The safest generalization one can make about life on earth might describe it as a thin layer of green rust. Much further below the surface of the earth, and even bacteria finds existence made difficult; too high in the atmosphere, and they again become thin. Bacteria represent the oldest form of life, and the most prevalent, but when it comes to multi-cellular life, plants form the bulk of it on this planet. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis deals largely in the global community of plants, and how they cooperate and share with one another. The entire animal kingdom exists as a kind of auxiliary to the world of plants; laid on top of it, and completely dependent on it. Yet all too often, we turn a blind eye to the secret life of plants, and mistake them for passive, inanimate parts of the scenery.
At the beginning of Edible Forest Gardens: Ecological Vision, Theory For Temperate Climate Permaculture, Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier describe an experiment that began with a carefully placed radioactive marker left on a tree stump. A few weeks later, when the researchers returned, they could find that radioactive marker in every plant for a considerable radius from the stump. The roots of each plant connected, one to the next, spreading out around each other and connected by bacteria and fungi. Prior to deforestation, root systems from Maine to Florida connected from one end of the continent to the other, creating a kind of vast super-organism, just below the surface.
Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis ultimately comes down to this kind of plant community, with plants regulating the atmosphere and responding to one another. As Stephen Harrod Buhner explains in The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth, plants act like chemists.
In 1803 Frederich Seturner isolated the first individual plant constituents from opium and named them alkaloids, some 140 million years after complex land plants created them for reasons of their own. Plant chemistry has not been studied very long in the scheme of things; it is still not very well understood.
Consider: Each of the estimated 275,000 different species of plants on Earth contains several hundred to several thousand unique chemicals. The majority of these species manifest as millions of different individuals, all of them generating different variations, sometimes significantly, on their species’ chemical theme. A plant with one thousand different chemical constituents can literally combine them in millions of different ways. To compound the complexity, these combinations, added to those of other plants or of other organisms, produce synergistic results that are not predictable. Even a tiny change in dosage or combination can produce significantly different outcomes. Basically, the little that people currently know about plant chemistry is not very much. This ignorance is magnified by our tendency (because of our upbringing) to think of plants as insentient salads or building materials engaging in chemical production processes that just happened by accident and, in consequence, have no purpose or meaning. Phytoexistentialism.
Still, here we are. (Buhner, 2002)
Plants regulate the atmosphere, produce medicine for themselves and for every animal species, and form the foundation for the macroscopic level of life on this planet, yet we have only begun to understand their lives. We jealously maintain that they exist only as inanimate, unfeeling, unconscious things. This perspective shrivels up and withers away under the light of the most recent research into the secret lives of plants, giving us evidence that must ultimately force us to ask if we should begin considering plants as people.
How Does a Plant Feel?
One can hardly discuss the notion of plant perception without discussing Cleve Backster. Backster worked with polygraph machines, originally working in interrogations with the CIA. Today, his claim to fame rests with experiments he did hooking up plants to polygraph machines; he claimed that his experiments showed that plants reacted to harm, and even suggestions of harm, even going so far as to suggest that the plants could read human minds, and react to their intentions of harm.
Unfortunately, Backster didn’t understand scientific controls very well. The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry on “Plant perception” lists a host of variables Backster failed to control for, including the possibility that he may have burned the galvanic receptors or other equipment. No one has successfully duplicated Backster’s results with proper controls since then, while his supporters typically contend that they don’t need proper controls.
Backster’s fame has turned the scientific world off of any actual, legitimate study of possible plant perception; the sloppiness and pseudo-scientific light that the affair gathered still makes the idea of plant perception seem like a bunch of New Age, hippy mumbo-jumbo. Fortunately, more serious biologists have continued researching plants, and that has given us a much more solid footing from which to explore the lives of plants.
For instance, researchers from McMaster University published a study in the June 12, 2007 issue of Biology Letters, showing that plants recognize other members of their family.
If kin discrimination via root-root interactions proves widespread, it will profoundly change how we view competition in plants. Our results, because we used maternal sibships, indicate a genetic or maternally derived mechanism for kin recognition involving root communication. However, the mechanism is probably different from the self/non-self mechanism, because plants recognize genetically identical individuals as non-self. Having found kin discrimination once, we expect to find kin discrimination elsewhere in plants, since variable dispersal, variable competitive situations, and increases in fitness when competing with kin, are found in other plants. Other competitive traits, such as stem elongation and apical dominance, are the most probable candidates to exhibit plastic responses contingent on kinship of neighbours. (Dudley & File, 2007)
A collection of studies titled Communication in Plants studies “plant neurobiology,” and the similarities between plant neurology and animal neurology. Researchers have even begun to move towards a mechanism of plant intelligence. Typically, plant perception has met with immediate dismissal because plants lack brains, or anything like brains. It turns out that such a statement doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny; yes, plants lack an animal’s central nervous system, but we’ve begun to see that plants do have a distributed kind of nervous system.
“This new study is very important,” says Richard Jorgensen, an associate professor of plant sciences at the University of Arizona and also an expert in the field. “What they’ve identified is probably a component in a radically new system for communication between cells and between organs of the plant.”
The current picture of the plant’s transportation, or phloem, system looks something like a bustling subway. The tube- shaped sieve elements of the phloem are the subway lines, the companion cells of the sieve elements are the stations, and connecting tunnels called plasmodesmata allow cargoes to move from the stations into the subway lines.
In the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Science, the UC Davis study introduces the new factor, the movement protein.
In the cells of leaves and stems, the movement protein binds to an informative segment of genetic code called messenger RNA (mRNA). Like a subway ticket, the movement protein lets the mRNA enter the plasmodesmal tunnel to the subway line, or phloem translocation stream. Once in the subway line, the complex of movement protein and mRNA travels very rapidly to distant stations located in roots and flowers.
At its destination, the report suggests, the messenger RNA probably influences the level of some other protein. That level conveys information to local tissues about, for instance, the overall physical condition of the plant, the season of the year or the presence of an invading pathogen. (UCD, 1999)
That may seem simplistic, but our own experience of intelligence has its roots in very similar chemical exchanges. The identification of mRNA in plant phloem means that while plants may not have a central nervous system, they do have the equivalent of a brain: a distributed brain that operates throughout their entire organism, rather than concentrated into a single organ (though, even that idea has come under pressure from the findings of neurologists like Antonio Damasio, who summarized the conclusions of his research by saying, “the mind is embodied, not just embrained”).
Researchers have even discovered the chemical markers of stress in plants, just like they have identified the chemical markers of stress in humans. Such evidence suggests that plants might even experience some analogue of emotion.
Koussevitzky, looking at the end of the signaling pathway, found the corresponding binding factor known that ABI4, a known plant transcription factor. It prevents light-induced regulatory factors from activating gene expression. Additional work in the project had determined that the chloroplast-localized, nuclear-encoded protein GUN1 is required for integrating multiple stress-derived signals within the chloroplast. This work was conducted by the first co-author of the article, Ajit Nott, who was a research associate in Dr. Chory’s lab.
Many of the nuclear genes that encode chloroplast proteins are regulated by a “master switch” in response to environmental conditions. This “master switch,” like a binary computer, can activate or de-activate certain sets of genes based on stress signaling processes.
“One of our suggestions in the paper is that ABI4 seems like a prime candidate to be the ‘master switch,’” Koussevitzky said. “ABI4 binds to a newly identified sequence motif, and by doing so prevents light-induced regulatory factors from activating gene expression. It has a role in so many signaling processes in the plant, it might actually be the ‘master switch’ that researchers have been looking for.” (Trent, 2007)
This kind of plant chemistry might seem too mundane to compare to human intellect, but we should remember that the electrochemical responses of the human brain—what we experience as emotion, intellect, and thought—appear materially only as similar chemical reactions. Animals use the same basic principles for their own central nervous systems. To see those same principles evidenced in plants to transfer information, respond to stress, and even recognize family strongly suggests that while plant perception must undoubtedly differ from animal perception in vast and important ways, we cannot deny the plausibility of its existence without also denying the personhood of our fellow human beings. Ultimately, we can recognize others only by empathy; by recognizing enough of ourselves in the other, that we become able to assign to them the same kind of personhood, autonomy, thoughts and feelings that we ourselves experience firsthand. In general, this becomes difficult unless we can communicate with that other, and recieve feedback to confirm that personhood. So, while we can see the plausibility for plant perception, the next question remains, can plants communicate?
