Seeing Green Seeing Green
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Anna Wehrwein, Interior (orquídeas y naranjas) 2023, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 60 in. Courtesy of Dreamsong, Minneapolis
Nature

Seeing Green

This article is published in collaboration with Lit Hub*
Klaudia Khan
Reading
time 11 minutes

Human eyes like to gaze into other eyes—so it is easy for us to overlook creatures that do not have eyes. Even when these creatures are countless, even when they’re all around, and even when they are invaluable to human life—if they are not similar to us, we are blind to them.

*Lit Hub is the go-to site for the literary internet. Visit us at lithub.com

Olivia Vandergriff, a protagonist of Richard Powers’s The Overstory, spends a semester living in a house in front of which grows a tree—“a living fossil, one of the oldest, strangest things that ever learned the secret of wood.” Yet Olivia doesn’t even know that the tree is there. Though she passes by it every day, she fails to notice its existence. The tree—unnamed in the novel—is the gingko biloba. And Olivia’s condition—undiagnosed in the chapter—is plant awareness disparity. Klaudia Kahn looks into the effects of plant awareness disparity in this essay, also published in Literary Hub.

The ginkgo biloba, a sole survivor of an ancient group of trees that used to cover the earth, is now an endangered species. Meanwhile, plant awareness disparity (PAD)—which was previously known as plant blindness but renamed to avoid ableism—contributes largely to the widespread indifference to the threat of botanical extinction and a limited interest in plant conservation. PAD on a global scale is dangerous, but on a personal level, it is detrimental as it impoverishes our experience of the surrounding world. So much beauty, so much drama, so much wisdom we miss out on if we fail to connect with plants.  

The Art of Seeing Green 

If by now I’ve got you looking out of the window to check

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The road from Austria to Italy. Photo by Aleksei Morozov
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Migrating at the End of the World

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In an interview with Natalia Domagała, environmental journalist and author of Nomad Century, Gaia Vince, discusses how climate change will cause widespread migration, what steps we can take to adapt to fast-changing populations, and how migration can actually prove beneficial for both immigrants and the countries that take them in. 

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