On the Death of Plants: John Kinsella's Radical Pastoralism and the Weight of Botanical Melancholia

Abstract

Through the poetry of Australian writer and activist John Kinsella (b. 1963), this article emphasizes the actual, embodied-rather than metaphorical-dimensions of the death of plants vis-à-vis the pressing international context of accelerating botanical diversity loss (Hopper) and the anthropogenic disruption of floristic communities globally (Pandolfi and Lovelock). On many levels-scientific, ecological, social, metaphysical-a fuller appreciation of plant life necessitates an understanding of their decline, decay, and demise. Toward a more nuanced appreciation of plant lives, the discussion draws a distinction-but aims to avoid a binary-between biogenic and anthropogenic instances of plant-death. Considering the correlation between vegetal existence, human well-being, and our co-constituted lives and deaths, I assert that a more encompassing and ecoculturally transformative outlook on plants involves not only an acknowledgement of their qualities of percipient aliveness but also a recognition of their senescence and perishing. Kinsella's poetry reflects such themes. His 'botanical melancholia' derives from the gravely fragmented locus of his ecological consciousness: the ancient, native plantscape existing as small, disconnected remnants within the agro-pastoral wheatbelt district of Western Australia. Consequently, rather than a marginal occurrence in his work, plant-death is essential to Kinsella's enunciation of a form of Australian radical pastoralism. His poetry provides a counterforce to the idyllic textualization of botanical nature as existing in an unimpacted Arcadian state of harmony, balance, and equitable exchange with the built environment (Kinsella, Disclosed 1-46).