Gardening as Political Practice

“Simply planting more vegetation because it is green doesn’t necessarily contribute to cleaner air,” said Jennifer Gabrys during her lecture Vegetal Sensors: How to Construct Air Quality Gardens at UVA. Showing a series of air-quality gardens planted in the center of London, Gabrys asked her audience to reconsider the relationship between humans and our environments. These gardens—or “vegetal sensors—have an “iterative relationship” with digital sensing networks set up by citizen scientists or local authorities, producing data to better understand and combat air pollution. Working to create “less hazardous, more collaborative environments,” her project Citizen Sense has created a Phyto-Sensor Toolkit to “suggest feasible citizen reactions within intractable political processes.” In walking through the how-to-guide and her hope for its utility, Gabrys remarked that “cultivation is often an expression of power,” and therefore, “gardening becomes a political practice to cultivate more breathable worlds along with more-than-humans.”