Living with invasive weeds? Reflections on migrant and decolonial ecologies and multispecies co-existence with vilified plants

Despite the fundamental significance of plants to life, plants defined as weeds remain a source of profound contestation in different contexts. Invasive weeds inspire particularly extreme responses and are identified as a growing threat to food production, biodiversity, human livelihoods and health, and economies. In response, this paper seeks to reconceptualise invasive weeds by proposing three related approaches that together provide a framework for radically disrupting dominant narratives shaping human relationships with these plants. The first approach challenges notions of biological invasion through the concept of migrant ecology, arguing for greater attention to be paid to why and how plants disperse and the histories of how weeds arrive in particular places. The second draws on anticolonial approaches to scientific knowledge to outline a decolonial ecology, which understands invasive weeds in the context of colonialism and coloniality and brings to the fore Indigenous and traditional knowledges of plants. The third challenges human exceptionalism to propose a multispecies approach that documents entanglements of weeds with other species and makes visible the ways in which humans and plants have co-evolved and co-conspired to reshape ecologies. The paper argues that this framework creates possibilities for rethinking invasive weeds as biotic cosmopolitans that transgress borders and challenge the illusion of human control; for re-storying invasive weeds in ways that challenge mainstream narratives that value plant life through colonial and capitalist measures; and for considering the potential of invasive weeds as sources of multispecies sustenance. Considering that invasive weeds are among the most ubiquitous forms of plant life and are likely to thrive in increasingly damaged environments, the paper concludes that greater attention should be given to how we think about and with them, as well as how we live with them. (A Spanish version of this paper is available with the supplementary materials.)