Talking to Plants
When we come to the question of plant commuication, we find ourselves on even firmer ground. If we take “language” with all the arbitrary strictness that linguists have added to it in recent years to fight the losing battle of keeping it unique from the most complex and nuanced animal calls, similarly to the battles fought to maintain human uniqueness in the past in the face of evolution or the heliocentric solar system, then we certainly cannot speak of a plant language. Most obviously, plants do not communicate with sounds, but with the release of chemicals into the air—what animals percieve as scent.
While plants can tell when they are being eaten by herbivorous insects, for example, and begin producing compounds like nicotine or protease inhibitors that are unpalatable or harmful to such insects, they can also release chemical markers that attract predatory insects—essentially taking an attitude of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” and telling insects that might eat the herbivore where they can find dinner. Even if that cry for help goes unanswered, the herbivores themselves “hear” that call, know that the plant has discovered them, and will sometimes retreat, or at the very least, find some other place to lay their eggs.
Researchers have been unraveling these complex interactions between plants and insects since the 1980s, when Marcel Dicke, professor of insect-plant interactions at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, says he was “the first to show that plants communicate with the enemies of their enemies. We know that terpenes are involved and also methyl salicylate.”
Plants have learned not to use such signals without cause. In many species, the hormone methyl salicylate is emitted only when the plant is attacked by insects but not when other types of damage occur, Dicke notes. Apparently, plants recognize chemicals in herbivore oral secretions and in that way can discriminate between pruning shears and a herbivore, he says. (Wilkinson, 2001)
In other words, plant perception and communication carries subtlety and nuance, just like human language, or at least animal calls; plants have different things to “say,” differentiating between an insect’s bite and a blade’s cut.
We’ve even observed plants “eavesdropping” on each other, for their own protection.
Insect-damaged sagebrush has a novel way of broadcasting to nearby plants that a predator is in the area: It releases a bouquet of airborne odors and perfumes.
If wild tobacco is growing nearby, it will “eavesdrop” on these chemical signals, and in response, fortify its defenses against such plant-eaters as caterpillars.
In a study published in a recent issue of Oecologia, Cornell University researchers say they have found that the release of chemicals called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from a wounded sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) primes the defenses of wild tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) to prepare for herbivore attacks of its own.
But the tobacco plant holds off actually creating its defenses until it is attacked. That’s because the plant pays a price for deploying its arsenal.
Most of the proteins and compounds used for defense contain nitrogen and carbon, which also are needed to produce seeds. So there is a fitness cost for the tobacco. The defenses are only advantageous to the plant if an herbivore actually attacks, because production of proteins and compounds for defense results in fewer seeds.
“By priming its defense response the plant is not investing resources before it is actually attacked,” said Andre Kessler, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell. “This could be a crucial mechanism of plant-plant communication.” (Ramanujan, 2006)
We can observe similar eavesdropping among animals: monkeys watch birds for signs of predators, and a bird call signalling a particular predator prompts nearly every animal species in the area to react. In that sense, we have already seen how animals engage in a constant, inter-specific conversation on a fairly continual basis. With the dialogue already established between plants and the most abundant form of animal life—insects—it seems fair to ask whether this conversation might go even further, not just among and between all the animals of a particular place, but between plants and animals, as well.
As previously mentioned, animal life evolved on top of plant life; plants form the foundation of all animal food chains, as the only multi-cellular organisms capable of actually creating food from the sun. From trophic level to trophic level, the entire animal kingdom exists as a community built on top of the plant world. But plants also provide more than just food; they also provide medicine, both for themselves and for every animal species.
Antifungal, antibiotic, or antimicrobial (preinfectious) compounds protect the plant from invading pathogenic organisms. For example: The tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipfera) produces a number of strongly antimicrobial alkaloids (dehydroglaucine and liriodenine) that it stores in its heartwood to protect it from invasion by microorganisms. Chicory (Cichorium intybus) produces a number of strongly antifungal compounds to protect its leaves and roots from pathogenic fungi. The compounds are so potent that even when chicory roots are kept moist on a plate for lengthy periods they will not mold. Other chicory compounds strongly protect against damage or infection from nematodes and other small organisms. Plant antimicrobial compounds such as those in chicory are active against microorganisms in exceptionally minute concentrations, ranging from one part per thousand to one part per million. During infection other kinds of compounds can be brought into play. Aromatic coumarins in such plants as potatoes increase rapidly at the site in response to any pathogenic organism. Cyanogenic compounds are also commonly present in at least a thousand plants where they are released as hydrogen cyanide gas to kill invading organisms.
In many instances invading pathogens release their own compounds that are toxic to the plant. Plants immediately begin to identify these compounds and create chemistries designed to counter them. At the same time, the plant will begin to generate unique compounds—phytoalexins—at the site of infection that are never present in the plant until an infection occurs. When fungal spores take hold on a leaf surface, for instance, and begin inserting growth tubes into the leaf, a plant may begin to synthesize a phytoalexin specific for that fungus. The synthesis begins immediately, can be detected after an hour or two, and reaches its highest concentration in 48 to 72 hours. The phytoalexin is concentrated in leaf cells and pushed out onto the surface of the leaf where the fungus has taken hold. (Buhner, 2002)
This creates the evolutionary foundation of herbalism; why plants make such effective medicine, not only for themselves, but also for animals. Chemoreception—the closely-related senses of smell and taste—show evidence of having developed as one of the very first senses in animals. The ability to understand plant communication offered an essential evolutionary advantage animals required to survive: being able to understand what plants “said” enabled them to find which plants they could eat, which plants would cure their illness, and which plants they needed to survive. With chemicals like pheromones, animals even communicate with one another in the chemical “language” of plants. The universal “odornet” of an ecology comes from both plants and animals, and both plants and animals percieve it, understand it, and act upon it. (Watson, 2001)
In other words, the smells of various plants have meaning, just as the vocalizations of animals have meaning; we can understand those meanings, act on them, and even produce similar signals of our own that communicate our own thoughts and feelings. It may occur at a level of chemical interaction we have become unfamiliar with, and it may not fall under our conscious control, but plants and animals communicate constantly. If you have ever smelled a flower and thought the odor was pleasing, you have experienced plant communication firsthand.
Learning from the Spirits
Wild humans claim that they learn about herbal medicines and wild edible plants from the plants themselves, and claim to communicate with them regularly. We normally dismiss these claims as nonsense, but given the communication we have already seen between other animals and plants, might we need to take another look at what we have all too often ignored as primitive superstition?
Such cultures certainly honor their sense of smell more than we generally do. The Ongee people of the Andaman Islands elevate their sense of smell to a cosmic principle, and associate personality with odor, and place the seat of the spirit in the nose, rather than the brain or even the heart. (Watson, 2001) But, if such cultures genuinely do communicate with plants, their primary means of doing so doubtless relies on not relying on smell alone.
