REVIEW: Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Foreword by Michael Pollan, Translated by Joan Benham, Washington: Island Press, 2015

Do plants dream? This is a question I had when finishing this remarkable book. Stefano Mancuso, the director of the International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology (Laboratorio Internazionale di Neurobiologia Vegetale, or LINV) in Florence, Italy, and his co-author, Alessandra Viola, do not answer this question, let alone ask it, but they seem to come awfully close. Plants possess the powers of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, not to mention a myriad of other capacities that humans and other animals lack, so why not the ability to dream, as well as other attributes of sentience and intelligence?

More than any other book, Brilliant Green has inspired my fascination with the social nature of plants. Written in an engaging manner and replete with dazzling imaginaries that are fortified by convincing science, the study radically argues for a major shift in how we consider plants as players in Earth's ecology, with ecology construed in both social and physiological senses. Plants are the unsung heroes of the world, according to Mancuso and Viola, and it is high time we changed our thinking about them.

Why do they think this? Here are just some of the startling insights they provide. Plants communicate with each other, using chemical signals that they send through the air via their leaves and stems and through the soil via their roots, the latter sometimes aided by fungal and bacterial networks. They live in communities and can recognize their siblings, this second attribute made visible by the way they arrange their root systems in relation to each other, depending upon their degree of relatedness. Saplings grown from seeds taken from the same tree cooperate with each other by not competing for sunlight or soil space, for example in the second instance by keeping their root systems contained to their own patch of soil, while those from multiple trees extend their roots in such a way so as to maximize their access to soil nutrients, all in the grand evolutionary imperative to pass on one’s genes.

The power of plants to engage their surroundings goes well beyond their own internecine relations, however. They form alliances with other species, for example, including humans and other animals, using their vegetal wiles to lure unsuspecting insects into transferring pollen from one flower to another, a mode of sexual reproduction that requires assistants, given plants’ sessile nature. In fact, the rootedness of plants is at the core of their ontology; all of their remarkable abilities are enabled, constrained and necessitated by this essential characteristic.

The instantiations of plant genius that Mancuso and Viola enumerate are stupefying. One species of plant produces a flower that replicates, in the stigma of its pistil, the pudendum of a certain kind of insect, such that the male of the species is not only fooled into entering the flower and thereby coating himself in the surrounding pollen during the course of his romantic executions, but who actually prefers the floral to the real version: even when fertile females are present and receptive, the males choose to mate with the flower. It is a demonstration of ecological competition in its most exquisitely attuned form.

It gets better. When one kind of plant becomes smudged by an undesired material – dust, for example – ants that have taken up symbiotic residence in its stems and leaves, quickly move in to clean away the offending particles. When another species is attacked by a swarm of insects, it will send out a chemical signal to another species of insect to come to the rescue, the second group of insects chasing off the first.

These are just a few of the spectacular revelations contained in this remarkable study. It is not a long work, easily consumable in a long day, or two, but you will want to savor it slowly by reading and rereading it because so much of what it has to tell us about plants is so transformative of our common understanding of them.

If I can point to a shortcoming of the book, it would be that Mancuso and Viola stop short of fully developing their discussion of plant personhood and rights associated with it. So while David Chamovitz has reservations about using words such as ‘dignity’ with reference to plants, Mancuso and Viola have no problem with it at all, firmly applauding the unanimous position against the arbitrary destruction of plants made by a Swiss bioethics commission. See my earlier review What a Plant Knows for a simple discussion of the position.

There is a strong set of theories in the social sciences that scholars could draw upon to make real advances in our understanding of the social nature of plants, social not only in the sense of their relations among themselves, but also of course with reference to their relations with other species, including human beings. It is my aim in this blog to engage these theories for this purpose myself.

Brilliant Green is an absolutely brilliant book: spirited, engaging and life changing, at least for me. I hope it will be the same for you. The Kindle version is available on Amazon for a pittance. I could not possibly recommend a better book to read next. Buy or borrow and read it now.

Ontology and Personhood

Before I launch into another review, I thought it might be a good idea to discuss at length some of the key organizing concepts of this blog, namely ontology and personhood.

The first is quite simple, at least in the way I use it here. What I mean by ontology is ‘the nature of being’. In philosophical circles, specifically metaphysics, ontology is discussed in its most abstract sense – what does it mean to say that something ‘is’ or that something ‘exists’? I rarely wade into such heady waters, although splashing around in them at least a bit will be necessary. My concern with ontology in this blog is much more practical – what is the nature of a plant’s being, with ‘being’ meaning both an entity and a condition, both a phenomenon and a process. What is the nature of the plant as an organism (the first meaning) and what is the nature of its basic experience (the second meaning). In engaging these practical questions, I will have to engage theoretical ideas about ontology from time to time, but mostly my focus will be on understanding and developing the idea of ontology as it is specific to and observable in plants.

The second idea is ‘personhood’, or more basically that of ‘person’. The first point of potential confusion that requires clarification is that the concept of 'person' is distinct from that of 'human'. In no way does this blog suggest that plants are human beings. This frees the way for considering the concept of person in nonhuman and even inanimate form. This idea is not as strange as you might imagine. In the fields of philosophy, ethics and law, the idea of a person existing in forms other than that of a single human being is commonplace. In the realm of law, an American jurist referred to nonhuman personhood, actually even inanimate personhood, as a ‘legal fiction’, the particular recipient of personhood status in this case being a ship. Since then, legal personhood has been granted to corporations, and the most current and vivid case being tried in courts involves the personhood of chimpanzees and orangutans being used as experimental subjects in scientific laboratories. These cases are not without precedent. A court in India granted personhood to a holy text, the Guru Granth Sahib, and in New Zealand, another court determined that a river bore this status. And of course, in medieval Europe, the regular appearance of nonhumans in courts of law to stand trial for crimes of which they were accused was commonplace and is well documented.

