News Published: 2 July 2024

“Extinction today, understood as the accelerated end to long evolutionary processes, throws into relief the unsettling and clashing temporalities of our time: the slow violence of pollution and global warming alongside the great acceleration of carbon emissions and the erosion of biodiversity.

We are witnessing the unprecedented collision of deep time—the time of species evolution and the formation of complex mutualistic and other relationships—with the historical time of human-induced climate change and habitat destruction.

Plants are fundamental to our sense of place, and their gradual disappearance not only disrupts the ecosystems on which we rely for survival, but also deeply ingrained forms of spiritual and communal belonging that we mourn.

Indigenous communities have borne such losses for centuries; now they are becoming, albeit still unequally and unjustly distributed, a global phenomenon. Local extirpation may be even more painful than extinction; the latter a planetary category that we may hold at arm’s length; the former an intimate assault on our habits and sense of belonging.”

—Yota Batsaki and Peter Crane in their essay “Collections Extinction Abundance,” explaining the urgency in the current special issue of Arnoldia on plant extinction.

The product of almost two years of conversation among scientists, artists, humanists, and horticulturists, the issue begins with a simple question: why aren’t we talking about plant extinction? As Yota and Peter explain, the varied responses to this question follow the ways of storytelling, cultivation, biology, and artistry; they also well up from desire, memory, and hope.