Once endemic to a geographical range spanning from the northern beaches of Massachusetts to southern reaches of the Carolinas,
Coastal development coupled with sea level rise and erosion prevention efforts has devastated amaranth populations,
earning the plant a title of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Today the amaranth remains elusive,
It starts with seeds. Or, rather, a scattering of seeds blowing across the sand and bobbing in the tidal wash. What might appear at first as an unassuming tuft of green clover sparsely dotting the edges of shoals and barrier islands along the Atlantic coast, Amaranthus pumilus - commonly called seabeach amaranth - lives a dynamic life. Amaranth thrives in the perpetual flux of coastal habitation, growing in the overwash and sedimentary deposits formed by the natural ebb and flow of tidal waves. An invaluable member of early succession ecosystems, amaranth's ability to put down roots in this shifting landscape helps form and stabilise sand dunes while simultaneously limiting natural coastal erosion.
Drawing out what it means to be fugitive and/or live in a state of fugitivity might be a helpful beginning. Taking up the Sisyphean task of defining that which seeks to evade capture, Merriam Webster elicits the following response:
To utter the word conjures images of the criminal or outlaw, perhaps rightly so, as fugitivity is certainly measured as a relationship contra the law - outside the law, beyond the law, all that is fugitive is anti-legal by its very nature.
The story of seabeach amaranth is one of potentiality, the germinal development offering a unity through which the world may be seized and transformed. Seabeach amaranth has an even more common name, the "fugitive plant", a moniker granted due to its unique survival mechanisms. It can be said from germination to dispersal the amaranth lives its life on the run in a continual struggle to remain evolutionarily and geographically ahead of climate change. But what might it mean to call a plant merely acting out its evolutionary imperative to survive a fugitive;
fleeing from what or from who? What lessons might a closer examination of this botanical fugitive offer as we, too, face the prospect of surviving an increasingly inhospitable landscape?
We become unified only through our shared dependence on the vast and alienating infrastructure of the system while market mechanisms offer up only false promises of escape, calls to tradition and community hemmed by the surrounding economy as objects of consumption. Both the lives of plants and the lives of humans take shape along the edges of decidedly unnatural structures, coerced through logics of extraction and accumulation. Studying the amaranth illuminates the deep connections between ecological simplification and the logics of capitalist enclosure, revealing the mechanistic hold over production and reproduction the system maintains across literal and imagined landscapes that must always be defined, mapped, and governed.
The present apparatus of global economy demands that we remain forever mobile, to relate only ever to the possibility of staying - the permanent detachment from oneself in an ever-marching line of social commodification we call "human capital".
Our mobility becomes increasingly defined by our relations to work, to debt, and to consumption, each resembling the other with every passing year until finally collapsing into a singular moment of evisceration.
We find ourselves in something that looks more like a hostage situation with each passing day. We look towards nature in the race for increased mobility, but like the amaranth we move so fast if only to constantly outrun the collapse of our own making.
Whatever small seeds of the communal may wash ashore are quickly subsumed by crisis and capital, evacuated of all intensity, and thrown into the monstrous atonal status quo of the world-rendering dance we refer to as the economy.
its fleeting nature an adaptive defence mechanism in the face of a changing climate brought on by anthropogenic systems. The plant lives a brief but storied life, with a growing cycle lasting only during the warmest summer months. However, the amaranth plant prepares its seeds for dispersal almost immediately, scattering them while the plant is still alive. The small leathery seeds do not immediately germinate, their unique physiology allows them to remain dormant until finding themselves carried to an ideal environment. Or the seeds may stay on the parent plant, forming seed banks beneath seasonal winter snows or shifting sands, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Imperilled or extirpated across the length of its historic homeland,
it is the very mobile and resilient nature that has allowed amaranth to persevere in the face of habitat loss. All of life reverberates with a similar ethos of mobility; we mobilise at the slightest pretext to any injunction: mobilise for war, against war, from one campaign to the next, to stop the spread of this or that new plague.
