Cultural ecology: emerging human-plant geographies

In this second progress report on cultural ecology, we identify and trace emerging trends in human-plant geographies. Human-plant interactions have been the stuff of cultural ecology since the days of Julian Steward, and many aspects of that tradition are alive and well. Following a previous progress report (Head, 2007), we are not interested in assuming an ontological and unproblematic separation between ‘cultures’and ‘their [vegetative] environment’ as the basis on which straightforward ‘interactions’or ‘adaptations’ can be analysed (Blute,2008). Rather we aim here to elucidate the contributions of relational geographies, sometimes referred to as more than human geographies, to the understanding of human plant relations