CULTIVATION
BEYOND
EXTRACTION
PUTTING PLANTS TO WORK
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS | SUBMIT BY FEBRUARY 1
- Liz Camuti, PLA, ASLA
- Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture
Leah Kahler, ASLA
Research Assistant Professor
Questions? We want to hear from you!
cultivationbeyondextraction@gmail.com
Ours is an age of putting plants to work. Cities maintain urban forests to counteract heat island effect brought on by discriminatory planning practices. States “restore” marsh grasses and cypress trees in massive Nature-Based Infrastructure projects to slow coastal land loss and mitigate flood risk. Wetlands replace dryland via mitigation measures mandated by federal policy to “replace lost function and values.”1 Farmers tend engineered rice cultivars adapted to saline soils to sustain global commodity markets while green capital increasingly looks to plants as agents of carbon sequestration. In each of these cases, plants are expected to perform at unprecedented scales and urgencies: purifying air, soaking up stormwater, attenuating storm surge, and providing human nourishment. This weak form of environmentalism2 ultimately perpetuates the transformation of living material into inert products—plant agency reduced to exchange value.
But here in the Gulf South, landscapes exist in the shadow of ongoing cycles of extraction and multi-faceted resistance. These persistent cycles, grounded in legacies of plantation agriculture, rely on “ecological simplifications, the discipline of plants, and the disciplines of humans to work on those.”3 Plantations tie the control of landscapes to processes of racialized dispossession. At the same time, practices of resistance, such as marronage and the covert cultivation of food and medicine, prefigured place-based freedoms founded on ethics of reciprocity. Thinking with these legacies of resistance, this volume seeks to document and critically assess cultivation practices and frameworks at all scales that emerge from— and reach towards repair of— extractive political ecologies. We collectively ask: When humans put plants to work, what work are they doing? For whom? And at what cost?
This edited volume examines plants as active agents entangled within systems of power, exploitation, and reparative care practices.4 Rather than viewing plants as passive elements or infrastructural actors, Cultivation Beyond Extraction frames plants as “live matter,”5 collaborators or co-conspirators in complex socio-ecological relationships. The book explores how cultivation—intentional, sustained practices of care for developing living organisms and geological materials—offers regeneration, not exhaustion, in landscapes with extractive legacies. Grounded in a reading of Gulf South landscapes, this volume welcomes contributions that engage this place and others whose histories of cultivation are inseparable from extraction—whether through plantation agriculture, settler colonialism, resource extraction, or industrial monoculture.
As landscape designers and allied disciplines increasingly look to plants as laborers and critical collaborators in landscapes of repair, care, and climate adaptation, we ask:
Cultivation Beyond Extraction welcomes abstracts from designers and scholars of the built environment, environmental history, and the environmental humanities, particularly those whose research is based in global landscapes imbricated in ongoing cycles of industrial extraction. We seek work that interrogates cultivation as both a mechanism of extraction and a potential mode of repair. Submissions may examine the drivers of and responses to topics such as politics of food systems, forestry, ethnobotany and traditional ecological knowledge, plant production, ecological restoration, ecological succession and disturbance, nature-based infrastructure, soil and agroecology, and carbon economies.
Contributions will take one of two forms:
Scholarly writing in the form of 4,000-to 6,000-word chapters with supplementary images and figures
Visual essays in the form of 1,500 to 2,000 words with 6-12 original images
Please submit the following materials to cultivationbeyondextraction@gmail.com by end of day February 1. Questions are also welcome at this address.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to participate in an online workshop scheduled for Spring 2026 to support collective book development and will receive an honorarium for their participation in the volume.
Cultivation Beyond Extraction welcomes abstracts from designers and scholars of the built environment, environmental history, and the environmental humanities, particularly those whose research is based in global landscapes imbricated in ongoing cycles of industrial extraction. We seek work that interrogates cultivation as both a mechanism of extraction and a potential mode of repair. Submissions may examine the drivers of and responses to topics such as politics of food systems, forestry, ethnobotany and traditional ecological knowledge, plant production, ecological restoration, ecological succession and disturbance, nature-based infrastructure, soil and agroecology, and carbon economies.
Contributions will take one of two forms:
Scholarly writing in the form of 4,000-to 6,000-word chapters with supplementary images and figures
Visual essays in the form of 1,500 to 2,000 words with 6-12 original images
Please submit the following materials to cultivationbeyondextraction@gmail.com by end of day February 1. Questions are also welcome at this address.
- Abstract (500 words)
- Author Bio
- For submissions of scholarly writing: 1 representative image
- For submissions of visual essays: 3-5 representative images
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to participate in an online workshop scheduled for Spring 2026 to support collective book development and will receive an honorarium for their participation in the volume.
Graphic by Post Form
1 Environmental Protection Authority, Memorandum of Agreement Between the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Army Concerning the Determination of Mitigation Under the Clean Water Act Section 404(b)(1) Guidelines (1990).
2 Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Beyond ‘Sustaining Beauty’: Musings on a Manifesto,” in Values in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design: Finding Center in Theory and Practice (Louisiana State University Press, 2015).
3 Gregg Mitman et al., “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing,” Edge Effects, June 18, 2019.
4 Sara Jacobs and Taryn Wiens, “Landscapes of Care: Politics, Practices, and Possibilities,” Landscape Research 49, no. 3 (2024): 428–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2023.2266394.
5 Rosetta S. Elkin, “Live Matter: Towards a Theory of Plant Life,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 12, no. 2 (2017): 60–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2017.1361087.
1 Environmental Protection Authority, Memorandum of Agreement Between the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Army Concerning the Determination of Mitigation Under the Clean Water Act Section 404(b)(1) Guidelines (1990).
2 Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Beyond ‘Sustaining Beauty’: Musings on a Manifesto,” in Values in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design: Finding Center in Theory and Practice (Louisiana State University Press, 2015).
3 Gregg Mitman et al., “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing,” Edge Effects, June 18, 2019.
4 Sara Jacobs and Taryn Wiens, “Landscapes of Care: Politics, Practices, and Possibilities,” Landscape Research 49, no. 3 (2024): 428–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2023.2266394.
5 Rosetta S. Elkin, “Live Matter: Towards a Theory of Plant Life,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 12, no. 2 (2017): 60–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2017.1361087.