The Invasive Register: Witnessing, Attending, and Responding to Vegetal Charisma

Growing academic research and popular interest in critical plant studies have brought vegetality out of the shadows of plant blindness. Yet, plants labeled as invasive continue to receive disproportionately negative attention in non-native contexts due to their detrimental effects on desirable native ecological processes. They have often been antagonized as unfair players in ecological harmony as well as a symptom of human negligence and an uncontrollably changing climate. They are charismatic in the sense that they incite a ‘collective turning towards’ ecological voice, although they are often misunderstood, as evidenced by misplaced antagonistic responses. The language surrounding many of today’s pressing environmental issues tends to estrange us from whom we should be fighting for and with, while ignoring the metastatic drivers of ecological dis-ease. The intention of this paper is to illuminate the characteristics and implications of what I call the ‘invasive register’. Invasive species demonstrate a vocal, charismatic, and passive activism, pointing to and flooding ecological wounds through adaptive physiological mechanisms. Their refusal to stand down in the face of conventional management methods demonstrates an insistence on collective responsiveness to that which they attend to and speak for, and with. The invasive register, as argued in this paper, is romantically intertwined with landscape, selflessly ego-centric through the proliferation of biomass, provocative as a facilitator of collective agency, a metabolic invigorator, and an expression of the legibility of landscape.