that dispute under practical pressure because bryophytes there have changed biodiversity assessment, environmental education, ecotourism, and biocultural conservation. The case hence supports an ethics of habitability concerned not only with organisms, but also with substrates, microclimates, ecological relations, and the small shelters through which a shared world remains liveable.

Keywords

Moss; Bryophytes; Critical Plant Studies; Conservation Ethics; Biocultural Conservation; Plant Agency; Multispecies Justice; Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve.

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