The Comforting Presence of Plants

What accounts for the comforting presence of plants? What makes them different from other material objects, including human beings and other animals? We can talk about 'energy' that is specific to various ontological forms: dogs, cats, fish, humans et cetera, which all charge a space with feelings that are quantitatively and qualitatively different, in accordance with their varying characteristics, which change also of course according to features that are present in all of them: for example, size, age and health, as well as innumerable individual differences that cannot or have not yet been categorized.

Just as there is variability on the production side, there is also variability on the reception side. Are some people more susceptible to the charms of plants? Probably, but I suspect it has much more to do withe personal and cultural influences than it does to any kind of innate difference, but this is something that needs to be studied, if it has not been already. Are human beings genetically coded to like trees or is such affection a cultural construct? I am sure there are many anthropological engagements with the question, but to what extent are these conducted within Anglo-Eurpean geographical contexts that are tree-laden, even in urban settings? Peter Wohlleben's observation that trees planted in an urban setting, like soldiers lining streets and boulevards (my description), suffer in this deployment, supports my long-held suspicion that these trees are being abused, separated as they are from their natural familial clusterings as found in forests. We may derive some pleasure from their presence, but if we were really tuned into their wellbeing, we would be distressed by their condition, just as we would be distressed by the appearance of a kitten or puppy who had been left alone on the sidewalk or in some alley, separated from its mother.

On that note, I have run out of books to review on the topic of the social nature of plants, so I will turn my attention to journal articles as well as my own investigations, in future posts.

Why think about plants as persons?

Why should we think of plants as persons? Can't we just be nice to them?

We should think of plants as persons because, from my perspective, it is the most accurate way to think of them, with person serving as an ontological category that can contain all kinds of things, whether they are animal, vegetable or mineral, to use a trinity from a guessing game I used to play as a child.

This ides of course calls for a conception of the word 'person' that lies outside of its usual everyday meaning of 'human'. So cutting any kind of exclusive link between the idea of 'person' and that of 'human' is a great place to start.

What then, exactly, is a person? I would say that it is an entity that has an agenda, with the idea of agenda being very largely construed. Does a dog have an agenda? I think most people would agree that it undoubtedly does. Birds, fish and spiders? Of course. Plants? Yes. Fungi and bacteria? Clearly. Rocks? Rrrrrhhh! (That's the sound of brakes squealing).

Does a rock want to do something? Of course. It 'wants' to do things in accordance with an ontology that is bounded by the physical and chemical parameters of minerals just as plants and animals want to do things within the confines of their biological ontologies. I understand that some may quibble with my use of the word 'want' here, but since an aim of this blog is to emphasize similarity rather than difference across ontological forms, I use the word in an open way. After all, not all wants are intentional. I do not think my hunger into being, it merely appears through no conscious effort on my own, as a condition of the nature of my beings. Similarly, a rock that is exposed to the serial effects of rain and sun wants to break so as to conform to its ecological conditions. Similarly, a mason or carpenter would say that a particular stone or piece of wood 'wants' to break or separate along its grain. In this way, even inanimate things exert their will upon society, shaping our art and architecture and, in a more fundamental sense, transforming the ground we stand upon.

In this sense, dogs, birds, fish, plants and rocks are all entities with agendas, and are therefore persons. Now, we can also say that groups of dogs, birds, fish, plants and rocks behave in ways that are both similar to and different from those of their singular forms, but that, that idea of collective agency and collective persons, with collective agendas, note the interesting connection between the words 'agency' and 'agenda', shall be a topic for another post.

The Radical Exteriority of Plants

Have I written on this before?

One of the more essential aspects of plants, in my view, is their sheer presence in the world, and this presence is no more apparent than in their method of reproduction. Mammals have evolved special organs in which they nurture a fetus until it is strong enough to survive in an open environment. Some species have evolved long gestations to facilitate the long period of nurturance that complex neural systems, for example, require to develop. Other classes of animals, such as fish, amphibians and reptiles, have evolved other strategies, such as producing and fertilizing relatively huge numbers of eggs in order to increase the odds of species survival in their favor. Only mammals have uteruses, organs that I like to think of as specialized and super-protective environments to allow for an incubation period that occurs inside rather than outside a sexually-reproducing animal.

How strange and instructive it is, then, that plants have evolved in such a way that they are capable of carrying out the complex and delicate process of fertilization, let alone incubation, such that it is, more or less entirely outside of their organism. And not only does it occur outside of plant bodies, but it also requires, by design, the involvement of other beings, namely birds, bees, bats and even human beings, as well as other creatures.

In this sense, agency, at least the agency of sexual reproduction, cannot be ascribed to a single organism, but is necessarily a group project. I said earlier that plants are instructive in this way because such a clear example of agency existing as a feature of a collective rather than an individual, as a dynamic of an ecology rather than an organism, points to the collective nature of human agency. Where would we be, for example, without the help of the countless organisms that inhabit our bodies and make them work?

As I have written before in this blog, and as scientists and scholars such as Pollan, Chamovitz, Mancuso, Hall, Nealon and others have elaborated, plants stand to teach us a lot not only about themselves but about us and about life in general as well. The beauty of plants is that all aspects of their lives are always on display for us to observe, such is their prepossessing and - seemingly - unselfconscious generosity.

Talk about tough.

Horses with Four Legs

There is a logic that some people use that I find strange. It goes something like this: If everything is or has X, then X is unimportant. So for example if, as some scientists claim, everything is or has consciousness, then consciousness is unimportant; that is, you cannot use it to make any claim about an entity, such as what it is like or to which category it belongs.

