Call for abstracts: Cultivation Beyond Extraction edited volume

Ours is an age of putting plants to work. Cities maintain urban forests to counteract heat island effect brought on by discriminatory planning practices. States “restore” marsh grasses and cypress trees in massive Nature-Based Infrastructure projects to slow coastal land loss and mitigate flood risk. Wetlands replace dryland as mitigation measures mandated by federal policy to “replace lost function and values.” Farmers tend engineered rice cultivars adapted to saline soils to sustain global commodity markets while green capital increasingly looks to plants as agents of carbon sequestration. In each of these cases, plants are expected to perform at unprecedented scales and urgencies: purifying air, soaking up stormwater, attenuating storm surge, and providing human nourishment. This weak form of environmentalism ultimately perpetuates the transformation of living material into inert product—plant agency reduced to exchange value.  

This edited volume examines plants as active agents entangled within systems of power, exploitation, and reparative care practices. Rather than viewing plants as passive elements or infrastructural actors, Cultivation Beyond Extraction frames plants as “live matter,” collaborators or co-conspirators in complex socio-ecological relationships. The book explores how cultivation—intentional, sustained practices of care for developing living organisms and geological materials—offers regeneration, not exhaustion, in landscapes with extractive legacies. Grounded in a reading of Gulf South landscapes, this volume welcomes contributions that engage this place and others whose histories of cultivation are inseparable from extraction—whether through plantation agriculture, settler colonialism, resource extraction, or industrial monoculture.  

As landscape designers and allied disciplines increasingly look to plants as laborers and critical collaborators in landscapes of repair, care, and climate adaptation, we ask: 

To what degree do various modes of cultivation perpetuate or contest ongoing legacies of land- and labor-based extraction?

What is gained and what is lost by putting plants to work? What are the externalities of green capitalist production?

What historic alliances, coalitions, and co-conspiracies exist between plants and people living in the shadow of post-plantation extractive economies?

Cultivation Beyond Extraction welcomes abstracts from designers and scholars of the built environment, environmental history, and the environmental humanities, particularly those whose research is based in global landscapes imbricated in ongoing cycles of industrial extraction. We seek work that interrogates cultivation as both a mechanism of extraction and a potential mode of repair. Submissions may examine the drivers of and responses to topics such as politics of food systems, forestry, ethnobotany and traditional ecological knowledge, plant production, ecological restoration, ecological succession and disturbance, nature-based infrastructure, soil and agroecology, and carbon economies.  

The full call for abstracts can be found here.

Contributions will take one of two forms:
Scholarly writing in the form of 4,000-to 6,000-word chapters with supplementary images and figures. Visual essays in the form of 1,500 to 2,000 words with 6–12 original images.

Please submit the following materials to cultivationbeyondextraction@gmail.com by end of day February 1. Questions are also welcome at this address.

Abstract (500 words) Author Bio For submissions of scholarly writing: one representative image For submissions of visual essays: 3–5 representative images.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to participate in an online workshop scheduled for spring 2026 to support collective book development and will receive an honorarium for their participation in the volume.