“I love Hogweed,” I said to a friend a few days ago. But can people love whole species? A species is a category and, according to some, a humanly constructed one. Such a term creates a boundary of inclusion and exclusion, pulling us away from the particularity of this flower in this moment. What could it possibly mean to love a cold and divisive lattice of generality? On the face of it, it seems like a misdirected emotion— possibly a reflection of my own human-centeredness, my own failure to see the individuality of the plants themselves. Could this be this superficial speciesm masquerading as love?
That I am endeared to Tilia trees on the basis of having one in the back garden of my childhood home is a betrayal of the depth of experience I actually had with that being. Doesn’t it seem unlikely that people would love all other humans through having had a deep connection with a specific one? And if that did happen, it would seem somehow wrong— dehumanising. You can only love a category to the extent to which you fail to see the differences of its members. And yet, my feeling of attraction to, and desire to care for certain plant species is greater than it is for others.
And yet, and yet. A species also feels to me like something more than ‘just’ a category. It is also a recurrence. The growth and development of Hogweed is bound with the passing seasons. The pattern is real and very visceral: it is a yearly return of bright green hands splayed across the bare spring soil, frizzy white wrinkled leaflets skyward bound, a rapid acceleration towards the sun, the flower’s rupture from its papery sheath, the explosion of symmetry in pink or white, the spicy grapefruit and cardamom scented seeds left behind to dangle from dying stalks as the light and warmth recede. It is a return of associations with other plants, animals and with my memories too. Perhaps long-lived trees— those veterans seeped with centuries of idiosyncrasy— do not need to reproduce their pattern to keep these realities alive. We can simply wander back to the same tree again and again. But the return to annuals, and the way they stitch themselves into the memory of people and places, requires, it seems, the transcendence of the individual organism. After all, the bumblebee yearns for the Bramble blossom every July.
Each spring, my backyard Tilia spreads out new shoots and the tree’s form shifts, from the canopy all the way down to its epigenetics. Some view a deciduous tree as a decentralised fury of annuals tied to a woody structure for ease of water and nutrient. So, perhaps we never return to the ‘same’ tree either. The idea of loving an individual and distrusting the love of a recurring pattern is perhaps not anthropocentric speciesism at all, then, but rather the conceit of those with central nervous systems! Perhaps. But I am not sure even this is quite right. Plants teach us about the reality of types, a kind of platonism that wraps its lessons back even into the human: is it not true that when we love another person, in some sense we love the recurrence of their pattern, too? Is this pattern not itself the collaborative recreation of countless beings and processes? Every cell is recycled, every memory and habit restored. Differences and repetitions, themes, and variations, through and through.
It would be absurd to say that I only love my wife in a series present moments. I also love her overall person, even though this ‘her’ is not instantiated in any specific moment. I only experience her in individual moments, but those moments are part of an overall pattern which includes all the moments I have and will experience with her. I have never met that overall person, because I cannot experience all these moments simultaneously. But I love that person anyway. Loving a species is extended across instances in space, loving an individual person is extended across instances in time. All individuals are types, all categories are unique patterns of becoming.
And love happens in the interplay between all these contradictions.