I have a standard response to such complaints, so when a student recently protested that my claim that everything has agency was irrelevant because the ubiquity of the characteristic made it useless for any kind of taxonomic sorting, I replied: All horses have four legs. Does that mean the fact that a horse has four legs is unimportant to understanding its nature?

My point is that we should focus on our similarities as well as our differences. Such is the politics of our times, however, that it is difference that is celebrated over similarity. So while I see clear differences among human beings, nonhuman animals, plants and stones, I also see clear similarities. And if this blog is about anything it is about noting and celebrating those similarities.

A Reaquaintance with an Old Friend

I happened to enter the house of my neighbor the other day and, after . . . 12 years? . . . noticed a familiar creature in the corner . . . my old dieffenbachia! In an earlier post, I had either misidentified or misremembered the plant as a ficus, but a dieffenbachia it is, probably dieffenbachia picta, but I am not sure of the cultivar. Apparently there are many that are available but picta is among the more common.

I remember it as being quite different when I had it, with fewer and larger leaves, and probably smaller overall. Maybe the perceived difference is due to the relative scale of plant to leaf because without a doubt it is a much bigger plant now.

What I remember as a mere spindly shadow of itself a few months after I gave it to my neighbor as I left my house, is now a much grander specimen. My neighbor, whose identity I shall keep confidential, really has a green thumb. He told me that he has been taking good care of it, but that it was really not that demanding at all. It is in the same relative position in his house as it was in mine: in a corner with filtered light. He said he waters it regularly and fertilizes it once a year, and that he had planted some cuttings in the same pot to balance it out, which accounts for its more symmetrical appearance. It always wanted to lean towards the light when I had it.

What is interesting is that when I gave it to my neighbor, he was having some personal difficulties and was himself in bad shape. He is in his eighties now, and even with the advancing years, he is in much better shape and the fact that the plant is also seems to me to be more than a coincidence. It is no exaggeration in my mind to speak in terms of family and social dynamics even when speaking of plants, for they are a part of our collective networks as well as the humans and other animals of our lives are.

As I left, I told my friend how happy I was to see the plant doing so well. He asked if I wanted it back. I immediately said: "By no means, he's yours now and has been for the past ten years!" I hope the plant feels similarly. He certainly seems to.

The Time Cycles of Plants

How strange it is, at least from a human perspective, that a single plant can evince such radically disparate time parameters, from the generally slow growth of its roots, trunk, branches and stems to the rapid cycling of an individual blossom. I am trying to think of an analogous dynamic in human beings or other animals, but I cannot think of anything that comes close, except perhaps for the growth of hair and nails, at least as it exists externally.

The combination of duration and ephemerality in plants is no doubt an adaptive feature that is strongly related to their sessile ontology. If a being cannot fight or flee, being able to establish oneself in a strong and durable way, such as by growing a thick trunk covered with tough bark, and by being able to quickly reproduce when conditions are optimal, such as by producing a blossom, seem to be ideal strategies for survival.

It is this this quality of plants, rooted most fundamentally in their radical exteriority, that is, in their thorough and intimate immersion in what we call the 'environment', a point made nicely by Michael Marder, that makes them so different from us. Given their immense power as mediators between the largest forces of the universe and the most fleeting of material forms, most notably as synthesizers of light, it is difficult to conceive of plants, the most abundant form of life on the planet, using the same paradigm of individual and environment that one uses to consider the ontology of human beings and other animals. Plants are their environment and their environment is the plants themselves, not entirely or in an absolute sense, a rock is still a rock and a plant a plant, but much more so than is the case for animals.

Of course, the convention of thinking of animals as being separate from their environment is under constant revision, as scientists discover more and more how what were once thought to be individual organisms are actually much more accurately described as ecologies, individual bodies included. Where would an individual person be, for example, without the legions of bacteria that make functional his or her digestive system? This notion becomes even more complex the more scientists discover and the more philosophers consider it. It will surely be the topic of future posts.

REVIEW: 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 just finished reading Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees and found it refreshingly straightforward. The book is, plainly, about trees, full stop. I say refreshingly because many of the books I have read in this theme, and many of the thoughts I post based on my own observations and meditations, exist in that fraught zone between plant and human. I will be the first to admit that without rigorous research and deep contemplation, my posts can veer toward the banal, although I believe that this simplicity does serve the purpose of normalizing the idea of plants as intelligent beings, especially for an readership whom I suspect does not read widely and deeply in the topic, which is an important aim of this blog. I therefore trot in that thin band of discourse between the sophisticated and the naive.

Wohlleben by no means ignores the human relations with plants, but his main focus is on forests and the plant to plant and plant to animal relations that make them. This does not prevent him from using human metaphors for trees, most insightfully perhaps when he likens commercially produced trees to 'streetkids' who, having had their roots trimmed of their most intelligent parts, and having grown up in the vegetal version of foster homes, have sadly had their individual and collective capacities curtailed such that they live now and will forever live in a diminished state, in terms of both the quality and quantity of their existence.

Wohlleben's book adds a great deal to the discussion by treating plants on their own terms. As a forester, he seems to be especially comfortable in his relationship to trees, plants and other denizens of the forest, so that he sets a model for ideal relations between humans and their environment.

Still, there are moments, especially in his final chapter, where he lets his imagination run a bit and hopes for a time when science will allow us to actually know what plants are saying, to each other as well as to us. I suspect, however, that like the denizens of forests everywhere, Wohlleben already knows what the trees under his care are saying to him, having lived among them for decades.

There is great deal to contemplate in this slender volume, and it will take some time for me to synthesize some or all of it into the running discourse, a process that will undoubtedly produce fruit for future posts. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you slot The Hidden Life of Trees into your reading list.