Anthropology 212 - On Botanophilia

There are many ways to love plants. Home gardeners design with them, healers study their properties to treat patients with them, field botanists learn ornate vocabularies to identify them, poets sound their symbolic depths. What do these different forms of botanophilia say about the human condition and its interspecies intimacies? Living amidst our planet’s sixth mass extinction event, more botanophilia is needed and needed yesterday. Putting love, joy and community forward as urgent political affairs, this course asks how students might go about cultivating plant love for earthly survival.