Who Are We
The Potato Liberation Trust (PLT) is a coalition of humans making common cause with others to fight for the freedom of Solanum Tuberosum. Established in 2023, PLT campaigns for potato dignity and for the inalienable rights of potatoes to thrive in biodiverse and sustainable homes, free from the violence of commercial monoculture, their exploitation in capital markets, and in the ongoing histories of colonial injustices. Through interspecies care, public education, research, and multi-agency collaborations, PLT fights to protect potato sovereignty, as individuals, as family groups, and as a planetary population.
Our Mission
The political, cultural, economic, and racial privileges extracted by certain humans are exercised at the expense of other human and nonhuman planetary populations. This enforced hierarchy has resulted in an asymmetrical predatory-prey relationship with the potato.
There are other ways of being with potatoes.
PLT rejects anthropocentrism that treats all organic and inorganic beings as a means to human ends, resources and property to be exploited for human benefit. PLT cares for the kinship shared between Solanum tuberosum and Homo sapiens. In decentring humans in their interspecies relationships with potatoes, PLT advocates for a symbiotic solidarity as a new framework for survival in the age of global climate and food crisis.
Our Strategies
At PLT, we want to develop methodologies from grounded research and community engagement to invent prototypes of action and storytelling that practice interspecies intimacy. We organize workshops, talks, and more to navigate the imperfect present and future as an inquisitive collective. Other than contributions from PLT members, we welcome proposals for new projects and collaborations, as well as skillsharing from other organizations and individuals.
Liberation cannot be achieved through singular effort but through pluralistic and intersectional struggle! Please email flying_compost_machine@proton.me for more information.
Although most potato families may retain a dream of one day returning home when safe to do so, the realities of thousands of years of intergenerational agricultural enslavement and the human devastation their homeland soils, means that this journey home for most, is a distant dream.
We are asking you to support their rights to family life by providing a home for displaced potato families, in order that they can start the process of healing. We seek to liberate our potato families to live independently, for their needs to be placed first, for humans to step back to allow potatoes to live for themselves, by potatoes, for potatoes!
The Potato Family Resettlement Scheme
(est. 2023)
In the face of a global crisis of displaced potato families fleeing the multiple traumas of genocidal farming practices, the Potato Liberation Trust is working to rehome potato families with suitable human families. Our hope is that we are able start the lengthy process of rebuilding their lives and creating a world in which their descendants can live in safety and with dignity.
Prophecies of the potato Martians
PLT on Earth opens space for multispecies dialogue
"Earth people peeled their own potatoes with their metal knives, boiled them for twenty of their minutes, then smashed them all to bits, …They are clearly a most primitive people"
This section is under construction and will be completed following full consultation with our potato community co-workers.
We need to remember more about potatoes, we have forgotten the reasons why they need to be remembered. They have been scrubbed and peeled of the complex social and metaphysical relationships, reduced to stand for human consumption.
In eating potatoes, we erase our memory of what we once were, and suppress the deep memories of our shared beginnings. To reverse the processes, which allowed potatoes to become merely resources through a disenchantment and homogenisation, we need to distinguish the best register of their voices.
This section is under construction and will be completed following full consultation with our potato community co-workers.
The violence of racism in dehumanising some humans, at the same time forces a rigid distinction between humans and non-humans that enables the subjugation of other categories of other.
This section is under construction and will be completed following full consultation with our potato community co-workers.
The sheer profusion of commercially grown enslaved potato families is overwhelming. How do we justify which families can be saved, rather than the others who are left to their fates?
This section is under construction and will be completed following full consultation with our potato community co-workers.
Spending time with potatoes, caring for them through several growing seasons, gives time to reflect on how this experience leads to transformative moments in reflection and revelations. Slowly accumulating links and relationships between other lives lived in the global interdependence of the reality of the world.
Time to pay our debts
It sums up so much of colonial violence, global capitalist exploitation, more than human equity, fears of interstellar expansion, and the desire to account for these intergenerational injustices through contemporary reparations
This section is under construction and will be completed following full consultation with our potato community co-workers.
Potatoes have a different vibration to other beings, they have a sheen. It is an opaque, a more juicy form of sticky energy that translates kinetic dynamism into latent stored power.
It is a matrix of potential providing affordance to itself, and in the right circumstances, to others. But don't get too close, potatoes are also protective about their families, and about their land. They are not always benign, and can be acquisitive over the lands of others should circumstances change, or should the potatoes themselves change.
This section is under construction and will be completed following full consultation with our potato community co-workers.
Please be patient as we carefully co-develop the stories of our potato families on this website with their full consent.
We aim to maintain the highest ethical standards in our collaborative work with our refuge families.
This is written with potatoes, not about them!
Moche creation myths include the origin story of the potato as the first inhabitant of earth, made in the image of the planetary gods.
These potato ancestors are said to have created humans to serve as their slaves, to tend to, and nourish potato families.
Gradually over the tens of thousands of years, the humans forgot their origins, and thought themselves to be the masters and potatoes their slaves.
This section is under construction and will be completed following full consultation with our potato community co-workers.
PLT 5
Despite long term dedicated research programmes, we are as yet unable to communicate directly with the individuals in our potato community. Therefore, we are only able to gaze upon their world from the outside and attempt to interpret thier stories remotely
This section is under construction and will be completed following full consultation with our potato community co-workers.