Hailey 2019

Reimaging the Lives of Plants:
Exploring the Wonder and Wisdom in Our Encounters with Plant Life
Plants play a significant role in our sense of place. This has surely become more apparent
in my own life since I’ve been studying and actively focusing on plant life. As I walk through the
forests here on Marlboro College’s campus in Vermont, I see it is mostly dense with hardwood
species. Then I come across places where the understory layer fades, and the trees rise further
into the clouds. Pine needles replace the shade of broadleaves with filtered light that begins to
reach the forest floor, and the spongy mat of leaf litter becomes rocky and bare. Entering this
area, it almost feels like I’m home in Colorado. When I first arrived on campus, and before the
permanent layer of snow came that winter, I would walk out to this spot in the woods all the
time. It felt familiar. For a while, I couldn’t quite place that feeling of familiarity or why it was
so strong.
When I was in Panama researching the coral reefs, I initially felt so disconnected and
uncomfortable in the new place. For the first week I blamed it on the research station, and the
fact that it was my first time out of the country, and the new people, and everything else that was
new. I was reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer at the time, where she writes about
her memories of New England and the particular connection that plants had to her memories of
place.1 When I looked around off the porch of the bunkhouse, I realized I didn’t recognize any of
the plants I saw. I figured that was a good place to start. I went to the mildewed library of the
1
Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 22. Kimmerer describes the connections that she or the Potawatomi people had to
the land through the native plants in several places. In the chapter “Gift of Strawberries,” she reminiscences about
her childhood, her native home, and Potawatomi ancestry through her experience of eating sweet strawberries.
Watching strawberries bloom in her backyard signals not just an important time and change in the seasons, but also
a personal feeling of closeness and kinship for her.
Reimagining the Lives of Plants
research station and found all the plant books and identification keys I could. I read through them
and asked the Panamanians working at the station about the plants around us. I remember
another student from Puerto Rico who showed me the Quenepa Tree. A broad and spreading tree
that was ripe with lime-sized quenepa fruits. The fruits are sweet and delicious with a texture that
is somewhat plum-like. Every day when returning from field work, I would stop by the tree and
grab a succulent fruit.
Visiting the sweet Quenepa Tree I suddenly found myself with a familiarity and sense of
connection to the place. I began to see other plants that I recognized amongst all the unfamiliar
green of the rainforest. My stepmother’s favorite flower, Peace Lily—Spathiphyllum wallisii,
with one large white petal displaying the yellow reproductive parts, began to point themselves
out to me. I would catch the Sensitive Mimosas—Mimosa pudica—folding themselves in as I
walked near them. I started to gain that sense of familiarity with Boca del Drago through the
plants. My experience resonated with what Kimmerer described: there is a connection between
the plants and the place, and when you are able to feel connected with the flora you feel
connected to the land. There is power in the knowledge and friendship of plants, and I think that
is so magical.
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There is a good deal of distrust and satire around concepts such as plant intelligence,
plant perception, and the very idea of ethical obligation to plants.2 Early media attention on the
studies of plant behavior, like those reported in the 1973 New York Times best seller The Secret
2
Stone, Do Trees have a Standing?; Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows; Pollan, The Intelligent Plant. These
publications which address such topics, all seem to devote a portion of their argument to dismantling previous
assumptions about plant life to even begin their inquiries. Even as recently as 2006 researchers boldly calling their
work plant neurobiology, received a letter from 36 prominent scientists dispelling their claims on the grounds that
there was no evidence of homology between plants and neuronal activity (Alpi et. al). To be discussed more later.
2
Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, praised a variety of poorly designed
experiments and exaggerated the findings of studies looking at plant responses.3 For some time
after its publication in 1973, the scientific exploration of plant life was damaged and researchers
“self-censored” their inquiries into this topic for fear of misinterpretation or invalidation from the
public or scientific community.4 This invalidation of plant life is consistent with a widespread
dualism between humans (culture) and nature. Such dualisms have often worked to undermine
plants by painting them as unfeeling, passive, objects or inert raw material.
By marginalizing and neglecting contemporary science on the active and responsive life
of plants, we are more easily able to view plants as passive background objects and unfeeling
resources. Unsympathetic instrumentalization of other species, coupled with marginalization of
human groups and exploitation of the environment itself, have contributed greatly to the
ecological crises we face today. This orientation to dissimilar Others which neglects their
individual experiences, primes them for marginalization and exploitation. Despite the effects of
this orientation that plants suffer from, continued research on the dynamic, and even intelligent,
capabilities of plants5 provides evidence in direct opposition to the idea of plants as static,
unaffected creatures. This evidence demands a review of our ethical relationship to the plant
Others that we have often misunderstood, and simultaneously provides frameworks in which we
3
Thompkins and Bird, The Secret Life of Plants; Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows; Pollan, The Intelligent Plant. A
key misrepresentation of plant abilities in the book was a study by Cleave Backster, a polygraph expert that attached
a polygraph machine to a leaf of his office plant. He reported that a variety of external stimuli could be registered in
the plant leaf by the polygraph machine, supposedly by a surge of electrical activity, which suggested that the plant
was feeling stress. He even published a report in 1968 in the International Journal of Parapsychology on the results
of an experiment where he described his plants responding to a live shrimp being dropped into boiling water.
