This podcast interview is the fifteenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey
Michael Marder—author, professor, and philosopher of vegetal phenomenology—joins Ellie Kincaid and M. Hamilton in conversation about plant-thinking: thinking about plants, thinking with plants, and even the ways that plants themselves engage in thinking. Taking plants as “not merely passive organisms,” the conversation considers the worlding work of plants, the untame-ability of plant commons, and thinking with plants about solutions to human-made barriers to community.
If, as Marder suggests, human beings are “plants that do not [any longer] recognize our planthood,” and if we take seriously that people and plants live interwoven lives, how might we learn to engage thoughtfully and responsively with the plants around us?
Stream or download our conversation here.
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Interview Highlights
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
M. Hamilton: For listeners who have not read your work, can you explain the idea of “plant-thinking?”
Michael Marder: “Plant-thinking” really began germinating in my philosophical research at the end of the 2000s and beginning of the 2010s, and it culminated in a book bearing that title. The intuition that I had there was simple but rather far-reaching—namely that plants are not merely passive organisms or passive backdrop in the drama of life, but active participants in the unfolding of the world.
So, plant-thinking had this multitude of senses facilitated by the hyphen in the word itself. It meant both human thinking about plants and human attempts to think with plants, to accompany plants themselves in thinking. It also meant the thinking of the plants themselves: how plants are cognitive organisms, how they are relating to their world—very often in ways that we human beings don’t necessarily recognize as cognitive or as thinking.
Even we human beings don’t only think with our brains. Rather, we think with all of our bodies. We think with our affects or emotions; we think with the very sensitivity of our bodies, with the interactions and contacts with everything and everyone in our environment.
Edges invite active engagements, which, in the case of plants, give rise to new possibilities for growth and connection.
Having reached this rather simple idea that follows from the deconstruction of the Cartesian divide between the mind and the body, I realized that plants think more intensely, more completely, maybe even more than human beings. Because they are highly interactive beings who thrive at the edges of their being, and who live most vibrantly, most vigorously at the intersection of different elements or different worlds: the organic and the inorganic, between the earth and the sky, between different biological kingdoms.
Plant thinking in this very vegetal kind of sense really means a way of engaging with the environment that is not automatic, that is not mechanical—that is highly responsive and highly imaginative, highly creative, depending on new situations at hand.
Ellie Kincaid: You had touched on this earlier but I want to bring us back to this question of edges in Plants in Place. You talk about edges as gestures—events happening. I would love to hear you elaborate a little bit more on edges in the context of Edge Effects, which is a platform committed to conversations happening at the edges of genre, discipline, and audience.
MM: “Edges” is really a concept most clearly elaborated by Edward S. Casey, my co-author in Plants in Place. He even has a very big and exciting book on this very subject, titled The World on Edge.
But one very succinct way to think about edges is to think about the places where surfaces—not only spatial but also temporal surfaces, or spatial temporal realities—come to an end. They are where something is about to end and something else is about to begin, because there is no such thing as an absolute end.
To think about the world as a collection of edges is really to think about these partial overlaps—the dynamic jointure of difference and sameness, of the new and the old, of beginnings and ends.
I think plants in particular respond and correspond to the notion of edges because, if anything, they are a conjunction of different edges. They thrive, as I’ve already mentioned, at the edges of their being: on the surface of a leaf, at the root tip that is sentient and probes underground labyrinths, and so on. The very existence of plants is most vibrant where the edges of their beings touch the edges of other kinds of beings, insects and other animals, fungi, and bacteria.
Edges overlap, sometimes imperfectly, incompletely, and that is why edges can be called events or happenings. The meetings and divergences of and at the edges are always eventful. There’s always something happening or taking place there.
So, maybe to a certain extent, Edge Effects as a kind of meeting place can be understood in such a light.
But I would also add that edges are gestures: of movements, of reaching out, of encountering what lies beyond. And in that sense, plants are not inert beings, even though they are wedded to the place where they are. They are rooted, but they are constantly reaching out to the other, to the light above ground, and to the moist darkness below ground.
My intention was to provoke philosophers into seeing their discipline otherwise in another light, trying to learn or relearn thinking from plants, and to see that philosophy is also a growing, decaying, and metamorphosing discipline, as it has been in history.
Edges invite active engagements, which, in the case of plants, give rise to new possibilities for growth and connection. This way of thinking highlights the creativity that is inherent in edges. They are spaces where difference comes together—where difference can be shared and exchanged.
EK: Who do you imagine as the audience for your work, and does that change from project to project?
MM: I would say that it probably changes from project to project. But in a certain sense, my starting point is not the imagined audience, but the matter of thinking: what it is or who it is that I’m thinking with and about. This is the core of my phenomenological method, very loosely understood.
If you ask professional phenomenologists, they might say that there are lots of nuances. But in practical terms, the phenomenological method for me means really trying to get the cues for thinking from the beings about and with whom I’m thinking. That means not projecting some pre-existing ideas or already made assumptions onto them, and then trying to confirm that theory in practice. Instead, it involves a lot of patience, forbearance, and lingering with the matter of thought.
Often, the form of thinking and writing will also change, depending on who or what that matter of thought is, whether it’s plants, fire, dust or passengers. The figure of passengers in my 2022 book dictates different basis of thinking, styles, and engagements. I would imagine that the audience also varies with regard to these variations in the case of Plant-Thinking.
When I wrote the book, I wanted it to speak to philosophers in particular, in order to reimagine the very discipline of philosophy, in which plants are sidelined. They are not interesting, or perhaps only interesting insofar as you think about a very traditional kind of natural philosophy.
My intention was to provoke philosophers into seeing their discipline in another light, trying to learn or relearn thinking from plants, and to see that philosophy is also a growing, decaying, and metamorphosing discipline, as it has been in history. I definitely kept scholars in the environmental humanities in mind as well, because we are dealing with the same life world with the same living beings in it, but maybe with slightly different disciplinary sensitivities.
Featured image: Green grape vine stem with tendrils and leaves. Photo by Marija Zaric, 2026.
Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz. His most recent books include The Phoenix Complex (MIT Press, 2023), Time Is a Plant (Brill, 2023), with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place (Columbia University Press, 2024), Eco-Freud (Bloomsbury, 2025), Metamorphoses Reimagined (Columbia University Press, 2025), with Anais Tondeur, Fiori di fuoco (L’Artiere, 2025), and Of Joints and Other Articulations (Northwestern University Press, 2026). Website. Contact.
M. Hamilton is a researcher and artist, a dissertator in the department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a 2025 graduate of the Studio Art M.F.A. program at UW-Madison in the performance and time-based media area. Hamilton earned their B.A. in Art History with minors in Sculpture and Intermedia and Appalachian Studies from Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky in 2021. Hamilton’s research focuses on trans methods in ecological art practices, on land-relations in capitalist ruins. They are a co-founder of the Borghesi-Mellon workshops project Trans NatureCultures. Contact.
Ellie Kincaid is a Ph.D. student in English Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their research in queer and trans ecologies considers the relationships between queer/trans people and the outdoors, especially in the context of endurance efforts and the so-called wilderness. Ellie is a founding member of the Trans Natureculture Collective, an editor at Edge Effects, and holds a B.A. from Davidson College and an M.A. from UW-Madison. Contact.
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