Outside of law, the concept of nonhuman and inanimate personhood is longstanding. Traditional cultures throughout the world and throughout history have considered and continue to consider entities as diverse as mountains, plants and stones to be persons as much as humans are if, however, also radically different in terms of their ontologies. This traditional animist way of thinking has recently experienced a new wave of support in the form of ‘new animism’, a field of anthropology that examines personhood as it exists with reference to more-than-human worlds or other-than-human entities, such as robots and cyborgs, as well as forms of technologically enhanced humans, as well as a renewed appreciation for more natural forms of nonhuman personhood, particularly as they are relevant to discussions of climate change and other environmental conditions.

This is just a cursory treatment of the idea of personhood, particularly as it relates to nonhuman and inanimate entities. I have not touched on the vital role that the concept plays in discussions of abortion and assisted death, for example. Neither have I broached the topic of collective personhood, other than a brief mention of corporations. So whether the idea of nonhuman and inanimate personhood is a convenient fabrication, or takes the form of a more closely held cultural belief, there are more than enough prior manifestations of the idea to suggest that speaking of plants as persons is not as extreme as it might seem at first blush, in fact far from it.

Furthermore, the relation of ontology to personhood provides a rich and important opportunity to consider topics such as rights and obligations, since what a plant does and what can be done to it, as conditioned by its ontological features, plays into what kind of person it is, and therefore what kind of personhood it bears. Society might extend the right to vote to certain human persons, for example, but never to monkeys and certainly not plants, at least currently. By the same token, some environmental conditions are less critical to human welfare, at least when compared to the vital role they play in the lives of plants, therefore different rights and obligations obtain in each set of circumstances.

The two remaining terms bear clarification also, specifically ‘plant’ and ‘project’. I will address those in future posts, as they are essential to understanding the nature of this blog and are not as straightforward as you might think.

REVIEW: What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses, by David Chamovitz, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

The strongest aspect of David Chamovitz's book is his detailed explanations of plant physiology. He does an admirable job of revealing the nature of plant awareness in clear and engaging language, thereby rendering complex concepts, which can be challenging for those with little or no knowledge of botany, into careful and accessible insights into the world as plants know it.

His engagements with the social, as opposed to biological, nature of plants, however, does not exhibit the same level of expertise. This is unfortunate, because Chamovitz is clearly a lover and admirer of plants. He cannot bring himself to fully insert them into his concept of the social, always stopping just short of doing so, or backtracking once he has conceded that plants are beings that are far more sophisticated than most people think. 

For instance, in the book's epilogue, he writes:

While we use the same terms—"see," "smell," "feel"— we also know that the overall sensual experience is qualitatively different for plants and people. Without this caveat, anthropomorphism of plant behavior left unchecked can lead to unfortunate, if not humorous, consequences. For example, in 2008 the Swiss government established an ethics committee to protect the "dignity" of plants.

If one reads the actual document in which the Swiss position is detailed, The dignity of living beings with regard to plants: Moral consideration of plants for their own sake, issued by the Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH), one finds a very temperate and, if I must say, somewhat bureaucratic document that seems neither unfortunate nor humorous at all, being quite measured and evenhanded in its discussion of the matter. 

In this particular case, Chamovitz seems to have a particular problem with the word 'dignity', seeing it as a term and concept that can only be properly applied to human beings, because plants apparently lack whatever qualities would make them worthy of respectful treatment. We can use these words metaphorically to help convey something about the nature of plants, Chamovitz argues, but we must be careful to not anthropomorphize vegetal life.

What I find peculiar about this argument is Chamovitz's apparent need to consider 'dignity', and other qualities such as 'happiness', as purely human concepts. In this view, the real meanings of words such as dignity and happiness can reference only human sensibilities, and that their use in any other context renders them 'metaphorical'. Well, I don't see why these words cannot in fact reference a larger context, one that includes plants and human beings, as well as other entities, equally. For example, could I not treat a piece of art or a book with dignity? Am I somehow corrupting the meaning of that word by using it in reference to inanimate objects?

I understand the point that Chamovitz makes in warning against making false equivalencies between humans and plants, but I think a richer and more inclusive conceptualization of the social, and a more flexible engagement with the terms that are used to discuss it, allow for a more expansive understanding of plants and the roles that they play in society, a concept that should not be conceived or engaged from a purely human perspective.

Overall, however, What a Plant Knows is a fresh and essential intervention into the discussion of the fascinating lives and abilities of the vegetal beings who are so essential to life on our planet, and whose virtues and importance are still misunderstood and under appreciated.

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog of Plant Ontology and Personhood Project International (POPPI).

The aims of POPPI are to:

Promote awareness and understanding of plant ontology and personhood by curating, displaying and reviewing works related to the biological and social natures of plants; 

Inspire conscientiousness in consumers and producers of plant-based goods by revealing how understanding the agency and ecology of plants expands appreciation for them;

Coordinate with other social and environmental welfare groups by engaging discussions of personhood and rights as they exist and emerge across ontological forms;

Advocate for the ethical treatment of plants by pursuing practical activities through appropriate channels at local, national and global scales.