There are beings, many of them human beings, that see, smell, hear, remember, sense more than we do. This is not a genetic accident, like being taller than six-foot-five or having an IQ of 150 or high cheekbones. This is a matter of culture. The human beings who maintain these hyper-refined senses are hunter-gatherers. Their impressive powers of perception have been noted and detailed by just about every student of hunter-gatherer groups. It is not only that they sense more than the rest of us do, but that they do so in a qualitatively different fashion. … The term “synaesthesia” describes something every child knows. In fact, Merleau-Ponty believes that we have “unlearned how to see, hear, and, generally speaking, to feel.” Synaesthesia is the mental function (or suite of functions) in which the senses run together, in which colors have a feel to them and tastes have a color. We speak of a loud shirt, of bright music, yet how often do we sense reality this way? For Abram and other observers, the phenomenon marks a total immersion in sense, when the observer is no longer in control, no longer separating and analyzing sight, sound, and texture, and becomes a part of his sensual surroundings. That is, the observer calls forth the world. (Manning, 2005)
This synaesthetic perspective offers the possibility of actually engaging plants in communication; trying to understand, catalogue, and analyze the slightly varying scents by which plants communicate consciously would surely overwhelm us almost immediately, yet we can percieve far more than we can consciously articulate. Much of our brain’s conscious function centers on filtering out the stimuli from our senses. Synaesthesia means that we can “see” and “hear” as well as smell what plants are “saying,” in a process that involves our noses as much as our imaginations. To most of us, the internal, anthropocentric nature of imagination seems self-evident, but ideas about the nature of imagination vary from culture to culture.
This article weighs cultural perspectives about imagination’s location and function as the exclusive domain of human cognition in conventional theories of educational development and developmental psychology. From a Haudenosaunee or Mohawk perspective, we notice that minds colonized by these assertions concerning the universality of imagination’s origins and functions are contributing dimensions to larger conceits maintained by anthropocentrically biased cultures. Cultures colonized by these conceits tautologically confirm the interior sources of their intelligence. Minds colonized by such conceits think and conceive of themselves in this grammar of possessive individualism. Onkwehonwe (unassimilated, traditional Haudenosaunee), in contrast, regard any assumption concerning the existence of autonomous, anthropogenic minds to be aberrations that violate the unity, interrelation, and reciprocity between language and psychology, landscape and mind. The ecology of traditional Haudenosaunee territory possesses sentience that is manifest in the consciousness of that territory, and that same consciousness is formalized in and as Haudenosaunee consciousness. Of course, other beings manifest that consciousness in their literature of tracks,chirrups,and loon calls.
Onkwehonwe mind everything because everything minds Onkwehonwe.
Haudenosaunee minds are composed not just of visible ecological domains but also by the numinous qualities of those domains that, allowed to mature, express the fullness of traditional territory. Old-growth minds and cultures mature, emerge, and encompass the old growth of their traditional territory. Haudenosaunee minds are congruent with their traditional territories but more important, Haudenosaunee minds are required to accomplish that symmetry in accomplishing their authenticity. (Sheridan & Longboat, 2006)
“Old growth” societies do not see imagination as an illusion or strictly internal human idyll; rather, they see imagination as a form of communication, by which a human can percieve what a given environment says. If we take a moment to consider such claims seriously, we can see a number of points that add up to a plausibility that we have systematically denied and turned a blind eye to:
- Plants communicate with chemicals released into the air. These chemicals carry mutually-agreed meanings understood even by other species of plants, and even other animals, especially insects that live in a close community with plants.
- The animal sense of smell provided an evolutionary advantage precisely for understanding plant communication.
- While the human sense of smell lacks much of the precision some other animals possess, humans do experience synaesthesia naturally; allowing imagination to wander and freely assign mental images and feelings to particular smells would thus follow evolutionary pathways, naturally relying on the mutually-agreed meanings of various smells. Just as dreams try to match mental images to internal body states, imagination would try to match mental images to a wealth of subconsciously and synaesthetically percieved sensory stimuli.
- Or, put more bluntly, imagination represents, at least in part, the human perception of plant communication.
This can seem very suspect to us, with our habit of dismissing imagination, but we should remember that neurologically, our brain constantly matches various sense impressions to memories and patterns it has previously encountered; thus, we can percieve a particular pattern of light and shadow, and recognize it as a human face, or a tree. Autism arises precisely when this pathway breaks down; an autistic person percieves a human face only as a collection of objects, failing to match those impressions to the pattern of a human face. When we dream, internal body states run through our brain, and become matched against these same patterns; a dragon in a dream might simply come from the best representation found to match the burning, painful feeling of acid reflux. Likewise, synaesthetic imagination allows us to understand what plants tell us, as our brains scramble to match the chemical signals to the best patterns it can fit. If we can learn to trust our imaginations again, it certainly seems plausible that we could find in it a pathway of communication with the more-than-human world.
The true test for such a claim must lie in repeatability: if we both listen to the same plant, we should “hear” the same message. Cultural differences present a major hurdle to such a study, though. Our culture has not just neglected this kind of perception, it has actively demeaned it. What even earlier civilizations called “the discernment of spirits” has become relegated to mere superstition, thanks largely to our inability to understand “spirit” apart from our anthropocentric superstitions. If we can compare our ability in this regard to playing an advertising jingle on a kazoo, then “old growth” cultures play Mozart with a full orchestra. To ask that question properly would really require a cross-cultural inventory.
The answer we find can seem astounding; separated sometimes by vast gaps of time and space, indigenous herbalists report astoundingly similar experiences with the same plants, even in places where cultural transmission seems impossible. They describe precisely this kind of encounter with plants, and it serves as the basis of fully functional ethnobotanical systems. Regardless of the epistemology we wish to assign to it—we can understand this equally well in our own scientific terms, or in the terms of the native epistemology that takes plant personhood for granted—the repeatability of plant communication resounds clearly across thousands of years of human experience.
Of course, full communication requires not just listening, but response. That end represents far less of a challenge; we communicate with plants all the time, whether we want to or not. We produce scents that animals and plants can easily decipher constantly, telling our sex, age, health, condition, diet, even emotional state. We broadcast these things continuously, in the form of constant chemical releases from our skin, our mouths, and the whole of our bodies. Just as plants can understand the chemical markers given off by one another, we know also that they can detect, for instance, the chemicals of an herbivorous insect’s mouth. Why should we assume that their ability to smell our own state would prove any less sophisticated than, say, a domesticated dog’s? As any dog-owner can attest, they retain the ability to smell even emotion from the pheromones, and various other chemicals we continuously emit. Given their complex defenses and communication, it seems terribly unlikely that a plant would fail to smell a larger animal’s hunger, say from the slight scent of its salivating mouth, when it smells smaller animals so easily.
Plant Personhood
What does it mean to call someone, or something, a “person”? In recent years, abortion, “corporate personhood,” artificial intelligence, and animal rights have all challenged civilization’s usual concept of a “person” as simply an individual specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens. Does a fetus count as a person, or not? Can a sufficiently “intelligent” program count as a person? Do great apes count as people? If rationality represents our defining criteria, we must recognize that a significant overlap exists between the most intelligent great apes, and the least intelligent people. That criteria even opens the floor for crows, ravens, dolphins, and other animals, even bears. Noting the problem of keeping bears away from garbage cans designed with more complex locks in Yosemite National Park, one ranger there noted that while bears could still get into them, some campers could not, saying, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
Graham Harvey defines animism as “the label given to worldviews in which the world is understood to be a community of living persons, only some of whom are human. (An older use of the term to label a putative ‘belief in spirits’ is less useful.)” The usual reference to “tree spirit,” for example, seems redundant; “spirit” simply indicates a person. Trees represent a particular kind of person (or “spirit”); referring to a “tree spirit” simply projects Western dualism onto a monistic perception. This older view of personhood has obvious advantages over the more recent, anthropocentric understanding that civilization has developed, now that critical “edge” examples have begun to break down that model.
Irving Hallowell introduced the term “other-than-human person” in his description of Ojibwe animism, noting that notions of animate or inanimate took center stage in Ojibwe language. Hallowell famously asked one Ojibwe elder if “all the stones we see about us are alive.” The elder responded, somewhat amused, “No! But some are.”