Subsequent, and more reliable, reports could not reproduce Backster’s experiment, or others in The Secret Life of
Plants and a good deal of the research reported therein has been discredited. In Chamovitz’s modern revisitation of
plant abilities and homology between animals and plants he specifically says that The Secret Life of Plants “stymied
important research on plant behavior” (2).
4
Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows; Pollan, The Intelligent Plant.
5
Trewavas, Plant Intelligence; Baluska et. al., Communication in Plants. To be discussed later.
3
can establish mutually beneficial practices with our native and food plants.6 Plant philosopher,
Michael Marder, argues that this paradigm is responsible for the deindividualization,
instrumentalizing, and misinterpretation of plant lives which he calls “the philosophical
degradation of plants.”7
To briefly define this process: humans have been able to systematically negate the
multivariate world of plants through gross generalizations of plant lives which work to
deindividualize the highly diverse and dynamic world of plants. As generalizable and supposedly
non-subjective objects, it has been easy to justify the exploitation and misappropriation of plants
and instrumentalize them exclusively as resource or aesthetic objects. Continued overuse and
subjugation of plants has normalized their oppression so that it has become easy to misinterpret
our relationship to plants so that we lose sight of what an ethical encounter would be at all. Take
corn—Maize—as an example of this process. Generalizations about which corn is best8 have
helped frame corn plants as feelingless crop. By viewing corn as a mechanistic means to an end,
corn is pulled from its ecological relationships and placed in a system of mass production. No
compassion or obligation need be felt then, because the corn becomes an ecologically
disconnected product for human use, like the plastics we build for our ends. Breaking free of
these paradigms and reorienting our attention to the ecological and subjective experience of the
plant, however, will help to mitigate and repair the degradation caused. In the case of Maize, a
historic agricultural plant, the reorientation is particularly visible. Even its ancient ecological
history is connected to the human where Native American groups grew corn, bean, and squash
6
To be discussed later.
7
Marder, Plant-Thinking, 30.
8
“Best” here, is a biased assessment if what the most ideal corn plant is based on purely human ends. Particularly
“best” has referred to a sweeter taste, which is often preferred, and lower maintenance subspecies that are more
likely to ensure profitable production.
4
together as the three sisters. They noticed these three plants growing wild together often and
found that planting the three together improved the yield from all three.9 In this agricultural style
the need to produce food crops (which is undeniably part of our own ecology), along with the
urgency to leave plants in their ecological life are both honored.
The orientation to plants that allows for their philosophical degradation has
systematically instrumentalized them by neglecting their individuality and ecology. When plants
are placed in the background of our view, the details of their lives are allowed to stay just out of
focus, kept just out of ethical concern and, “populating the margin of the margin.”10 Moreover,
insofar as we have been able to claim these primary change-makers of the ecosystem are passive,
static, or lesser, we have been allowed to exploit them to instrumental ends, and primarily to our
benefit. Philosopher Michael Hall also asserts, “Although the dogma of passivity and
subservience is contradicted by careful observation of plant behavior, I contend that it has been
maintained partly in order to justify untrammeled resource use by human beings.”11 When plants
are, alternatively, attributed an individuality and subjectivity, it then becomes ethically difficult
to deny them the ability to pursue their own ends.12 By alternatively acknowledging their
9
This was simply an observation they made based on care and attention to their world and the plants. However,
even researchers who have gone back to verify this have found that indeed all three are bound together ecologically.
The corn stalk provides a place for the bean vine to grow up, the squash shades the soil below them keeping out
various other non-food plant that would compete with the three sisters. The bean, which has a relationship with soil
bacteria that allow it to make more nitrogen available to plants, provides extra nitrogen boosting corn and squash so
they can produce larger fruits at lower cost to themselves.
10
11
Hall, Plants as Persons, 53.
12
Taylor, Ethics of Respect for Nature, 2986. This is reminiscent of Paul Taylors biocentric outlook where we
recognize a telos in other beings (here plants) and judge our moral action on our interference with those other teloi. I
will unpack the details of how we ought to reform our relationship to plants in later sections with a virtue ethic
framework that avoids some of the common critiques of biocentrism. Here though, it is at least worth noting that I
am not arguing that we all reject eating vegetables based on their right to pursue their telos, only that we
acknowledge that there is a dilemma to be faced in pulling the carrots and weeds in our gardens alike. Conceptually,
this is similar to the dilemma many people already recognize in the consumption of more expressive creatures like
animals.
5
dynamic, sensitive, and even rational lives we will rethink plants, ourselves, and our
relationships to the non-human all in more productive ways.
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As I walk through the woods, I hold my hand out lackadaisically to the side and let my
fingers run gently along the vegetation that comes in reach. While conducting ecological
sampling in the Northern hardwood forest it has been easy to fall into thinking about the trees as
standardized study organisms and archetypal representatives of their species. It is one type of
interaction to critically examine the leaves of a tree for a specific detail or characteristic. In those
instances, I may be interacting with the plant and attending to it, but I am not really meeting it. It
feels like smiling at a stranger on the street: friendlier than nothing, but still brief and exterior. I
feel as though I am having a very different kind of interaction when I inspect the same plant parts
for the details particular to each individual tree and leaf. It feels like the focus of a camera as it
zooms from long range to close range. I find myself, in mid-examination, refocusing.
