Plant and Project

Following up on my admittedly overly mechanistic promise to break down every element of the name of this blog, or nearly so (‘international’ shouldn’t be left unexamined, so I will get to it also), I take up the words ‘plant’ and ‘project’. The saving grace of such a task is that any assumptions can be tossed aside, leaving terms that had seemed simple enough susceptible to and amenable to reinterpretation.

So what is a plant? I want to address this question in two ways. First, I will consider the category from a physiological perspective and second, from a social point of view.

My survey of the literature so far suggests that a plant is a biological entity whose metabolism is based upon photosynthesis. This places the plant in the position of being the great translator between the fizzing energy of the sun and the meatier ontologies of animals, to surrender to a somewhat unsophisticated adjective. It is not bad, however, since one of the fundamental characteristics of residents of the kingdom Plantae is their composition in cellulose as opposed to the tissue of those resident in Animalia. Both are eukaryotes (organisms composed of cells with nuclei and membranes) and, as I will address in a future post, and as Mancuso and Viola discuss at length, at the cellular scale, distinguishing a plant from an animal can be quite difficult and, in fact, the comparison leads to some surprising insights in the both similar and contrasting natures of plants and animals.

A turn to an etymological investigation of the word ‘plant’ reveals it to be of the kind of noun that is derived from a verb: a plant (from Latin planta) is a thing that is planted (from Latin plantare). A consideration of these linguistic origins points to an essential typological characteristic of plants: they are sessile (rooted, fixed in place) as opposed to mobile (a distinguishing feature of animals).

So a plant is an organism that is rooted in soil, made of cellulose, and which derives its energy through the process of photosynthesis. There are important exceptions, modifications and addenda that need to be posed to this basic definition, but it at least stakes out some of the basic parameters of plants.

In a less straightforward way, I want to address the social understanding of plants. What is a plant from this perspective? I will address this question first by considering the idea of plant as individual organism as opposed to the idea of plant as collective. One way of considering the complexity of a system is to place it on a scale between the Baroque and Romantic epistemologies that emerged in the 17^th through 19^th centuries. Briefly summarized, the Baroque perspective looks downward, seeing worlds within worlds in a never-ending diminution in scale. In contrast, the Romantic view looks upward, seeing a grand assembly of agents acting in an enormous and unified ecology. The first perspective is well served by a microscope, the second by a telescope, at least in a suggestive rather than literal sense. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a key exponent of Baroque thought, while Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a major developer of the Romantic outlook. Both views posit the same model, one in which complexity increases with scale, the difference being the direction in which they trace it.

The significance that this discussion has for plants is that it is often more accurate and useful to see organisms – humans, cats, birds, fish, plants – less as individual beings and more as collective ecologies. The human body, for example, not only hosts a number of other organisms, on its skin and inside its organs, but is in fact dependent upon them. The human digestive system, for example, would not function without the myriad bacteria that populate it.

So how should we look at a human body – as a being or as a community? I aver the latter and do the same for plants, who evince an even stronger distributive nature, in the shape and function of their leaf and root systems (in the Baroque model), as well as in the shape and function of their intra- and inter-species communities (according to the Romantic idea) , aspects of plant physiology that I will address in future posts and again, something that Mancuso and Viola unveil expertly.

As for project, perhaps the most important feature of this word is its connotation of ‘process’. The Plant Ontology and Persona Project, as manifest in this blog, is very much a dialog, a discussion that is not necessarily tenuous, as it is based upon sound science and logic, but one that is very much in process. A person is whatever we – individually and collectively – decide it is, so I look forward to your insights on the topic, rendered in the form of comments to each post as it appears.