Ojibwe specifically, and animists generally, accept and treat as persons everything they encounter that acts like a person—regardless of its nature. This includes humans, but it also includes animals, plants, and even some rocks, weather systems, stories, and so forth. In this understanding, recognizing persons has much more importance than the objective state of “being” a person. Ultimately, existentialist and post-modern skepticism proves difficult to entirely refute; we cannot know anything beyond our own experience, not even the personhood of other human beings. True communication always eludes us. All communication proves imperfect and fallible. The escape from this spiral of existential doubt exists only in empathy. Only empathy allows us to recognize the personhood even of other humans. When we draw our circle of empathy too close, and withhold the recognition of personhood from those who deserve it, we call such a person a sociopath.
From the “old growth” perspective, a fairly good description of civilization would focus on the systematic normalization of sociopathy. Our attitudes towards deforestation, the environment, pharmaceuticals, mass extinction, global climate change and a host of interrelated issues all contribute ot the overall picture of a sociopath. According to Jean Piaget, animism and the “pathetic fallacy” represent cognitive deficits that children grow out of. Without anyone to tell them so, “old growth” cultures encountered other-than-human persons and treated them as such. Plants can recognize their family; they communicate with each other and with other species, both plant and animal; they experience stress; in short, they act like people. To not recognize that requires specific and significant effort. We must methodically train our children to withhold their empathy, or they will continue treating all manner of non-human things as people. Animism comes from humanity’s natural condition; we have to teach anything else.
By withholding our empathy, we act like sociopaths. If we trust our sensuous experience of the world, the way the world presents itself to our senses, then the personhood of plants becomes self-evident. They act like people, as we can plainly see. So why would we not treat them as people?
The Animal’s Dilemma
The animal kingdom evolved on top of the plant world; the bottom of the animal food chain, herbivores, simply eats plants. Carnivores eat them. That forms trophic levels, as energy flows up and down, but in the end, the world belongs primarily to plants. Animals, one might say, simply exist as plants by other means.
If we recognize the personhood of plants, then we throw ethical vegetarianism into crisis. Peter Singer provided the philosophical basis of much of the animal rights movement by his argument that because animals can suffer, causing their suffering entails a moral cost. Thus, we should prefer vegetarianism on ethical grounds, because vegetarianism causes less suffering.
Yet we have seen that plants experience stress. Having never experienced life as a plant, none of us can say what that feels like, even though an exercise of basic empathy makes it as clear as the suffering of other animals. Stress arises in animal bodies as a flood of cortisol. We see very similar responses in plants under stress—as animals eat them, or they dry up, or otherwise suffer. We can empathize more easily with animals, because we have experienced that flood of cortisol and understand t not just as a chemical reaction, but as an emotion. Why should empathy not suffice to recognize that simply changing the particular chemicals in a different form of life makes it substantially (or, more to the point, ethically) different? The experience no doubt differs, as the whole plant experience of the world must radically differ from our own, but we can still empathize, and we can still recognize that whatever form it takes, the plant obviously still suffers.
That means that vegetarianism has no greater ethical claim than carnivorism; in either case, some living thing, some person, suffers and dies. That presents us with the basic dilemma of animal life: all animals live only by killing others. The dying and rising god, the ouroboros, even the supposed Paleolithic shrines where cave bear skulls sat with their own femurs stuck into their mouths, point to an ancient understanding of that inescapable truth of animal life.
How, then, do animals justify their existence? We should note that in the hundreds of millions of years that animals have evolved, plants have found ways to make them useful. Animals give back more than they take. Their existence has made ecologies richer and more vibrant. By taking its life from others, every animal binds itself with every meal to the most sacred covenant: the living community has laid down its life for the animal, and that binds the animal to the living community, to use that life given as a gift to enrich that community, to defend that landbase, to give back more than it takes. Civilized mythology often anthropomorphized the land as a dying and rising god, and just as often restricted that god to wheat alone, but echoes of that basic notion can still be seen even in modern Christianity: “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’” (Luke 22:19-20) Long before Christianity proclaimed that Jesus had died for our sins, animists understood that with every meal, the persons in the land around them—their own siblings—had given their lives for them.
Thus, every animal kills to live. That rules every animal’s inescapable fate. We cannot escape that basic truth; if we try, we only serve to delude ourselves, and forget the responsibility that animal life comes with. Because we kill to live, we buy our lives at the cost of that sacred covenant to justify our existence, to give back more than we take.
Every animal gives back more than it takes; that veritably defines sustainability. Modern civilization, however, does not. That does not mean that humans have become innately fallen; even today, humans live in ways that give back more than they take. Humans created the Amazon rain forest and the Great Plains, and after thousands of years of harvesting salmon in the Pacific Northwest, more salmon lived there than before. That kind of legacy follows from a sustainable culture, and a thousand years of human life when every generation understands their place in a more-than-human world, acknowledges and respects other-than-human persons, and takes seriously the covenant that the animal’s dilemma creates, and gives back more than they take.
Works Cited
- Buhner, Stephen Harrod. (2002). The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth. Chelsea Green Publishing.
- Dudley, Susan A. & Amanda L. File. (2007). “Kin recognition in an annual plant,” Biology Letters, vol. 3, no. 4
- Manning, Richard. (2005). Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization, North Point Press.
- Sheridan, Joe and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat. (2006). “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred,” Space and Culture, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 365-381.
- Trent, John. (2007). “Researchers Help Find Master Switch In Plant Communication,” Terra Daily, 3 April 2007.
- University of California, Davis. (1999). “Researchers Probe New Depths In Plant Communications.” Adapted from press release.
- Watson, Lyall. (2001). Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell, W.W. Norton & Co.
- Wilkinson, Sophie. (2001). “Plants to Bugs: Buzz Off!,” Chemical & Engineering News, 30 June 2001.
What was this about humans creating the Amazon rainforest and the Great Plains?
Comment by Anonymous — 16 August 2007 @ 12:17 PM
See Charles Mann’s 1492. Both are largely man-made.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 August 2007 @ 1:08 PM
Well said, Jason! I’m starting a Talking to Plants series on my blog, and I used a link to this piece as a place for people to start reading and understanding the bigger picture. Thanks and great timing!
Comment by Kiva Rose — 16 August 2007 @ 6:18 PM
Thanks, that’s great to hear! I’m looking forward to your series!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 August 2007 @ 7:29 PM
Excellent article, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Having spent much of my childhood talking to trees, I feel much better now that I’ve got a scientific justification for being weird.
Comment by dagnabit — 16 August 2007 @ 11:07 PM
Excellent write up. Thanks for taking the time to make this available.
It makes me so happy to see life described as a sort of whole scientifically :~)
Comment by J.K. — 17 August 2007 @ 12:34 AM
This is a great article. I like the way the content is structured to present the evidence.
I would agree that human beings are becoming more disconnected from the natural world.
I do like my internet though!
Excellent write up, I’ve already told some friends to read into it.
Vince-0,
South Africa
Comment by Vince-0 — 17 August 2007 @ 3:05 AM
This is why I’ve come to realize that the philosophy of rewilding is as just as important as the technical aspect. If we cannot reconnect at least some of the sensuous traits of tribal people, a lot of what we plan to do will be shots in the dark.