Touching the leaves as I walk helps to focus into the individual plants. My fingers tap the
top of a paper-thin leaf. It makes a sound like flipping a page of a book, and I know this to be a
Beech leaf—Fagus grandifolia. The leaves are so thin they don’t feel so much like the vital
organs they are, instead they are like an extremity, like hair or nail. They are only a few cells
thick, but they are some of the heartiest leaves in the forest. Leafing out early in the spring, they
brave the possibility of late season frosts, and then remain withered on the tree late into the
winter. They are so light and such little hindrance to the tree that they need not even be dropped.
In thinking about the ethereal connection of the Beech and its leaves I can feel the weightlessness
that the leaves embody in myself, in my breath.
6
I pass through these Beech trees the most often when running my hand along the
understory species of these Southern Vermont forests, and so the feeling of delicate, papery
leaves bouncing off my fingertips becomes as regular as my breathing. It is jarring when I come
across the soft leaf of a Birch tree. The structure of the leaf is similar in the two, light green with
long with serrated edges, but they are different in a number of ways. The Birch trees are doubly
serrate (the serrations have serrations) and they have a soft pubescence to them. The veins of the
birch leaves themselves are much less intense than the rigid Beech. I stop and lean into the soft
leaf, still looking now to see what species of Birch this individual is. I look to see if the regular
veins spreading from the center branch out into further tendrils. They do not, at least not the few
I was holding, which makes me think that this tree is Yellow Birch—Betula alleghaniensis.
However, I glance back up and find the tree itself. The bark is rough, and although it is a
young tree, the vertical strips peeling up the sides give clear indication that this is actually an
Eastern Hop Hornbeam—Ostrya virginiana. What's strange is that although Hop Hornbeam has
leaves very similar to Yellow Birch, it often does have lots of lateral leaf veins which help
distinguish its leaves. But this is when the focusing comes in. They are not just an example of
their species, but individuals themselves, with characteristics as unique as our fingerprints. In the
serendipitous discrepancy, suddenly, I am not looking at an Ostrya or a representative of a whole
species. Instead it is this tree, this particular Ostrya, this individual being as alive before me as I
am before it. It is critical to develop the ability to shift focus between the ways of knowing if we
are to properly hold our ecological knowledge alongside a reimagining of plants as subjective
individuals.
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7
The separation we construct between human/nature, and human/plant within that, is
problematic for both the plants themselves and for us. It contributes to the overall lack of
attention given to the environment and the climate change crisis. How are we to develop care and
empathy for something if we think it is so unlike us that we have difficulty believing it could
feel? Animistic perspectives, such as the one articulated by the pre-Socratic philosopher
Empedocles, described the formation of the world, and all things thereafter, as particular
combinations and interactions of four elements—air, fire, earth, and water13 Whereas all things
are created from the same four substances, Empedocles was able to imply a kinship and shared
experience between all beings. Shared kinship allowed him to speculate to the shared
experiences of these different beings: “[from the elements] all things have been fitted together
and are formed, and by these they think and feel pleasure and pain.”14 Although not made
explicit in the fragments of his writing, the shared experiences of pleasure and pain in all beings,
plants included, encourages an empathetic consideration of the experiences of other beings.
Similar mutualistic and ecocentric perspectives are articulated in the stories and relationships that
some Native American tribes had with native plants. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer
uses the Potawatomi story of sky woman to discuss our kinship with natural beings in the
13
Empedocles, The Poem of Empedocles, translated by Brad Inwood, 327-245.
14
Empedocles, The Poem of Empedocles, translated by Brad Inwood, 327-245.
8
environment.15 There are also practices like this in the Eastern traditions, such as the Jains, who
revere plants as inspirited creatures, just like humans, who it is morally wrong to kill.. Hall
describes, “Jains must recognize the sentient nature of plant life and ideally must seek to
minimize the harm which is done to plants in order to let them live.”16
Kinship is this critical element in a positive relationship with the world. Insofar as I think
of myself as from the same matter as plants, not just in the sense of sharing the same molecules
and building blocks but also as sharing fundamental qualities such as novel responses to stimuli,
I feel a connection to the non-human. The connection, the kinship, is the primary requirement for
our empathetic consideration of these plant Others. There is no way we can begin to encounter
plants that does justice to their subjectivity, unless we first acknowledge that there is a
subjectivity to be had by them. Not a subjectivity we may be able to fully access—the plant
world is, after all, one of and for plants—but communicative and responsive one nonetheless.
Cultivating this kinship, and this ability to encounter the plant in a way that acknowledges its
rich subjective world would significantly change our relationships with plants for the better.
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“In making possible the world in which they are both part and content, plants
destroy the topological hierarchy that seems to rain over our cosmos. They
demonstrate that life is rupture in the asymmetry between container and
contained…To blow, to breathe—means in fact to have this experience: what
contains us, the air, becomes contained in us; and, conversely, what was contained
15
Kimmerer, “Skywoman Falling” in Braiding Sweetgrass. In Kimmerer’s adapted story she retells the Potawami
creation story in which Skywoman, fell to our world from Skyworld. Seeing her struggle, animals such as turtle and
dove assisted her and gave her gifts to flourish. Her gratitude, alongside the gifts of the animals, produced a drop of
mud which spread to produce the beautiful world they knew. By grabbing the tree of life, the seeds of the many
plants were born and she spread them across the world. She writes, “the land grew and grew as she danced her
thanks, from the dab of mud on Turtle’s back until the whole earth was made. Not by Skywoman alone, but from the
alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude. Together they formed what we know today as
Turtle Island, our home” (4). The story is a particularly good example because it shows that because of their
difference abilities they were able to come together with a shared responsibility for the creation of all things
thereafter.
