Storying Plant Communication - (Environmental Communication and Nature: Conflict and Ecocult) by Mariko Oyama Thomas & Melissa M Parks (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book explores the narrative accounts of southwestern herbalists, healers, teachers, and farmers

Book Synopsis

Embedded in vibrant and richly textured New Mexican landscapes, Storying Plant Communication: More-than-Human Relationships in New Mexicoexplores the narrative accounts of southwestern herbalists, healers, teachers, farmers, and other plant enthusiasts who maintain deep and reciprocal relationships with the local flora.

Reflecting on plant relationships, place-making practices, and a breadth of other topics, the storytellers describe their transformative perspectives that frame plants as intelligent, relational, and communicative. The Land of Enchantment is steeped in stories, and narratives captured here show how attitudes and practices related to plants can trouble dominant, often harmful beliefs of human exceptionalism, and gesture toward more ecocentric pathways in an era of environmental uncertainty. Employing auto/ethnographic methods that put storytellers' experiences in conversation with a range of interdisciplinary literature, Thomas and Parks highlight ways in which plant studies offer a rich and timely direction for communication research. Ultimately, the co-authors argue that story-based methodologies offer a fertile starting point for scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences to venture into the realm of plant communication.

Review Quotes

Storying Plant Communication makes an important contribution to the growing environmental and internatural communication literature. Through engaging prose woven together with multidisciplinary literatures, the authors address the critical question of how we know, understand, and communicate our relationship with plants. That the Land of Enchantment provides the context for their investigation makes the story even more compelling.
Emily Plec, Professor of Communication, Western Oregon University, USA

This beautifully written, transportive book breaks the spell of plant blindness and the overarching spell of anthropocentrism from which it came. The work gives readers insights and offerings into ways of immersively and relationally being in the world - through the eloquence of the authors themselves, the interweaving of fascinating research across disciplines, the stories shared by those who continue to care for, and be cared for by, plants as kin, and guided reflection on how we perceive, communicate with, and reunite with the green world.
Tema Milstein, Professor of Environment and Society, University of New South Wales, Australia

What is a story but a long thread, almost invisible, weaving the wonders of our daily delight that emerges by disrupting the values, beliefs, and actions that constrain the performances of convivial ecocultural identities. Within the pluriverse of species, the stories in Storying Plant Communication are the poetic vibrations that register the nurturing spaces of co-creation between plants and us. The authors' voices are woven in colors and textures, like a quilt. They have inspired me to find my own story.
José Castro-Sotomayor, Associate Professor of Environmental Communication, California State University Channel Islands, USA, and Co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) and Intersectional Activism in Environmental Communication (2025)

About the Author

Mariko Oyama Thomas is Interdisciplinary Scholar and Teaching Faculty at Skagit Valley College, USA. She holds a PhD in Environmental Communication from the University of New Mexico and is also Co-Founder of the arts and ecology collaborative Submergence Collective.

Melissa M. Parks is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah and Associate Director of the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities Education in Centennial Valley, Montana, USA.