Messages from the Underground: Interspecies Memory in Times of the Climate Change

Abstract

In times of climate change, the citizens of Málaga (Spain) must consider how to respond to both the longer droughts and the torrential rain falls that pose serious threats to local agriculture. In this context, the non-profit group Ecoherencia researches and teaches how to use plants that are viewed by society as weeds, but are equipped with various nutritional, medicinal, and agroecological properties —they call them Multifunctional Plants (PlaMs)—. The ease with which these plants grow is due to what Ecoherencia calls “soil memory.” These weeds may have constituted crops long ago, and their seeds remained and multiplied over the centuries. This paper departs from Ecoherencia’s vision to propose and examine the concept of interspecies memories, phenomena of centuries-long interactions between species and ecosystems that generate structures of meaning, flesh, and matter. It is not just human memory of the environment or the biological memory of the species revealed by processes of adaptation, but rather a memory of co-evolution. In particular, the co-evolution of societies and their crops has shaped both cultural and technological development that are materialized in seeds and the seeded soil. Seeds, and also weeds’ seeds, are repositories of information about life and agricultural technologies from the past, when the human community faced food shortages. This information may be necessary to solve problems arising in the future of climate change.