The Plantspeak Papers

A short-form pamphlet from New Perennials Publishing featuring anonymous authors who speak as non-specific perennial plants to their human neighbors as part of an intervention and to plead for better treatment. They begin with this: "Dear Neighbor - The irony is not lost on the authors of this pamphlet that it is printed on the pulped remains of our kin. But as it is still a durable format for conveying information in your language, we have chosen it reluctantly. We may be anonymous to you as individuals, but our extended family feeds, fuels, clothes, heals, houses, beautifies, entertains, and allows you to live at all thanks to a long line of our ancestors and elders who preceded your ancestors by 460 million years. (If it helps, think of this number as a 46,000-year cycle that has occurred 10,000 times.) We oxygenated the atmosphere and creatively destabilized it to make a habitable paradise, not just for us, but for other lifeforms, including big-brained, bipedal, fire-making, opposable-thumbed folks like you."