Social exchange and vegetative propagation: An untold story of British potted plants (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Using data collected in Kent as part of the ‘British Homegardens Project’, we show how mode of reproduction in houseplants serves to increase biological fitness through selection and distribution through informal human social networks, and how those same modes lend themselves to the articulation and maintenance of social networks, instantiating memories and meanings, and providing opportunities for plant‐based narratives     

Pacifism and the Question of Responsibility

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between pacifism and responsibility through conversations with four white U.S. women formed in historic peace church traditions. The conversations resist the dominant tendency to present pacifism and responsibility as dichotomies. For these women, responsibility is not an absolute criterion to which a pacifist position must answer; nor is it a worldly commitment shunned by faithful adherence to the gospel. Rather, responsibility is a crucial yet highly contextual consideration in the pacifist life one cannot but live. This article concludes that it is a mistake to utilize responsibility as an external criterion by which to judge pacifism and a mistake to deny the importance of responsibility in a pacifist life. Both of these dichotomous arrangements mischaracterize the lived experience and moral reflection of the interviewees. The question of responsibility is not whether one should be a pacifist, but how to live nonviolently in a violent world.