Plants as Pets?

To my mind one of the more obvious instantiations of the idea of plants as persons would be plants as pets. I am not sure to what extent people hold this attitude, but to the extent that they do I imagine it would be reserved for a single plant in particular: an oak tree or maybe a rose bush. It is hard to think of a lawn gaining such a singular stature, although the culture of care for both pets and lawns show strong parallels: specialized products dedicated to them, not to mention a kind of recreational devotion. I suppose people do not name their lawns, due no doubt to the fact that they are considered inanimate, or at least not animate in the way that animals are. Anima means soul or spirit, and it is no mistake that it serves as the root for animal, animate, animated and other derivations. Another reason why plants are seldom or never regarded as pets is that they exist so commonly in collectives, with the lawn being perhaps the prime example of this, Walt Whitman's paean to leaves of grass notwithstanding, but then the idea of social collectives in modern western industrial societies has been on the wane for decades now, so I do not expect this status to change any time soon. One dog or one cat, or perhaps two, seems to be the proper number of animals to have as pets. Above that, the number seems suspicious.

I once has a rubber tree plant (why the double vegetal indication I do not know) that seemed particularly contented in a corner of my living room by a window. I had a true connection with that plant and still feel pangs of guilt for giving it to my neighbor when I moved out of the house. I visited him some months later and saw it in a dark dining room, having diminished from a fat and happy being to a spindly and dwindled stalk in a short time. I cannot imagine having stronger feelings of sorrow had the plant been a dog or a cat who had suffered the same fate. This of course calls into the question the nature of human relations to other beings and things of the world. I have had similar feelings even for nonliving things. There is something about disorder and disintegration of an entity that is moving. Certainly the extent to which that entity itself has feelings related to its disintegration compounds the problem, but there seems to be an initial if not primary font of feelings that emanates from the feeler that is independent of the emotional state of the entity to which the feelings are directed. It makes me wonder to what extent the affection that is felt and professed for another is mostly or perhaps entirely an attendance to one's own feelings, if feelings can be apportioned in such a way. 

EXCERPT: Davos (1)

Here are the opening paragraphs from Davos, the first book in the Franco Fasiolo series, which recounts the adventures of its eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic botanist and reluctant cosmopolitan. I hope you enjoy it!

DAVOS

A Franco Fasiolo Novel

Chapter One

And with that, Franco closed the door and began to walk.

The road up out of the valley, which he reached after several minutes of weaving through the landscapes of modern rural life: the clusters of advertisements for real estate agents, dentists and propane suppliers, the emotional pleas for solar energy sprayed on three-hundred year old walls, the lengths of enormous black pipe that had never found their purpose, the hokey kitsch that says more about the deterioration of urban hearts than it does about country life, the modern buildings that evoke only embarrassment for not looking like they were made by a fourteen-year-old, the stately homes that communicate the cruel inequality of times past in the richness of their design and construction, the plastic playthings of a group of children inside the security of a prefabricated fence, and the baying dogs who see it as their duty to ferociously protect it all. Franco walked past all of it, still unable to find reconciliation among it and with it after all of these years. Where were they doing it right? Surely not the cities, where this was all you see, and therefore did not see, and surely not the villages that had little in the way of these things, mostly because they had little in the way of anything, people included. There, high in the mountains, you saw other things: the lonely cow locked in a dark stall, the stolid donkey staring straight ahead at nothing for minutes at a time, the frantic mama goat and her kids, who comes charging at you and, forced to stop by the fence that stands between you, unleashes a gush of urine at your feet, either by accident or in greeting. What does she want? Food? Affection? A chat? Franco would love to stop but what would he do? What would he say? So he would keep walking, hoping that it were true that animals forget the pain of their disappointment within a few minutes.

A fig tree, ridiculous with fruit, cheered him up. It seemed to not know, not mind or not care about the squalor around it, and in fact was doing everything it could to alleviate it. What abundance of energy caused it to push all of those fruits out of the ends of its twigs? What sense of duty and purpose caused it to throw itself with such abandon into such an expensive display? Would anyone eat them? Bursting, big as your palm, and here high in the mountains, alone among the larch and birch and pine, like that African man he saw on the train in his pajamas. Yes, Franco knows he should not call them pajamas, which is an Urdu word, but that was not why. What was it, something about cultural relativity? So if culture is relative, why is it not okay to call them pajamas? Maybe he would not mind if I called them pajamas, maybe even like it, maybe find it funny?, Franco thought. If someone called his shirt a blouse, he would not mind. Rigan, in Hausa. He would quite like it. Ihembe in Zulu. Not bad. What was the fig tree thinking, so far away from the world of shirts and pajamas and molded plastic slides, from somber cows and excited goats. No, not from the goat. There was something of the goat in the fig tree, and vice versa. One time Franco saw a cow lactating on a beach in Hong Kong, wisps of sticky milk whipping in the wind around her teats and hind legs, long white strands of fat and sugar that dripped to the sand, inedible in their contaminated state. What a waste. He should have picked that fig, gravid with its own lurid progeny, scarlet wrapped in green, Christmas time.

ABSTRACT: Incorporating Nonhuman Subjectivity into World Society: The Case of Extending Personhood to Plants

I am sorry to have been absent for so long. I have been hard at work! The following is the abstract to a just completed manuscript of mine that is currently under review:

Recent scholarship reveals that plants exhibit qualities and abilities that are analogous to those possessed by humans and other animals, and sometimes argues that they should be regarded and treated not as objects and property but as subjects and agents, and in some cases granted personhood. I explore this argument within the framework of the relation between modern subjectivities and world society. I start by engaging discourses on subjectivity and personhood, first generally and then with regard to nonhuman beings, specifically primates who are held and used as experimental subjects in research laboratories. I then outline a conception of world society that includes nonhuman subjectivity within it. I next shift my attention to plants to examine a comparable reasoning, relying on several current studies on plant ontology and ecology to inform my substitution of plants for animals in a global system of social relations. I conclude that the claims for plant subjectivity and personhood have merit, and remain valid at the global scale, especially within the contours and exigencies of the Anthropocene, the emerging geologic era that calls for a reformation of human-environment relations. A key finding of the study is that indigenous and pagan cultures, particularly those with animist traditions, have long given plants a level of social recognition, and that new scientific findings support them. I conclude that a reanimated understanding of plants as subjects and persons calls for a model of world society that is universally inclusive, extending beyond conceptualizations of the social that are exclusively human.

PREVIEW: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World, by Peter Wohlleben, Foreword by Tim Flannery, Vancouver: Greystone Books

I am highly anticipating the release of the English translation of The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, which is scheduled for the middle of next month. I have not yet read all of the reviews, so I cannot say too much at the moment, but the chatter about it is exciting and it is a number one best seller in Germany.

Wohlleben is a forester with many years of experience, so he writes not primarily as a philosopher or a scientist, but as a practitioner, although his work promises to draw on the first two fields as well as the one with which he is more familiar.

One intriguing finding, which I am eager to read more about, is the social nature of trees. Fittingly, Wohlleben takes as his subject not the tree so much as the forest; in other word, his ontological unit of interest is the collective and not the individual. One provocative review, or perhaps Wohlleben himself, likens the solitary tree to a child who is left to fend for him or herself on the street, a weakening condition that shortens the tree's life. Like humans, trees are social beings and need to be in the company of others to thrive. As others have noted, parent trees communicate with their offspring, and as Wohlleben apparently describes, they send special nurturance to those who appear weak and sickly.

I am really looking forward to reading The Hidden Life of Trees, which you can preorder on Amazon and elsewhere in hardback or digital edition, as well as in the form of an audio recording.