Comment by Dan — 17 August 2007 @ 12:43 PM
I was checking out Buhner’s new book “The Secret Teachings of Plants,” (yes, OK, in Watkin’s occult bookstore - it was raining, I had time to kill..) - it looked pretty groovy. Lots of poetry and Goethe. The stuff about cardiac fields all got a bit Dan Winters at times but good stuff nonetheless.
http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Teachings-Plants-Intelligence-Perception/dp/1591430356
Also, presumably y’all saw this: Neurons work with sound, not electricity, according to some Danes in white coats. Which makes sense, considering the world is sound and all that, but would also blur the line between organisms with nervous systems and those without even more.
http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2007/03/10/scientists-say-nerves-use-sound-not-electricity/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Ftechnology%2Fstory%2F2007%2F03%2F09%2Fscience-nervessound-20070309.html&frame=true
Comment by cheeba — 17 August 2007 @ 1:03 PM
Excellent article! I also plan to (someday) do a write up on my blog about this topic and will have to link this post!I remember when I first read the book The Secret Life Of plants years ago I couldn’t put it down.Since childhood I have known that plants have their own language, feelings, spirit~ so nice to read your explanation of these findings, so eloquent.
Comment by Angie G — 17 August 2007 @ 5:20 PM
Hey Jason,
I don’t know a great deal about Cleve Backster (and haven’t yet gotten to the rest of this atrticle), but I’ve read his interview with Derrick Jensen, and he implies that the scientific establishment hasn’t been able to dismiss his work, and now mostly ignores him. Is it your understanding that the establishment has been able to fairly discount his work? Also, on his site, he mentions the skepdic article, and offers a fact sheet he compiled in resposne to anyone who requests. I’ve requested one, and plan to look over it. Have you seen it? If so, does he adequately respond to the claims of the ‘un-scientific’ nature of his experiments? Are there other resources besides the skepdic page that invalidate his work? If not, could it be that the page is more aimed to ‘explain away’ a phenomenon than to explain it?
In some ways, though, I do think he’s un-scientific, or maybe super-scientific, insomuch as science is biased to reproducibility, and he fully acknowledges that the responses he measures are not reproducible on demand. If I’m understanding that correctly, that seems completely reasonable, and more a short-coming of science than a reason to discount the data. I don’t think emotions and feelings are reproducible on demand (unless you have evidence to suggest they are), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t legitimate or are irrelevent.
Just some ideas- any thoughts on your end?
Comment by Archangel — 18 August 2007 @ 9:18 AM
Nice essay, one major omission however is a discussion of the role of Chi in plant-human communication. I understand that one of your purposes with this essay is to make this aspect of animism plausible to someone coming from a scientistic world-view, and therefore mentioning chi would open an extra can of worms, since you would then have to argue for the reality of chi and try to explain what its correlates are in the scientific materialist world picture. However, if you actually want to describe the factors involved in communicating with plants or give any guidance to people who are interested in beginning such communication, Chi is huge.
If you want to talk to plants I recommend learning to feel your own chi and focusing on how the plants make you feel. Of course all the senses are important.
Comment by solxyz — 18 August 2007 @ 12:28 PM
Secret Life of Plants’, the classic 1979 documentary with music and songs composed by Stevie Wonder, is available for viewing online here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4753736638977368381
For more background on the film see:
http://www.psychobotany.com/projects/SLOP.htm
Comment by Avi Solomon — 18 August 2007 @ 2:21 PM
Great essay, Jason!
It does, however, have a greater political claim, in that eating higher on the food chain is much more inefficient.
If the world’s population were small enough that we could all sustainably eat meat, that’d be great — but it isn’t.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here; but this seems awfully counterintuitive. The vast bulk of our lifetime energy intake is expended in simply keeping us alive from one day to the next, no? If it were true that animals returned more than they took, then it seems to me there’d be no need of the sun.
Comment by Eddie — 18 August 2007 @ 7:47 PM
That argument might hold water if vegetarianism could feed the planet sustainably, but it can’t. Agriculture itself is unsustainable, and the vegetarian lifestyle is only possible with agriculture.
In terms of pure energy, no, of course not; energy cannot be created or destroyed. But animals do make their ecologies more varied and diverse, and thus stronger and more resilient. So the ecology is better off for the animal. Animals pollinate flowers, spread seeds, and perform all kinds of other functions that make life for plants better than they would be otherwise. Horticulturalists in what’s today the Amazon created the rain forest we know today.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 August 2007 @ 8:25 PM
I think it’s pretty well documented that “the establishment” has quite thoroughly discounted his work. Backster’s a hack, and it’s rather embarrassing to have his name and work floating about like this. It really tarnishes a lot of the really solid evidence that has since emerged pointing to the basic idea of plant perception, if not the ESP mind reading Backster was interested in.
Of course, being a hack, Backster obviously doesn’t think so, but that’s largely a result of his ignorance of what scientific controls are and why they’re important.
I haven’t, but having seen some of his other work, I’m not holding my breath. By his own account, he watered the plant before the test. That alone could explain his findings. It was just a badly done study, and that’s why none of the hundreds of studies done to replicate his findings ever has.
Oh, there’s no doubt that skepdic has an agenda (just like the conspiracy theory and New Age sites where you’ll find Backster’s biggest supporters), but that’s hardly the only place where Backster’s been refuted. The primary arguments can be found in:
Of course, prevalence of an idea online has no correlation whatsoever with its veracity; you’ll find 100 gushing articles about Backster’s genius online for every one sober analysis of his methods.
I value science. I think science is an excellent way of knowing, no worse than many others. I don’t think it’s the only way of knowing, or the only right way of knowing, but it is a very good way of knowing. Science gives you a minimal set of data that you can be sure about. For instance, I can be sure that safrole is mildly toxic. We run into trouble when we try to take that too far, like saying that sassafras must be mildly toxic because it contains safrole. We don’t know how safrole interacts with the whole plant.
But in the case of Backter’s experiments, we have a great illustration of what makes science so valuable. Backster’s experiments are so sloppy that they don’t prove anything at all. He had no controls, there are so many different things that could have produced the read-outs he saw, from the fact that he’d just watered the plants, to the possibility of damaging his own equipment with the flame by burning the same leaf the sensor was on, that we really can’t say what he was measuring. He measured something, but to jump to the conclusion that it was plant ESP, and none of the dozens of more mundane explanations that his sloppy methods left open, seems a bit ridiculous.
What makes Backster all the more embarrassing is the fact that we have good evidence for plant communication and personhood, which is what this article was about. And yet that good evidence is now sullied by the affair of a sloppy hack who got a lot of publicity for some lousy science.
Heh heh, that’s a paper I’m writing right now; I do have some evidence that they’re reproducible. But that’s not the problem with Backster’s study. Notice, when you study humans and show them pictures of terrible things, their emotional reactions are quite consistent. So if plants have emotions that can be recorded by galvanic skin receptors, then those should be just as reproducible, right? The problem with Backster’s study is how sloppy it was, and how he never even tried to control for anything, and never even considered other possible explanations.
Not an omission. I don’t believe that chi exists. It might reflect an understanding of the movement of kinetic energy or blood flow, but as something real? No. I don’t buy it. So it wasn’t an omission; I left it out because I don’t think it’s part of the picture at all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 August 2007 @ 9:05 PM
Fair enough. But as a practical matter, doesn’t a vegan diet make more sense than a meat-based diet, in that it does a lot less harm?
Ah, I had been misunderstanding your argument. But this opens up a new can of worms. To wit: is it really possible to quantify your assertion? And even if it can be quantifiably shewn that animals give back more than they take, it’s not for animals to adjudge whether that justifies their existence — it’s for the plants to.
It’s kind of like the invasion of Iraq. The Bush-ites continually assert that Iraqis are better off post-Saddam than they were before the invasion. Complete horseshit, of course. But even if it were true, it’s still not for us to say whether that justifies our killing hundreds of thousands of people in order to make conditions better — it’s for the Iraqis to say.
Comment by Eddie — 18 August 2007 @ 9:33 PM
I don’t think so. Someone who hunts their own meat does a lot less harm. But I’m not sure a vegan does any less harm, let alone a lot less harm.
Yes, a good deal of ecology is concerned with precisely that. See “biodiversity.”
