#planthropocenes

[kokemoha]

Cooperative crops

'Unselfish' genes that make plants cooperate could boost crop yields

A simple breeding experiment can identify genetic variants that make plants grow well without impeding their neighbours, improving overall yields

by Kismat Shrees

New Scientist | 29 November 2022

[anthropocenes]

Weight of the Earth

How many trees are there on Earth? Mission to measure planet's biomass

Trees are our biggest ally against climate change - but we've never been sure how big. New space-based technology is revealing their potential for the first time.

by Christine Swanson

New Scientist | 2 October 2019

[kokemoha]

Farming futures

Growing crops in the city, without soil or natural light.

The Vertical Farm by Ian Frazier | The New Yorker, January 2017

Growing crops in the city, without soil or natural light…Plants create themselves partly out of thin air. Salad greens are about ninety per cent water. About half of the remaining ten per cent is carbon. If AeroFarms’ vertical farm grows a thousand tons of greens a year, about fifty tons of that will be carbon taken from the air.

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[anthropocenes]

Dreaming Technoscience

from The Economization of Life by Michelle Murphy (Duke UP, 2017)

In 1905 Begum Roquiah Shekhawat Hossein, a celebrated advocate for women’s education and equality and an elite Muslim woman from what is now called Bangladesh, wrote a story about dreaming technoscience that is now considered the first feminist science fiction story. At sixteen, Begum Roquiah married the deputy magistrate of Bhagalpur, who would die young. With the money left to her, she opened the first school for Mus- lim girls in India, which still exists today. In the portrait gallery of Dhaka’s Pink Palace Museum, Begum Roquiah is the single female face looking out from the gallery walls.

Called Sultana’s Dream, Begum Roquiah’s story begins with the narrator falling asleep as she is “thinking lazily of the condition of Indian woman- hood.” She then wakes into a dream. Alert within her imaginary, she finds herself walking unveiled in daylight in another world where the gendered structures of elite South Asian Muslim society are reversed: men are now confined to their chambers and women have become the scientists and public subjects. In this other world, “lady” scientists have turned away from building military machines and war. Instead they have invented ways to harness rain from the sky and share energy from the sun. One school of women scientists had “invented a wonderful balloon, to which they attached a num- ber of pipes. By means of this captive balloon which they managed to keep afloat above the cloud-land, they could draw as much water from the atmosphere as they pleased.” Another university had “invented an instrument by which they could collect as much sun-heat as they wanted. And they kept the heat stored up to be distributed among others as required.” The most distinguished science of this other world was botany. The roads were formed of a “soft carpet” of moss and flowers, and the city itself was a marvelous garden. Sewing too was a celebrated art, and beauty highly valued. In the garden, “every creeper, every tomato plant was itself an ornament,” such that the products of science were as much aesthetic as functional. In this other world, science had a “sentimental” quality, not divorced from feeling or beauty. In this world, women were all educated and married late, while men minded the children. Kinship was expanded such that “a distant cousin is as sacred as a brother.” It offered an alternative vision of how to live with plants and ecologies as part of the fabric of society. Revisioning gender, kinship, and science, Sultana’s Dream conjures a feminist techno- science through a counterfactual world, a world turned upside down.

Awake to its own phantasy, the story calls on dispossessed women to dream with technoscience at a moment when South Asian Muslim women had begun agitating for access to formal education. Dreaming otherwise, the story draws on a tradition of Western utopian fiction and the revelatory force of dreams in Bengali culture to generate medical innovation and moral demands. While the inversion of men’s and women’s worlds reverses rather than unravels gendered norms, the text suggests that dreaming is a domain where the possibilities of technoscience are contested. The inauguration of feminist science fiction as a South Asian Muslim feminist project disrupts the cartographies of knowledge-making that posits South Asian women as the objects to be counted rather than the subjects who dream with technoscience. Through its figures of gardens, clouds, and pleasure, Sultana’s Dream suggests the possibility that technoscience might do life and phantasy differently.

The premise of Sultana’s Dream has something to teach about the work of phantasmagrams. What would it mean to be awake, rather than asleep, to the dream? There is a politics in the invitation to become alert to the phan- tasy. How does one awaken to the phantasma of economy and population?