16
9
in us becomes what contains us. To breathe means to be immersed in a medium that

penetrates us with the same intensity as we penetrate it. Plants have transformed
the world into the reality of breath.”
~Emmanuel Coccina, 10.
French philosopher, Emmanual Coccina, suggests that plants and humans have an
intimate bond through our most basic life processes.17 In the act of breathing and in our ever-
present interaction with the atmosphere, we enter into a special relationship. That which most
primarily contains us, the atmosphere is extraordinarily, and very literally, contained within us
and our lungs. Conversely, in containing the atmosphere inside ourselves we become the
container. We may only hold either position, but each only for a moment, locked in a reciprocal
pendulum. Plants share this magnificent connection to the atmosphere. Plant life, moreover, has
been so powerful as to change the global atmosphere from one of CO2 to one of the O2, which
has in turned set the stage for a plethora of other life to be what it is today. Here, I will concede
that humans, unlike many other animals, share a particularly special responsibility with plant life.
In creating and fumigating the atmosphere with our industrial production of CO2, we have
surpassed our typical relationship with the atmosphere. It seems now we find ourselves in a
relationship to the greater atmosphere much more like that of plants than many of the other
animals. A relationship that is not only intimate and reciprocal, but one in which we act upon the
atmosphere as greatly as it acts upon us.
Through breath we are already bound to the world, and specifically bound to plants
which have created, and continue to create, the means for our existing relationship with breath.
17
Coccina is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Social Sciences in Paris. In the preface to his book, the
botanist and social scientist explains that his work on the metaphysics of plants and their relationship to human
culture came out of five years he spent considering these topics and their connection to each other. In sum, his
exploration concludes that in reorienting to plants we are oriented to the sun and the fundamental parts of our life
and metaphysics which can help ground us and our perspective.
10
By this alone I feel an esoteric connection to plants and the environment as a whole breathing
entity. What's more, though, is that in pushing the boundaries of our connection and entering into
the reciprocal relationships that maintain the atmosphere, we must take on a responsibility as
plant have. As our soul partners in shaping the composition of atmospheric gasses, we must
maintain reciprocity. Even if, as some might argue, humans have no inherent moral reason to
produce pleasure and/or prevent pain in other beings, by this reciprocity we have inherited a type
of ethical obligation. It seems that modern advancement and tampering has brought us to a place
where we, alongside the plants and microbes, must take responsibility for our part in the creation
of our shared atmosphere. I find this notion inspires a profound kinship to plant life, and
amenability to the larger environment.
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The rise of post-Socratic philosophy, which laid a foundation for a good deal of modern
Western thought, shifted the methods philosophers used to think about similarities and
differences between entities in the world. They began to rely more heavily on empirical
observations and revised the tools they used to interpret the world. Matthew Hall attests that, “in
this respect, although Empedocles urged respect for plants, the pre-Socratics movement also
heralded a shift away from society focused on maintaining respectful relationships with non-
humans, toward the prioritization of rational, causal explanations of natural phenomena.”18
Moving away from kinship-emphasizing animistic perspectives19 Socrates’ student Plato
formulated an account that reorganized the relationships between beings according to their
likeness to the divine. He contended that although both humans and the divine contained a
18
19
Hall says that animism is often built on kinship and shared connection between things, although this may be a bit
of a generalization.
11
rational soul, which was in tune with a greater divine order of the world, humans alone also
contained a mortal soul. The mortal soul is the one that can be swayed by emotions and desires
as opposed to the greater divine rationality. Therefore, it was Plato’s view that humans ought to
cultivate piety in their lives to resist temptations of the mortal soul which would bring us further
from the divine.20
Plato argued that physical form and shape indicated the positions of these souls within the
body: intelligence and rationality of the mind indicated to him that the divine soul was housed in
the head separate from, and above, the body which opposingly contained the appetites of the
stomach and heart.21 The more closely people resembled this format and worked to cultivate the
intelligence and rationality through philosophy, the more aligned with the great divine order they
could be. Those who did not were reincarnated in shapes that reflected what Plato described as
progressively less rational and intelligent creatures: human women, and then animals. “Land
animals came from men who had no use for philosophy and paid no heed to the heavens because
they had lost the use of the circuits [souls] in the head and followed the guidance of those parts
of the soul that are in the breast. By reason of these practices they let their forelimbs and heads
be drawn down to the earth by natural affinity and there supported, and their heads were
lengthened out and took any sort of shape into which their circles were crushed together through
inactivity”22 Thus, Plato created a pernicious dualism in which reason and intelligence are
indicative of divine order while emotion and physical needs represent the chaotic natural world.
In asserting a correlation between these qualities and physical form, Plato created a perfect
formula for the misinterpretation of plant Others.
20
Plato, Timaeus 89d-90d, translated by Francis M. Cornfold.
21
Plato, Timaeus 44d-45b.
22
Plato, Timaeus 91d7-92a2.