Given that at this point, many plants have evolved to need animals, I think that justification has been granted, and it’s precisely the way animals give back more than they take that brought that about. That’s how we proved ourselves.
Indeed, and I think the plants have spoken in that regard. I disagree with Pollan about a lot of things, but one point he made in The Botany of Desire certainly stands: plants have benefitted greatly from animals, and now even compete for our affections. I think that’s the clearest indication we’re ever likely to get that the plant kingdom has officially sanctioned the existence of animals.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 August 2007 @ 9:40 PM
I was a vegan for many years, and am not now, and feel much better physically for it, but I do think that, where it concerns most people who aren’t hunting their own meat, and instead are obtaining 100% of their food by paying for it (supermarket, farmer’s market, whatever), then eating plants and not animals who were eating those plants is doing less harm. It’s the difference between supporting nasty agribusiness and supporting nasty agribusiness and also anasty animal agribusiness. Do you disagree?
Comment by Archangel — 18 August 2007 @ 10:32 PM
Granted. But you didn’t specify that in your original post…
…and I didn’t specify that what I mean by “vegan” is something much more akin to the hundred-mile diet than to Kunstler’s 3,000-mile ceasar salad.
Yes, a good deal of ecology is concerned with precisely that. See “biodiversity.”
I probably didn’t word that very well. I meant, is it possible to quantify the comparison? It’s the age-old question: how do you place value upon a life?
Even if (to take an extreme example) all animals could live on Earth without encroaching upon any plants’ rights — with the exception that one plant would have to be killed — and all plants would have their lives immeasurably enriched by the animals’ existence; can we justify the animals’ existence without first obtaining the sacrificial plant’s consent?
Most likely, knowing what would come from its sacrifice, the plant would consent to give up its life. But we’re still morally obligated to ask it first.
To return to the Iraq analogy, occupation apologists like to argue that, right or wrong, we’re there now, and that if we leave, it’ll be a disaster for the Iraqis. In other words, that they “need” us.
Maybe, in some ways, they do (or, maybe we just think they do). But it doesn’t necessarily follow that they want us there. I’m reminded of the Flaming Lips’ “Christmas At The Zoo”: “All of the animals agreed they’re not happy at the zoo / But they preferred to save themselves / They seemed to think they could”. And who’re we to say that they couldn’t?
Well, the PLO officially sanctioned the existence of Israel, but that doesn’t mean that Palestinians don’t consider the events of 1948 to have been an injustice…
This may all seem like useless nit-picking — obviously, animals aren’t going to be going away any time soon. But you did pose the initial question; and, as a purely philosophical matter, I’m not satisfied with your answer.
I hasten to add that, as I said in my first comment, I really enjoyed the essay. And, more generally, have found your posts of late to be of most excellent calibre.
Comment by Eddie — 18 August 2007 @ 11:04 PM
For Backster’s original paper see:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/180335/Evidence-Of-A-Primary-Perception-In-Plant-Life
Comment by Avi Solomon — 18 August 2007 @ 11:18 PM
I can certainly respect someone who refuses to eat factory-farmed meat. That’s what Giuli does, too. But that’s not veganism. Giuli absolutely loves organic, free-range meat and cage-free eggs. But does that really do less harm? If someone decides to go vegan, that just means they’re supporting agriculture all the more. Veganism is a step away from a sustainable lifestyle.
Eating locally doesn’t really have much of a correlation with veganism or not. You can eat locally-grown meat, as well. Now, eating locally and seasonally, that does do less harm. But refraining from locally-raised meat? No, I don’t see it.
That’s very much what animism is all about. How do you negotiate that exchange? It’s plants, but animals, too. And sometimes, it comes down to simply killing someone to live. That’s one of the basic problems of civilization: having become extremists in our ethics, we’ve ended up causing far more destruction than we used to. That’s why animals have to give back more than they take, because in the end, their lives come from killing.
Would you consent to such a sacrifice? But you’re getting very much to the heart of animism right there.
The comparison is pretty specious. Do Iraqis compete for American attention? Are there more Iraqis, able to do more things, now than there were before? It’s not just a matter of having become dependent on one another, even if the argument wasn’t complete B.S. with regards to Iraq. The plant kingdom is richer and stronger now, thanks to animals. What’s more, comparing biological relationships to political mechanations is always going to lead to some pretty specious metaphors.
And neither have Palestinians competed for Israeli attention; there aren’t more Palestinians thanks to Israel; Palestinians aren’t more wealthy now thanks to Israel. Can’t say that about plants and animals.
Notice that it was published in the International Journal of Parapsychology
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 August 2007 @ 11:41 PM
Siwmae Jason and everyone!
Anyone not already familiar with Eliot Cowan’s ‘Plant Spirit Medicine’ might like to take a look. Eliot describes a wonderful journey that he was moved to take by his spontaneous experiences of communication with plants. Starting from the standard modern Western mindset, he felt driven to ask himself repeatedly: “Am I making this up…?” Yet his practical results suggested again and again that he was contacting something real, and the more he followed it, the more convincing it became.
As one who has pursued and participated in unmistakeable and sometimes quite flamboyant ‘parapsychological’ — call them that — incidents for many years, I know — well, I firmly believe, anyway — from direct personal experience that mind seems to fraternise with and use brain, but not to be confined to it; nor is it, apparently, nothing more than an epiphenomenon of neurological function, as reductive, materialist Western science would have us accept.
Lay that understanding over the matters which Jason is discussing here, and it proves to be a considerable liberator.
May I suggest also that, as Tolkein imagines so vividly in his descriptions of the nature of Ents and Huorns in his Ring cycle, many nodes of the overall life of the Gaia web — big trees, for example — live on a much longer, slower timescale than humans, just as we see the timescale of bacterial life as incredibly fast and brief from our perspective, and that of virtual particles unimaginably faster and shorter again.
Putting these two ideas together, we can see that the physical sidekick of plant intelligence — the plant brain — could well be so spread out from our perspective, and operating on such a different timescale, that it would be easy for Western science, with its very short life-so-far, to miss it.
But on the Gaian timescale, a hundred millenia is an eyeblink. So the plantweb of a continent taking hundreds of years to produce its passing cogitations could still be seen as intense, high-speed thought. And how about the thought patterns of a larger galactic, or inter-galacic lifeform?
The only other thought I wanted to add here is that individualism, especially carried to its pathological extreme as in modern Western society, predisposes us to think of ‘individual’ nodes of physical life (a questionable notion at best) as almost always in jostling competition with each other, because the getting ahead of the individual, and the defence of individual existence to its last gasp, is supposedly every ‘thing’s’ supreme motivation.
But set against that idea the ecologist’s assertion of the fundamental, inescapable interrelation of all ‘individual’ nodes(See Lynn Margulis’s: “Symbiotic Planet”); add too the Buddhist’s insistence on the inherent transience of the personal self, and indeed its illusory nature, and you begin to glimpse direct experiences of the one oceanic mindsea, in which all nodes may indeed do a certain amount of competition, but for the larger, longer-term purpose of constant COOPERATIVE creation and play within the one ocean. Individual defeat and death at the hands of supposed ‘competitors’ or ‘predators’ then becomes viewable as a proper fate for a transient nodal point, when time is ripe. Are plants really battling insects when they put out their defensive alkoloids? Or simply taking part in a balancing game with insect playmates who can just as easily be seen as an utterly essential part of the plantinsect holon? Remember the Inuit perception that: “The wolves are doctors to the caribou, and keep them strong.” And of course these ‘individual’ holons are themselves essential nodes nested in larger entities, and so on.
Extended meditative practise with these perspectives helps us to break out of the individualist, human-anchored mindset, which so badly limits our chance to feel our way back into the ‘primitive’ gather-hunter sophistication of oceanic awareness. ‘Mere’ imagination, as the poor myopia-afflicted reductive materialists like to call it.
Yes, assuredly plants are people too. Everything that is, is a person.
