Meta Post: The Problems with Perspective

This week's blog topic was over Michael Pollan's Ted Talk, discussing our affinity toward looking at the world through a human dominant perspective. Understandably, we believe that we are the captains of this ship: we have the most power over the earth through consciousness, our ability to think critically, etc. Though like Pollan, we seem to recognize that this is a problematic perspective: what we don't realize is that humans are just one part of a complicated ecological system, and our ability to manipulate and control our environment is not an exclusively human thing to do. Plants and other things without our understanding of consciousness manipulate humans just as much as we perceive we're manipulating them.

So the next natural step for us as nature writers is to understand how that plays into the way we write literature. The main line of inquiry people seem to be having is whether or not we should write from a plant's perspective, and if so, what that might look like. While we want to move away from the human dominant perspective, is writing from a nonhuman perspective actually helping or hurting the cause? Are we still humanizing plants, simply because we are humans and will always have a human perspective? How will literature evolve if we start writing from more nonhuman perspectives? How can it be done successfully?