12
Aristotle, Plato’s student, in many ways developed his teacher’s account, articulating a
philosophy that has been pervasive in shaping Western metaphysics. Problematically, his
similarly biased framework of ontology and anatomy is still embedded in several our modern
ideals and ways of organizing our thoughts. Aristotle pursued the dualism that Plato described
between the intelligent capacities of humans and the chaotic properties of the physical and
emotional. Using this dualism, and Plato’s previous assertion that the divine (rational) soul is in
tune with our highest good, Aristotle further broke up the distinctions between types of beings by
their anatomy and perceived abilities. Aristotle noted that the apparent increasing complexity of
creatures—from plant up to human and the divine—indicated the types of soul possessed by
various beings. Aristotle defined new characteristics to distinguish the types of souls that living
beings might have. Since empirically not all living things move, Aristotle believed growth is the
most universal and passive capacity amongst living creatures, and so he calls this aspect of the
soul the nutritive soul. The nutritive is the only portion of the soul attributed to plants, because of
their clear capacity for growth and, in his view, lack of any other abilities.23 Those beings that
possessed other organs which give rise to sensitive capabilities such as sight and hearing
additionally possessed a sensitive soul.24 Only humans also possess a rational soul that enables
them to participate in divine activity25
Aristotle writes, “Of the psychic powers above enumerated some kinds of living things,
as we have said, possess all, some less than all, others one only. Those we have mentioned are
the nutritive, the appetitive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking. Plants have
23
Aristotle, De Plantis, translated by E.S. Forester, in The Complete Works of Aristotle.
24
Aristotle, De Anima III.12, translated by J.A. Smith, in The Complete Works of Aristotle.
25
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.13, 1102a32-1102b17, translated by W.D. Ross . In The Complete Works of
Aristotle.
13
none but the first, the nutritive, while another order of living things has this plus the sensory.”26
The assertion here, which is expanded by his later writings in Nichomean Ethics, that there is a
unique superiority and accessibility available to humans by virtue of the rational soul, is the basis
for my disagreement. It is clear by the attention given to organs as the ‘functional’ parts of the
body, Plato and Aristotle were working from a fundamentally zoocentric perspective.27 Such a
perspective toward movement (Plato) or particular organs (Aristotle) as the basis for fundamental
qualities of life create an orientation in which, implicitly, the qualities of animals and human
beings are of more value than the seemingly motionless life of plants. However, modern ecology
and plant-thinking directly belie this notion.
We can first look to Plato as inciting the dualistic perspective of the world where orderly,
intelligent, and divine are seemingly more significant and meaningful qualities than chaotic,
nutritive, and natural which are uncontrollable and unruly. Then, coupled with Aristotles’ better
known division of souls, this dualism created a hierarchy for the types of souls on the basis of
physical characteristics or capabilities. Insofar as rational intelligence seems preferable to
nutritive capacities—as is implied by Aristotle’s ordering of the souls from the zoocentric
perspective—conclusions can be easily drawn that humans are in some way superior to animals,
and ultimately plants, by virtue of their very being alone. This perspective, however, is deeply
problematic. As knowledge about the complexities of different beings has increased, we have
consequently shown how the qualities that may be thought of as implicitly better under a
26
Aristotle, De Anima II.3, 414a33.
27
Although these philosophies have been critiqued elsewhere for their anthropocentrism and hubris for human
abilities, they are additionally informed by a zoocentrism that gives unequal attention to the ability to move and
speak—as animals do and plants do not. In the same way anthropocentrism places humans at the apex, a
zoocentrism shows preference to all motile and expressive beings. In tracing the marginalization of plants the base
zoocentrism is more fundamental than the anthropocentric element alone.
14
zoocentric view, are not always the qualities which have been most advantageous to the diverse
life histories of other species.
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It follows that to start to remedy the situation in which plants are able to be
deindividualized and misinterpreted by our inability to conceptualize their otherness, it is
important to encounter plants in a way that can do justice to the individuals by reinterpreting
their experiences from the perspective of the plants themselves, but that simultaneously does not
make unwarranted presuppositions or tightly adhere to one method of understanding. To
accomplish such a vital task of rethinking our metaphysics we can use the framework of plant-
thinking that plant philosopher Michael Marder has developed.28 Plant-thinking employs three
contemporary philosophies to help rethink the life and individuality of plants and provides a
framework for encountering and understanding and rendering of plants in ways that are sensitive
to their alterity. For our interactions with plants and the environment around us, plant-thinking
allows us to shift our orientation from one that marginalizes difference to one that can explore
and utilize it. We can begin conceptualizing the essential qualities unique to plant life such as
dispersion, multitude, and plasticity with a proper respect to their inaccessible experience.
Adopting this framework cultivates an orientation to the world that hears and implements the
beautiful wisdom available to us from the dissimilar lives of plants.
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In an effort to learn about the plants in the tropical forest in Northeastern Panama I had
asked the native Panamanian who maintained the grounds and helped with classes to walk
28
Marder is a research professor at the IKERBASQUE philosophy department. His book is dedicated to putting
plants back at the forefront to assist in our rethinking of many problematic and unnecessary paradigms, and he lays
out a philosophical account for a renewed view of our thinking as more plantlike.
15
around with me. Enrique showed me the food plants they had growing like Pineapple—Ananas
comosus—and the common Heliconias—Heliconia Rostrata—whose bright red pendulums hung
heavy from the palm-like branches. The research station bordered farmland and ocean to the
South, but the North side came to a wall of thick rainforest with just a tight path to navigate
through. Immediately after entering the air became cool and the light darkened, saturated ground
squished under our tall rubber boots, and light danced off wet leaves as we passed by them.
