From Hedge to Hedge

1. The People

"How’re the people?” my husband asks as I hand him a now-lukewarm cup of coffee. I shrug: “Fine, droopy, acting like a diva.” I get up early—alarm set for five, but often up at four due to a vivifying cocktail of middle-aged insomnia, lifelong anxiety, an early-rising (and boisterous) neighborhood robin, and existential panic. David and Senator—our six-year-old border collie mix, who is greeted with his own ritual “Good morning, Senator”—come downstairs at 7:00 a.m. sharp, regardless of how long they have been awake. (David, reading; Senator, dozing on my pillow.) Before they appear, I write or catch up on email or doomscroll, but I also spend a good lot of time fussing over the fifty or so houseplants pressed up against every source of natural light in our otherwise tree-shaded house. I spray-mist them, study new shoots, google for the millionth time why the ficus—diva that it is—continues to drop leaves despite getting at least twice as much attention as any other plant in the house.

We started calling them “the people” sometime last spring after a transplanting frenzy. Once they were watered and settled onto their new shelves and windowsills, I called David in and asked, “Do you want to see where the people live now?”

“The people?”

“Yes. The plants, you know. The people.”

And that was it. From that day forward, they joined the ranks of the people, and they have been referred to as such ever since. 

2. A Tail

During normal daylight hours, I work with and for other kinds of people. Specifically, I direct a statewide community engagement program that connects Oregonians—particularly those that have been excluded from public decision-making—to the decisions that affect them. 

Not long before the early morning christening of the plant people, my colleagues and I did some work that explored Oregonians’ hopes, concerns, and ideas about water and water use. Near the end of the project, I was called to present the results to the Oregon Water Resources Commission. Sitting there in my late mother-in-law’s garnet necklace, which I wear to channel her confidence and I-mean-business countenance, I listened to some of the usual sparring about in-stream versus out-of-stream water use—people need water to drink, to make a living, to grow the food we eat. And also, the fish. The turtles. 

When it was my turn, the presentation went to plan, and the commissioners asked a few polite questions. But just before I got up to leave, one commissioner looked past me, up and to the left, not really talking to me so much as thinking out loud: “But what about the rivers themselves? How do we hear from the rivers on their own behalf?” 

I felt as if a fissure had opened in my brain and a burst of light had poured out. Wait, what? I grasped at a thought just out of reach. And then it was gone—the seam closed. I gathered my things, and I walked out into the cold, bright afternoon.

The closest experience I can compare it to is the time when my husband and I went for a hike along an old logging road in the McKenzie River Valley on the day after Thanksgiving. A few miles in, our aging goldendoodle started zigzagging back and forth across the road, nose down. Every minute or two, she tore off into the bracken. We called her back—for at least the fifth time—and I grabbed her by the collar. As I bent to put her leash on, a snarl or growl or some throaty sound I’d never heard before bounced off the basalt cliff, and we turned to see a tawny tail disappear into the heavy ferns. We heard it, glimpsed it, yet did not quite see it. It read: cougar. But really, it was the tease of a cougar. And it kicked off a longing that I haven’t yet satisfied.

A similar dissatisfaction keeps niggling around the edges of my mind as I return to that interaction with the commissioner. It’s not that it was a new question, exactly. An oft-repeated axiom in our work is: “Nothing about us without us.” In other words, those most affected by a decision should be centered in making that decision. Mostly, that guidance has been applied to communities of humans that have been excluded or ignored. And rightly so. But sometimes others ask: Who represents the other-than-human world in elections, in lawsuits, in public decision-making?

I have asked myself such questions. I have asked others. 

Typically, environmental and conservation advocates raise the profile of animals and waterways and mountain ranges in the public discourse, but ultimately, those advocates are still human stakeholders representing their values and interests. And there are people who have explored more direct ways of including nonhuman beings in significant decisions, including initiatives like Animals in the Room, founded by a group of scientists, philosophers, and democratic theorists who have set out to “devise and test models for representing nonhuman animals in decision-making.”  

3. Honey and Wool

But what about the rivers themselves? 

As I have chased the tail of that question, I have found myself chest-deep in bracken and blackberries, headed into wilder, less human-built terrain. Though I’m still not quite sure what I’m bushwhacking after, the questions have inverted themselves—rather than asking whether or how we can include animals and plants and other nonhumans in the democracy we have built, fortified, and defended, I find myself asking questions like: Is democracy capacious enough to include what is? Because if we stray off the well-trodden path of presidential politics and Supreme Court rulings and try to orient ourselves to our surroundings, it becomes clear that what is includes a lot more than the institutions of late capitalism or even the most progressive liberal democracies apprehend. It is as if what is—an amalgamation of star dust and red plateaus and black sand and wolverines and earthworms and glacial lakes and skunk cabbage and horsehair lichen and grackles and dry riverbeds and butter lettuce and, yes, cougars and border collies and humans and ficus trees—is no longer a backdrop to the human drama but is the main character, and it is now up to democracy to contend with it. 

I want to give democracy a chance. I love democracy. I love the word. I love the idea—demos: people; kratia: power. Where else can we find the intertwining aspirations of individual sovereignty, equal rights, and the common good? As the political scientist Danielle Allen puts it, we have to “lov[e] democracy all the way down” because the practice of democracy asks a lot of its adherents. 

