Rethinking Plant Power: Bioenergy, Vegetal Labor, and Postproductivist Energy Cultures

Bioenergy derived from plants is typically defined by its capacity to act as a sustainable substitute for fossil fuels. Yet plants might also help us to rethink the very purpose of energy in the Anthropocene, with implications for prevailing attitudes toward growth, productivity, waste, and even pleasure. Drawing on resource and vegetal geographies, the energy humanities, and posthumanist accounts of capitalist production, this provocation begins by highlighting the shared reliance of bioenergy and fossil energy on the work that plants do while photosynthesizing and growing. Recognizing bioenergy as dependent on vegetal labor, rather than as a free gift of nature, serves to foreground the inherent contestability of plants’ use as energy feedstocks. By attending closely to the temporalities and rhythms of vegetal labor, the article argues that we might work with plants not just to restructure incumbent energy systems but also to reshape underlying energy cultures. A closer attunement to plants, the article concludes, could enable society to imagine and embrace new habits of energy consumption. Such habits would reify not continuous expansion or growth, nor even sustainability, but rather the patient anticipation of more transient episodes of deliberate squander and excess.