When we came to a small tree raised above the ground on a cone of stilts, we stopped. Multiple
smaller, stilt-like roots began there at the base of the trunk and spread into a conical web of these
stilts from there into the soil.
Enrique called this tree the Walking Palm or Stilt Palm—Socratea exorrhiza.29 It is
advantageous to have this unique growth form because when a root is broken or the palm is
knocked over by another tree falling, it is able to put out new stilts and stand itself back up. With
every disturbance the tree adjusts and so, overtime, it can move from where it was once growing.
Enrique told me about how the common name came from the native people who observed the
trees ever so slowly move across the forest as they put out new stilts when others are broken. It is
astonishing how plants defy our expectations if we only let them.
Later in our program my class took a group walk through the forest with the station
manager. He was also pointing out some notable species to us all. When we got to the spot on the
winding trail with the Walking Palm I pointed it out by common name. He chuckled and called
the tree Socratea exorrhiza. That’s just a hyperbole he said to us, moving on into the rainforest
without another thought. I remember wondering why he had so little imagination? Why not
29
Coincidentally the botanist who created this Latin name, Carl Linnaeus, named this tree after Socrates.
16
allow yourself to be fascinated and excited by the plant world? Even if it seems unbelievable,
what harm is there in overestimating their capabilities?
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The crucial moment of rendering plants in our thought is the encounter between the
individual human and plant. The pauses I take to make intentional contact with plants help to
define these for me, but encounters can be as broad and undefined as the times we pass potted
plants on the street and—even if only for an instant—offer our attention to them. In doing so we
most easily offer our consideration to their subjective experience. The encounter is the
opportunity to meet another being, and simultaneously the moment in which we begin to try to
understand and contextualize them in our world. Emmanuel Levinas argued similarly that
encounters between individuals are of the utmost philosophical importance because it is where
we derive our ideas on what is ethical. He writes, “the being that expresses itself imposes itself,
but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity–its hunger–without my
being able to be deaf to that appeal.”30 In actually encountering the plant Other, they become
irreducible to our ideas or presuppositions because of the immediately visible connection and
relation to them that is provided by recognizing their dynamic subjectivity.
We encounter plants every day, from the tree in the backyard to vegetables in our fridge.
What has been allowed to happen in our dualistic and biased paradigm is that we negate the
subjectivity of plants and their interactive lives in this momentary encounter by considering them
only from a single framework. In the same way packaged meat allows us to distance ourselves
from the ethical consideration of the animal it came from, a view of plants extracted from their
ecological life is dull. By not viewing our meat as an animal we seem to remove a feeling of
30
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 200.
17
moral obligation which justifies practices such as factory farming, which are ethically
questionable and ecologically unstable. By viewing plants as objects that can be extracted from
their native ecological relationships—whether it be in commercialized agriculture or exotic
gardens—allows us to engage in similarly ethically questionable and ecologically unstable
practices. Take historical forestry practices for example. By viewing tree species simply as
lumber, or discreet parts of an unfeeling object huge hectares of forests have allowed to be
decimated with little to no attention afforded to the swath of ecological relationships that each
tree supported, let alone a whole species in a community. Recognizing the damage, modern
practices often take into account nesting times for some birds, age of tree before producing seed,
and other traits and factors to determine when a tree is appropriate to cut down.31 It is easy to see
the loss of biodiversity between a recently cut forest and an old growth, but our encounters with
plants need shifting even in our everyday life.
Industrialization of specialized breeding of food crops have produced lots of archetypal
looking fruits and vegetables. A massive amount of food is wasted in the United States each day
because people preferentially buy the produce that looks more like their ideal image. In reality,
fruits produced can vary greatly in color and shape, but for many species these differences to not
translate into differences in the quality of the product. To remedy this, stores have opened that
advertise selling ‘ugly produce’ for less money since they are classically undesirable. This helps
to normalize the ugly vegetables and combat the skewed archetypal images we have of our food
and plants in general. In moments as innocuous as rummaging through the apples at the grocery
store we can stop and allow ourselves to engage in plant-thinking, so that we can be excited by
the uniqueness of the apple and the tree it came from, instead of being put-off by the obscure or
31
USDA, NCRS, Healthy Forest and Wildlife Practices.
18
unconventional and contribut to anthropogenic environmental damage. It may be hard at first to
recognize the far-reaching effects of our treatment of plants on our lifestyle as well as on the
plants around us. However, by readily engaging in our plant encounter in even benign situations
such as at the supermarket, and not just when confronted with whole-forest devastation, we see
our ubiquitous relationship with these creatures.
Seeing is the critical first step in the larger goal here to reimagine these relationships in
productive ways. Our encounters with plants will be different than those with people and animals
and at times more conceptually challenging; we will need to find ways to relate despite our
different experiences and simultaneously explore our difference without dualistically or
hierarchically biased schemes. However, this is altogether necessary to better navigate our
relationship to the plant Other and whole ecosystems. We best enter into these encounters with
silent plants by deconstructing our presuppositions about them and finding ways to learn from
our encounters with them as multitudinous individuals. Although vague, these moments are
important to recognize and seize to begin recognizing the plant as a subjective Other. Undertaken
properly, these encounters can avoid repeating metaphysical violence that is often done to plants
by reducing them our presuppositions and superficial analysis of their lives. As the rest of this
piece exemplifies, the phenomenology, metaphysics, and practices we can construct from this
way of thinking, provide a way to renew and repair our strained relationship to the environments
of which we are an irreducible part.
