Uncommon Fruits

“Traditional harvesters recognize the individuality of each tree as a person, a nonhuman forest person. Trees are not taken, but requested. Respectfully, the cutter explains his purpose and the tree is asked permission for harvest. Sometimes the answer is no. It might be a cue in the surroundings—a vireo nest in the branches, or the bark’s adamant resistance to the questioning knife—that suggests a tree is not willing, or it might be the ineffable knowing that turns him away. If consent is granted, a prayer is made and tobacco is left as a reciprocating gift. The tree is felled with great care so as not to damage it or others in the fall. [...] [Keep] to the tradition of the Honorable Harvest: take only what you need and use everything you take.”

“Gleaning has been a customary right to farm products in Europe and elsewhere since the Middle Ages. It refers to both the right and the practice of gathering leftover crops from farmers’ fields after they have been commercially harvested or where reaping is not economically viable. Gleaning differs from scrounging in that, unlike the latter, it is legally regulated - it is a common and informal type of usufruct that ensures gleaners a circumscribed right to use (usus) others’ property and to enjoy its fruits (fructus). Because it is specifically regulated (for instance, after thrashing, the collecting of the straw and the fallen grains of wheat is authorised) it is distinguished from pilfering - defined as the offence of stealing fruit or vegetables before they have fallen to the ground. A more subordinate mode of usership than, say, poaching, gleaning is nevertheless significant because it points to historically entrenchced rights of common usership over resources found in private domains. Today, immaterial gleaning is widely practiced by a whole host of art-related practitioners; its agricultural antecedents offer it a haven from encroachment by groups lobbying on behalf of increased intellectual property rights and the foreclosure of the epistemic commons.”

Etymologically, the latin concept of matter comes from the ancient greek word hyle - ὕλη (húlē) - which was used to name both the woods and materials in general. In the Aristotelian tradition, hyle means a raw or undifferentiated medium, which passively awaited an outside force in order to acquire a particular form. According to Gilbert Simondon, such a conception of materiality - characterized as hylomorphism - has strong political implications since: “What the hylomorphic schema primarily reflects is a socialized representation of labor and an equally socialized representation of the individual living being; (...) This is essentially the operation controlled by the free man and executed by the slave; the free man chooses the matter—which is undetermined because it suffices to designate it generically by the name substance—without seeing it, without manipulating it, and without preparing it: the object will be made of wood or iron or clay. The veritable passivity of the matter is its abstract availability behind the given order that other men will execute.”¹
Could we look at the woods otherwise? What if we did not approach them as a passive, undifferentiated, standing reserve of materials, but instead horizontally acknowledged the woods and everything concealed in them as partners of equal footing?

“We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning. For the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers and the memory of snow.”

Expropriation refers to any kind of labour which is not compensated for. However, when it comes to natural labour, such as the one performed by other-than human beings, traditional labour theorists refuse to deploy the concept of expropriation. In Capital, Karl Marx recognizes that an archaic form of capitalism was only possible thanks to the primitive accumulation of wealth, which came from European colonies and depended on the plantation system, where both enslaved people and enslaved plants were worked to exhaustion. Thus, how can the concept of vegetal expropriation be used in order to elucidate forms of natural predation that are carried to this day?