Cofion gorau, Rhisiart Gwilym
Comment by Anonymous — 19 August 2007 @ 5:54 AM
Yes, I agree that veganism is an industrial artifact- where else are we to get the synthetic fibers and processed soy products made miles away? But insofar as it does imply an abstention of factory farmed meat and dairy and eggs, and insofar as the baseline is commercial agricultural consumption (and I think that’s a fair baseline for most of the US population), it’s less bad.
And yeah, eating local is better, though there was a bit of attention in eco cirles a little while back about New Zealand grass fed meat being less ecologically intensive, even when shipped to Europe, than some of the local foodstuffs, mainly because of the conventional fertilizers and pesticides used in the latter. Of course, local is fresher and thus healthier, and when you’re talking about wild or gardened organic local food, then we’re talking. But the point of the whole article was that ecological impact has to take into account the whole life-cycle of a product, and not just it’s miles shipped, so local isn’t necessarily better. After all, factory farms are local to somewhere, too.
Comment by Archangel — 19 August 2007 @ 10:15 AM
Eating locally, seasonally, and lower on the food chain must be less unsustainable than eating locally, seasonally, and higher on the food chain?
Hmmm, it occurs to me that the fruitarian diet has an ethical claim over both the vegetarian and the meat-eating diet…
If the plants consent to this arrangement — and I’m not convinced that they have. (For all we know, plants may even be okay with the killing, but have issues with some other encroachments upon their rights.)
Probably. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s the aggrieved party’s choice to make.
The comparison is pretty specious. Do Iraqis compete for American attention?
Undoubtedly many do — though not because they like us; but rather because they perceive it as their surest means to survival.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who genuinely believe that Iraqis are better off than before the invasion, based simply on the reasoning that, “Saddam is gone, obviously they’re better off.” But Iraqis most likely have other criteria.
Similarly, plants very possibly have other criteria than “richer and stronger” (or different ideas than we might of what comprises “richer and stronger”).
Furthermore, even if they’d agree that they’re better off, how do we know that they feel it was worth the sacrifice? Your argument is that we know because plants compete for animals’ attention. But, just as with Iraqis, that could well be a survival strategy — and they could very well wish that the animals were all gone.
Or, they could very well have communicated their approval to the first animals, only to see the human animal violate the terms of the initial agreement.
I wouldn’t say “always”. I’d say you can take it on a case-by-case basis. And in this case, I think it works a lot better than I really expected it to.
Comment by Eddie — 19 August 2007 @ 11:57 AM
Science only proves the obvious. For some that fills the need left by the loss of the capacity to believe.For others it is a stepping stone to belief. I prefer to concentrate experiencing the things that matter - Nature and Meditation, without trying to wrangle endlessly over the exact meaning of these terms. As they say, you can only lead the horse to the water:)
Comment by Avi Solomon — 19 August 2007 @ 12:54 PM
Ethics doesn’t say anything about modes of existence(or it shouldn’t, it probably does, try to get a philosopher to shut up
).
The idea that it is necessarily bad to kill anything is a function of our “extremist” ethics that attempts to put (civilized) humanity in control of all of the actions of the natural world. How do we justify in our minds the fact that wolves need to kill to eat? We don’t! We accept that that is the way it is for wolves. If we can accept that for wolves, why can’t we accept that for humans? (Ok, I can imagine that there are people who, given the wolf example would think, “they don’t know any better”, which is an even more egregious example of extremist ethics)
If an animal returns to it’s environment more than it takes (in terms of diversity, etc.) that is an unintended consequence of the animal’s mode of existance. (Ok, more accurately, it is a result of coevolution, but coevolution is not planned by the participants and is therefore an unintended side effect) The fact that wolves reintroduced into yellowstone allowed more plant diversity was not because the wolves were actively conserving plants. The wolves were being wolves, the deer were being deer, the various plants were being themselves.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 20 August 2007 @ 11:15 AM
I don’t know about you guys, but when I see a wild animal, my instinct is not to go chase it and dig my nails and teeth into it’s neck and then rip out its belly.
I am like my monkey relatives. I LIKE FRUIT the most.
Meat is famine food. When there is nothing else to eat. And if it’s so good and great, why don’t you eat it raw? Cooking destroys 85% of protein, kills all enzymes and most vitamins.
Comment by suvine — 20 August 2007 @ 12:41 PM
I think that’s a gift of the kind of self-confidence you get from a strong community, like Jean Liedloff discussed in The Continuum Concept, or Sorenson in “Preconquest Consciousness.” We’ve been taught for so long to ignore our feelings, that naturally we disbelieve them and figure we must be making it up.
Cartesian dualism has led us to the position of a profound lack of respect for our physical bodies. We feel and think with our whole bodies. “Mind” is a verb, not a noun; it’s something the body does, in relation with the world around it. I get nervous when people talk about things like, “nothing more than an epiphenomenon of neurological function, as reductive, materialist Western science would have us accept,” because what follows is usually domesticated thought at its finest: appeals to some superstitious “world of Forms” or “spirits” separated from the world of our direct senses, always trying to drive us further from our sensuous experience of the living world.
Absolutely! Have you seen this? I love that video.
Well that can’t be it; there are plenty of plants that live much shorter than we do; plants that live only a year or two. Not all plants live for centuries on end.
Most animists disagree, like the Ojibwe elder quoted above. Only some of those rocks were people; most weren’t.
I’m not so sure. If you want to live sustainably, you’re almost certainly going to have to eat meat. Being a vegan makes rewilding much more difficult, if not impossible. Maybe it’s “less bad” in absolute terms, but it moves you even further away from being “good.” Before you’ll reach sustainability, your veganism will become a hurdle you’ll have to overcome.
But even then, it’s still moving you away from a relationship with your landbase. It’s still moving you away from becoming more native, from rewilding, from attuning yourself to the rhythm of your place’s seasons, tastes, smells, etc. So like veganism, it might be “less bad,” but it’s also further away from “good.”
For alpha predators, yes. Probably not for ungulates, but we’re not ungulates, we’re humans. We’re omnivores. We’re fairly high on the food chain, for the most part. If you try to eat lower, then you are necessarily engaging in an unsustainable system. That’s just another habit you’re going to have to break to become actually sustainable.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Thank you, Anonymous, for reminding me of that quote from the Inuit: “The wolves are doctors to the caribou, and keep them strong.” Are you familiar with what happened in Yellowstone when the wolves returned? What would the world be like without herbivores or carnivores? Certainly no fun for the plants, either.
If competing for animal attention, trying to become something that animals will like better, taste better, or even just smell better, does not constitute an expression of consent, whatever could? Seems to me that’s about the clearest signal you could ever hope for.
No; cooperating with the American forces is a death sentence.
I offered some criteria that I think most Iraqis would agree with, and they had nothing to do with Saddam.
The answer is an astounding no on all counts. You can’t say that for plants. There are more plants, more kinds of plants, and they’re richer and able to do far more now than they ever could before animals. Yes, I agree, that it would be for the plants to decide. But I think they’ve made their decision astoundingly clear. They’ve done more than become dependent on us; they compete for our favor, they give us fruit, adapt to smell better or attract our attention, because animals have helped plants so much that one of the best strategies plants have developed is to get animals to do stuff for them. They positively love us.
Because they’ve gone to such great lengths to accept us, embrace us, and include us in their community.
They communicate their approval to each succeeding generation of animists, and one suspects other animals, too. It wasn’t humans who violated the agreement, just one culture of humans among many, who finally managed to convince themselves that plants had nothing to say, because they had grown tired of hearing them shouting to stop.
Well that’s just ridiculous. Science has proven some pretty fascinating and non-obvious things.