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When I think of Colorado, I think of the stoic Ponderosa Pines dotting the yellow grass
and red rock canyons on the Front Range. From afar, the tufted ends of branches of Ponderosa
Pines become capillaries, and they arrange themselves in a large oval shape with the tips of all
19
the needles outlining the tree in the shape of a lung. Somehow, the tree, comprised of sharp and
pointed lines of branches and needles, becomes reminiscent of the meandering and organic
vessels of the lungs. These lung-shaped trees are particularly sensitive to air pollutants, and
tinctures made of the needles are used to treat help sinus and breathing issues. Not only is this
interconnection between form and function remarkable, but these airy trees are also intimately
connected to fire.
Walking in the Colorado mountains on long trails filled with Ponderosa Pines, I stop at
every few trees and say hello. A jigsaw puzzle made from layers and layers of strangely shaped
and colored scales creates an incredible collage of bark. The flakey scales peel off easily and
there are rings around the base of the tree from where zealous squirrels have ran up the trunk,
knocking pieces off. This bark is part of the fantastic adaptation to fire of this tree. We have
learned that adult Ponderosa Pines are especially adapted to survive in frequent, low intensity
fires—historically common along the dry Front Range.32 Fire prevention management tactics and
continuous suppression of low intensity fires have resulted in enormous amounts of dry tinder.
Together, and exacerbated with climate change, this has led to increasingly common and
damaging high intensity fires.33 Higher intensity fires burn so hot that even fire-adapted plants
suffer dieback, and whole ecosystems experience much slower succession and regrowth. I peel a
small piece of bark close to the trunk of the Ponderosa and lean my head to the tree. The
tantalizing smell of vanilla greets me, and I close my eyes. What fantastic creatures these trees.
Perhaps, along the fire-prone Front Range, we ought to take a lesson about disturbance
and resilience from the regionally native species. They do not resist the inevitable destruction of
32
Ponderosas allow themselves to release outer pieces of bark, which burn quickly and at a low intensity, and this
protects the sensitive inner parts of the tree or needles from catching. After the burn, their fire adaption makes it so
the ponderosas benefit from the lapse in competition and dominate dry early successional habitats.
33
Dombeck, Michael; Williams, Jack and Wood, Christopher, “Wildfire Policy and Public Lands,” 885.
20
the fire. As we have now witnessed, even though we may be able to suppress the disturbance in
a short-term, these disturbance regimes are engrained on the successional patterns of the land.
Fire is unpreventable, and perhaps instead of forestalling it altogether we could look to the
historic Ponderosas for guidance. Perhaps we could try to envision how we could ‘adapt’ the fire
regimes, what changes could be made that would better serve the land and ourselves? Although
imbued in otherness, our mutual needs and experiences allow us to take lessons from the
Ponderosas. When I think of Ponderosas, I am excited by the way plants could help us to
improve our relationships to our environment. What a sustainable future we could envision with
the frameworks set forth already.
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Michael Marder critiques, as other environmental philosophers have, the Latin naming
scheme used in taxonomy for embodying a problem of knowing in the West. The problem being
a tendency to substitute meaningful knowledge about individuals, which is multidimensional and
interdisciplinary, for the taxonomic knowledge alone. Marder is specifically concerned that such
a system of naming is able to consume the uniqueness of an individual sunflower. He suggests
that in the taxonomy, “the actual sunflower turns into an example of the genus, tribe, and so
forth, to which it belongs and is nothing in itself outside the intricate net of classification wherein
it is caught up.”34 In his view, Latin names serve as a superficial way of knowing the plant
because we then misguidedly believe we have sufficiently met, and encountered, a creature by
knowing it through this system alone. Although deeply interrelated, learning what an individual
is through this system is notably distinct from actually learning who they are. Unlike Marder,
who apparently condemns Latin naming altogether, my idea here is that these ways of knowing
34
21
the plant are indeed divergent, but not mutually exclusive. Alternatively, incorporating an
ecological perspective that is inherently multidimensional, can be helpful in informing
environmental ethics. Utilizing both perspective sand recognizing which one we are using is
important to cultivating our ability to move between these ways of viewing and knowing.
There is a key distinction to be made between learning from plants and learning about
plants. By rejecting the presuppositions we may hold about plants in our dualistic or hierarchical
tradition and recognizing the limitations of even our empathetic perspective, we open ourselves
to the lived experience of plants and the wisdom therein. Meeting the plant Other and
constructing them in our locus as themselves, i.e. not as tree in our backyard or a weed in the
sidewalk, but as an individual and sensitive creature in such a way that does not claim to know
their experience we can learn from plants. Our one-on-one encounters give us a space to where
we allow ourselves to seriously consider the subjective experience of plants and sympathetically
rethink our interactions with them. Critically, this should not be confused with learning about
plants, which is distinctly the ecological knowledge about the plant that we derive from reliable
academic papers and careful personal observations. Learning about plants is certainly a
worthwhile task in its own right; it gives us a better glimpse into this subjective experience of
plants and creates a basis for the ecologically accurate rendering we ought to engage plants with.
However, the aware and ecological understanding a relationship with plants is vastly different
from this ethical encounter we must have to honor their subjectivity properly.
It seems learning the name Helianthus annuus, is equivalent to learning Homo sapiens.
