Reading for Sustainability through Botanical Aesthetics: Embodied Perceptions of Perth's Flora, 1829 to 1929

Abstract

"There's a shrubby plant in blossom just now that lends a great deal of beauty and variety to our bush undergrowth. It is especially beautiful when long shafts of morning sunshine filter through trees and bushes, diversifying the monotony of flower-gemmed green with charming light and shade effects of golden sunlight and purple shadow patches." In reference to Blueboy ('Stirlingia latifolia') (The West Australian, 1924, September 19, p. 6). Sustainability - indeed a contested term (Thompson, 2010, pp. 196-214) - can be defined as the meaningful and dynamic long-tern equilibrium between environmental and social, human and non-human, sentient and non-sentient "things" co-existing in a physical space. Plant life and human relationships to the botanical world are crucial dimensions of sustainable communities and ethical socio-ecological practices. However, the role of plant life in the theory and practice of sustainability is problematically limited to the utilitarian discourses of sustainable agriculture (Tuteja, 2012), food security (Wright, 2012), organic farming (Burnett, 2008), urban gardening (Reid, 2012), sustainable forestry management (Kitayama, 2012), and ideological debates over invasive plants and their impacts on ecosystems and indigenous species (Coates, 2006). Such discourses exemplify a profoundly limited anthropocentric perspective on the botanical world that largely disregards its od1er values, 111ost importantly a plant's intrinsic right-to-exist (Hall, 2009) and the metaphysics of the plant world (Marder, 2013).