Plants and Politics

Plants are essentially blank slates as far as most humans are concerned. They don't communicate in a way that humans can easily notice and mostly just sit there. They don't even have faces for us to project emotions on to (something that I'm sure any pet owner will be familiar with.) As such, when plants are anthropomorphized the results tend to be much more direct in their inspiration whenever they're more than just a man in a plant suit.

A freshly emerged swamp thing in The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1982) #21 tries to be more than just a man in a suit.

Alan Moore was part of a team that revolutionized The Swamp Thing with DC. They aimed to transform them from just some guy that got turned into plants instead into something different. Part of this revamp involved the introduction of a communal plant hive-mind of sorts known as "the green" which spans the globe. It can be argued that this was an attempt to distance the plants from traditional human intelligence. To some degree it does, but it is my belief that it serves more directly as a reflection of Moore's politics. 

"Representative leaf (false coloured) changing its growth direction in a row formed by kin neighbours" from Photoreceptor-mediated kin recognition in plants

In a study it was found that some plants will work to aid genetic siblings but will leave others to fend for themselves (the results are debated though). This is an interesting study, but instead I want to draw attention to how this might be interpreted. The first words that came to my mind were "independence" and "individuality" which are both heavily loaded words reflective of the neoliberal society I've grown up in. In the end I was hesitant to refer to this as it felt like I was projecting my own experience onto these other life forms' behaviors. I believe that the green is Alan Moore doing this himself. He has regularly stated that he regards himself as an anarchist, often depicting these values in his writings, and the green in his works follows a lot of the primary ideas of anarchism, namely a lack of authority and hierarchy.

The Floronic Man's human presence in the green is seen as a foreign invader in The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1982) #23

I will use the Floronic Man as my primary case. His human mind forcing its way into the green imposes what is deemed as an unnatural hierarchy onto the green where he drives the plants to force him to support his revenge plot. In contrast the Swamp Thing, despite being vaguely humanoid, is treated merely as a part of the green, this untainted plant society of sorts. The stance held by many anarchists is that anarchism is the natural state of the world before power is unjustly enforced by bodies such as the state. It goes without saying that plants disconnected from humanity would fall under this natural order without the interference of humanity. This intrusion is treated as an infection of sorts that corrupts the natural order and one that the enforced powers sitting in their space palace are unable to fix. Only the anarchist hero of Swamp Thing is able to save the day with his disconnect from human society. This disconnect from humanity that plants have makes it easy to portray politics overtly while still maintaining plausible deniability which I believe makes for an interesting device that would be difficult to create otherwise.

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