Hi folks,After re-reading through the blog, I'm feeling very excited about all of the threads that we are trying to weave together. Also, glad to see so much interest in the potential for creative 'otherwise' people/plant interactions. I'm happy to report that the PLSS project will be given a larger audience at Concordia's Undergraduate Research Day on April 9th. As the only philosophy student at the event, I'll be presenting a short paper addressing some of the philosophical questions that have come up in our group explorations. Especially interesting to me in this paper will be the attempt at a holistic bioethics, instead of the persistent duality of human/culture - nonhuman/natural. In response to Xin Wei's postscript on March 13th: Yes, I think Spinoza would consider these arbitrary boundaries to be unnecessarily limiting to our understanding of nature. Spinoza's recommendation is that before we ask the ethical question, we should ask in the metaphysical question: Inevitably, "what is the plant?" will have bearing on "how should we interact with the plant?" I suspect that our answer will not be merely material/biological, but historical, social, technological. This is where the speculative nature of the project comes in handy; it opens up a 'play ground' for us to embody different relationships with plants. Rather than separating 'the wild' from 'society', and merely looking at plants as objects of study - as conventional science would - we are proposing to live with the plants, and perhaps to subject ourselves to scrutiny too. Below is a list of some relevant texts that may interest you. I've provided suggestions for particularly useful/interesting excerpts, in case you don't have time to read the full texts. I'll be referring to many of these in my presentation. A few were mentioned before by Xin Wei and others - If you have further suggestions, please pass the titles or links along! "The Ethics" by Baruch Spinoza - Pt.I, Appx."The Three Ecologies" by Félix Guattari Introduction, 70-80, 140-141 "Ecology of Wisdom" by Arne Naess, ed. by Alan Drengson, Bill Devall - 140-141 "A Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway"Bioethics in the age of new media" by Joanna Zylinska - Preface, 22-34, 49-53 Take care. LBC