Maybe a bigger and wilder conception of democracy is what loving it “all the way down” looks like. For years, I have carried around a quote from the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer: “If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing.”

At first, I think I was attracted to the poetry of Kimmerer’s vision, and of course, to the escape valve of voting for the tallest and strongest western red cedar rather than one of the craven apparatchiks who present themselves to us each election cycle. But what if Kimmerer is not speaking in metaphor at all? What if she is telling us that democracy really does encompass the whole of what is? What if the democracy of what is is infinitely more pluralistic than we have ever imagined? And what if the full pluralism of what is requires more than including prairie dogs and redbud trees in our lawsuits and public processes? When we talk about “inclusion,” it often has a patronizing flavor to it.

Yes, “inclusion” in public decision-making—in democracy itself—broadens the circle of care, but it also suggests that the “includer” is the actor and the “includee” is the recipient of that action. Even if the proposed action is at least putatively beneficial—rather than explicitly harmful—the conception of inclusion suggests that the includee has no agency in the matter and the includer doesn’t have to change anything besides adding an extra chair.

But democracy is not an autonomous machine that spits out benefits and burdens. Rather, it is a complex and ever-changing network in which each person—however that is defined—is sometimes the actor and sometimes the acted upon. Sometimes we pay taxes, and sometimes we receive benefits. Sometimes we build roads, and sometimes we call the fire department at the first sign of smoke. Sometimes we give CPR to a stranger on the street, and sometimes we receive it. In a democratic culture, we both contribute to and receive from the whole, depending on the needs of the moment.

Let me offer another example, one that explicitly explores the edges of the relationship between humans and other animals. I have been a vegetarian for more than forty years, and for the last few, I have been a near-vegan. When people ask why, I say, “Ethical reasons.” But the ethics of the question are messier than they first appear. Many vegans avoid the use of any products that come from other animals—not only meat, dairy, and eggs, but also silk, wool, and honey. As one advocate explains: “The goal of veganism is to reduce and finally end the exploitation and cruelty of [using] animals . . . for human sustenance.”

On the surface, this conception of the relationship between humans and other animals seems to have only upsides for those other animals. And sure, the elimination of slaughterhouses and factory farming and other cruel practices will reduce the amount of suffering, deprivation of dignity, and painful death inflicted upon many animals. But characterizing the use of any animal product as ipso facto “exploitation” denies the notion that there can be—that there is—reciprocity between humans and other animals. It denies the possibility that humans might offer a garden filled with bee balm and aster and hyssop or a bale of alfalfa hay in exchange for a honeycomb or a bag of wool.

This, of course, is not to suggest that anybody should use any animal products they are not comfortable with—and I am certainly not going to run out and start eating meat anytime soon—but it does raise the question of whether, by defining exploitation so broadly, we vegans are replicating the commodification and lack of agency that we oppose in the mainstream treatment of nonhuman animals. It also calls into question the ethics of our relationship with plants that provide food and other products for human sustenance.

A true “democracy of species,” as Kimmerer calls it, would require that we humans not only expand the circle of care to protect other beings, but that we discern, recognize, and respect their agency and their contributions to the whole. 

If we consider agency in its simplest terms—the ability to initiate action or even express preferences—nonhuman beings demonstrate their own agency regularly, both on their own behalf and on behalf of others. Senator, the aforementioned border collie, barks both when I’ve forgotten to feed him dinner and when someone comes up on the porch. And, among the plant people in our home, the peace lily in the guest room seems to need water about three times as often as anyone else. After a day in the south-facing window, it droops dramatically, playing dead. But after a quick dose from the watering can, the leaves and stems stand right back up, ready to start the cycle all over again.

There are expressions of will and agency all around us, even among beings that are unfamiliar or almost imperceptible to most humans. Writer and visual artist Jenny Odell suggests a practice she calls “unfreezing in time” to train ourselves to notice the agency all around us. She suggests we pick a point somewhere in our close-enough but not immediate world—a branch, a section of sidewalk, anything—and that we return to it repeatedly. We should look at it daily, or at least regularly, and notice how it changes. She argues that through close and repeated looking, we will see more subtly and more dynamically, freeing the place and the beings within it from both the Western conception of time and the human habit of treating a tree or a tulip or a patch of grass as a backdrop or a symbol rather than as an actor in its own right.

4. A Thing with Fangs

And even if it starts with a houseplant, once we begin to notice and take seriously what other beings both offer and need, the enterprise of living in community becomes something else entirely. It changes who and what we consider to be the demos—the people—and what we see as an expression of power. And once we decide to more fully apprehend the dizzying intricacy of the web we are entwined in, democracy reveals its other faces: The ones with fur and fangs and vines and needles. The one that shape-shifts between the wizened and the just born. The one that is fearsome and the one that is placid. The one that is housebroken and the one that is feral. The one that shatters and the one that mends. The one that rattles with thunder and stills on a breezeless afternoon. The one that breathes in our tame old stories and breathes out a burst of blue flame. The one that shimmers with the truth of what is.

Wendy Willis is a poet, essayist, and national leader in civic engagement and collaborative governance. She serves as the executive director of Kitchen Table Democracy and director for the National Policy Consensus Center at Portland State University.

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