That’s every bit as inane as when you hear people tell you that science is the only way to know anything. We have many ways of knowing, and all of them have value. You might as well reject hammers forevermore and tell us how the screwdriver is the only tool we’ll ever need. There’s no one right tool; a well-stocked toolbox is useful. There’s no one right way to know, either, and being a zealot for one way doesn’t make you any less foolish than a zealot for another.
Yeah; it’s not our problem, that’s for the wolves to figure out. We need to figure out our own way of life. But if someone takes more than he gives, the community is diminished by that person; that person can’t be allowed to keep going, or he’ll destroy the whole community. So how do you give back more than you take? Wolves give back more than they take. So do most humans–all but one culture.
Because we are humans. Just as it’s up to wolves to figure out what works for wolves, so it’s up to humans to figure out what works for humans. That would be us, so we can’t just leave that one alone. If not us, who?
And part of being wolf is to give back more than you take. That’s very much what animism is all about; how do you ask permission? How do you give back more than you take? According to animists, other animals are animists, too, and they engage in some of the same rituals humans do to give back more than they take. We’re the ones obsessed with conscious thought; they care more about ritual, and conscious or not, there can be no denying that wolves following wolf rituals (like the Hunt) helps give back more than they take.
Suvine, that’s just ridiculous. Meat is no starvation food; hunter-gatherers pursue meat vigorously, because there’s nothing that can match it for its protein density. Meat can be eaten raw, but we generally find cooked meat more palatable because we evolved from scavengers, so we prefer the taste of meat when its texture more resembles that of rotting flesh. Cooking does diminish meat’s nutrition, but not as much as you claim, unless it’s being vastly overcooked. It’s a balance of nutritional value and palatability, which is the same balance struck with the preparation of vegetables and fruit, too. As for saying that humans eat fruit like monkeys, that just shows a good deal of ignorance about monkeys. Sure, we have a fructarian ancestry, and before that, an insectivorous ancestry. But chimps eat meat, too. And before we were omnivores, we were also scavengers. Seeing an animal and not wanting to rip its throat out just means you’re not crazy. Normal people only kill animals for food when they go hunting for them. You don’t see lions normally killing anything that wanders past them, either, you notice.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 August 2007 @ 1:23 PM
Too true! And it’s one (the only one, probably) that I’m really not sure I’ll be able to overcome. I’m not philosophically opposed to hunting; but honestly don’t know whether I personally can do it. Time will tell.
And yet, many do. Why? Do they want to die? Or do they perceive it (rightly or wrongly) as their least-bad option?
The point is that rather than assuming that we know what’s best for them, we should ask the Iraqis — and the plants — what their criteria are.
I feel like we’re just going around in circles. But I’ll say again that you don’t know their motivation for doing these things. Maybe, as I say, it’s a survival strategy. Maybe it’s part of a plan to eventually kill us all off. We don’t really know.
I presume you’ve intuited their feelings on the matter more less accurately. But without asking, neither you nor I know that your interpretation is correct.
So what? I guess only that we should make it part of our project to figure out ways to ask them what they want from us; or even, indeed, whether they’d prefer we fuck off (or figure out how to convert sunlight to energy for our own damn selves) altogether.
Comment by Eddie — 20 August 2007 @ 2:54 PM
Giuli’s vegetarianism has probably hardened me to veganism. It’s helped make her so far removed from the natural world that she’s too disgusted generally to even touch meat, let alone eat insects. How can you butcher a deer when you can’t even touch ground beef?
There’s actually a big problem with how few will. Some use us to get back at old enemies. A few believe in “the cause.” But it’s never the least-bad option; it’s usually the most-bad option.
And again, see animism. That’s to animism what, say, repeatable experimentation is to science. They’ve already sounded off that their criteria are the same as every person’s: more of us, better off, able to do more. This gets down to the “Selfish Gene” level of universality.
I suppose if you reject the clearest way anyone’s ever voiced their affirmation, then no, we don’t know. But the plants have been much more clear than you or I have.
Most of the plant world would die off if we did. What would survive would be incredibly impoverished. And if you’ve studied animism for very long, you know they haven’t kept their opinions to themselves, but you keep suggesting this as a hypothetical, rather than as an historical fact, so I don’t think you have.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 August 2007 @ 3:05 PM
I’m not quite that far gone — hell, I still get cravings for meat, even ten years since having eaten any. But the actual act of the killing is a major stumbling block for me (irrational, I acknowledge, considering I’m perfectly willing to kill plants).
Okay, that works for me — now all we need is a citation or two, and I’ll concede the point. (And don’t take that the wrong way! I’m genuinely interested, and your sources are usually quite good.)
Comment by Eddie — 20 August 2007 @ 8:49 PM
On vegetarianism/veganism:
I did an 8 year stint as a vegetarian. Let me tell you, now that I eat meat again, it just amazes me how much I [i]love[/i] the smell of fresh, raw meat.
I break out some deer from the freezer, and man, by the time it finishes thawing… it takes a certain amount of effort to wait for the minimum searing….
One of the reasons I went veggie to start with was that I had some moral issues with the distance we have between us and our food. I still have that as our meat is still much further away from us than I’d prefer, but….
On plant/animal relations:
If we’re including a large portion of the plethora of soil life as animals (as, imho, we should), then, yes, we have some very, very strong (and healthy) relationships in existence between plants & animals. We can see those relationships in “higher order” animals as well, but I think it’s clearer when we start looking at soil (not to mention insects), imho.
Comment by jhereg — 21 August 2007 @ 9:30 AM
Are you aware of this research? More to your taste than Backster:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/41179/plant-mind
http://www.scribd.com/doc/40729/The-Concept-of-Plants-as-Teachers
http://www.scribd.com/doc/41182/Root-apices-as-plant-command-centres
Comment by Avi Solomon — 21 August 2007 @ 1:59 PM
Jason,
I love how you threw off at the end, oh yeah the humans made the amazon and the great plains… that ought to ffuck with lots of heads!
I’m encouraged by your writing (see me vision posted on Ishthink, “A Valley Vision” Except rather than play with the philosophical depths of our interplay, I’m attempting to bring social jsutice to humans by reconnecting them with the regional community of life.
Edible Forest Garden looks like a great book that I may have to purchase soon (or rewrite!). I am experimenting with something new. Since teafching a man to fish would lead him to brain seizures and daeth, I am going to teach him how to clean up the rivers, sequester heavy metals out of the ecosystem, and then grow his own fish to eat some and return the rest to the wild. Perhaps I will write the book on biodynamic aquaculture!
I feel that society has a hard time getting out of it’s rut because I would estimate that most americans are in some form of a sugar coma. Without proper protein nutrition, I believe this is the largest stumbling block to AMerica’s lack of motivation. I think the ideas are out there, they are spoiling in our own minds, but that’s because our bodies resident levels of sacchromycetes are so high that we’re litterally drunk on our own bread and circus.
I believe in Chi, but that’s because it’s reality is only sensed and felt, there is no definition of what chi is, only that it points to the moon. I don’t ‘believe’ in the finger that pointed me to it, but certainly I’m feeling and sensing SOMETHING.
I’m totally blown away by fungi. Our destiny is intertwined. If we could jsut simply get to the point where we leave the micro side of life alone, it could heal itself, and us as well. If we don’t quit polluting, then only opportunistic organisms will survive, and the matrix that keeps mammals afloat will be lost in the genetic river. It’s unfortunate that there are so many of us human; the individual’s voice is small.
I don’t know yet how to share my vision over the internet. I can only imagine ya’ll going camping with me and the group. I can only imagine the nightwalks, and the sunrises, and the greasy breakfasts. I can’t communicate to you ‘this IS life’, and most of my friends are paranoids, so vicariously it can’t be.
Find a vocation that adds to the health of the soil, water and air, that’s it, thats The Real Secret, that’s how you can love your life even while the ship your ego wanted to save goes down.
Comment by tonyZ — 12 September 2007 @ 2:53 PM