From this information I might say I know what this is: a person. Perhaps I even know some
linage: this species is in the class mammalia, or other details about life history and physiology.
However, by this information alone, I would not claim to know much of anything about the
22
subjective individual in front of me that I identified as Homo sapiens, nor as Helianthus annuus.
We need not abandon taxonomic schemes and their usefulness, insofar as we can avoid
mistaking this identification for an “encounter,” nor overinterpreting the knowledge we receive
from these distinct interactions. Because knowledge about is not equivalent to knowledge from,
our encounter with plants cannot be complete unless we encounter the plant as an individual. Not
a plant in the objective sense, nor Helianthus annuus, but instead the active synergistic being that
we may know personally as that sunflower. As an ecologist I am indeed satisfied to know
Helianthus annuus and am informed by this knowledge about the individual. However, when I
am trying to meet an individual and engage in plant-thinking, I call them Sunflowers (using the
capitol S to denote this as a proper noun describing an individual and not a species identity).
When driving on long stretches from Vermont to Colorado across the Midwest, where highways
are lined with tall stalks of the full moon flowers, I say hello as they grow and fade from horizon
to horizon.
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The omnipresent dualistic view of the world set out by Ancient Greek thought has caused
us to think of things as splitting dichotomously. Things are either wholly this or wholly that,
science or humanities, capable or incapable. In seeking to define the differences in lifeforms the
abstractions and dualistic definitions lack conceptual context and scale since the world is
inherently complex and spurious. The interdisciplinary team of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and
psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, defined this dualistic way of thinking in their well-known work A
Thousand Plateaus.35 They pick the image of a tree to visualize how we organize information so
that is branching dichotomously outward from larger and more general to thin and specific, an
35
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 6.
23
arborescent pattern of organizing the world. However, such evenly dichotomous organization
seems to not be the rule as much as the exception. A misinterpretation of the ecological
communication proper to plant life has wrongly perpetuated a dualistic orientation that
consequentially works against the plant to hold them in the ethical background. Although
problematic for a number of other reasons, misguidedly conceptualizing the interconnected
ecological life of plants as embodying a dualistic orientation, contributes to the philosophical
degradation of plants.
The branches were never the information center of the tree. Instead, I look to the roots
and mycorrhizal fungi as the communicative organizing centers of trees in the forest. This is a
better visual for how we ought to organize our thought patterns.36 In just the past two decades an
enormous amount of research has come out about the critical role that underground fungal
connections play in aboveground plant communities. Fungal networks known as mycorrhizae
intimately connect the many species in the forest communities. Not only are they superficially
linked, but they make use of these connections like pathways. Mature ”Mother Trees” support
large networks of resource sharing with their nearby kin, and trees of different species are able to
exchange resources with one another.37 In one of her first studies, researcher Susan Simard and
her team supplied identifiable isotopes of carbon to specific trees and were able to detect the
same carbon being shared with another tree species through the mycorrhizal connections. They
36
Worth mentioning here is a discussion I am drawing on from Edward Slingerland in his book What Science Offers
the Humanities. He makes a compelling case for how our thought and the abstract mind are fundamentally
physically embodied. Slingerland explains that the way we conceive of the abstract is through embodied sensations,
e.g. we describe a painting as balanced because this is able to convey the relationship we perceive between the
colors in the most intelligible way, the feeling of imbalance something heavy causes. It is difficult to understand an
experience or event without cues that rely on physical sensations. Plants especially allows us to envision the abstract
and provide these salient metaphors. The point I am making here is distinctly not addressing the usefulness or
unusefulness of a philosophy that uses natural patterns to orient us to what is right and wrong.
37
Simard, How Trees Talk to Each Other, NPR TedTalk.
24
examined this relationship between Paper Birches—Betula papyrifera—a deciduous tree
common in the higher slopes and Douglas Fir—Pseudotsuga menziesii—an alpine evergreen,
which often associate together in British Columbia where they were working. They found that
the two species were indeed sharing their carbon with one another. By doing controlled tests with
cedar trees, they concluded that there is specific and directed sharing that can occur through he
fungal networks.38 Moreover, Simards continued experiments and research with the mycorrhizal
ecology found that the carbon sharing was even more complex and interconnected. In winter,
when the Paper Birch had dropped its leaves, it received a larger carbon supply from Douglas Fir
than it returned. Then, in summer, the reciprocity is returned by Paper Birch supplying carbon to
a nearby Fir that becomes shaded by the bloom of other tree leaves.39 This mycorrhizal network
interconnects the forest like a dynamic superorganism, and I find this image so harmonizing.
Realizing that the tree is involved in a lively and sporadic network of fungal connections
under the soil, we can better envision our thought patterns as rhizomatic and interconnected.
Getting at this notion of interconnectivity, Deleuze and Guattari propose a rhizomatic model of
thought.40 Rhizomes are dynamic, insightful, ever-present in our lives, and at their core they help
to envision non-hierarchical, non-centric, non-dualistic thought. The tree is one node in a vast
network that itself has no beginning and no end.
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Our first walk through the Lilley Cornett Woods in Kentucky was stunning. The
protected old growth forest preserved a unique and diverse assembly of Appalachian species.
38
Simard, Durall and Jones, Carbon Allocation and Carbon Transfer; Simard, How Trees Talk to Each Other, NPR
TedTalk.
39
Simard, How Trees Talk to Each Other, NPR TedTalk.
40
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.
25
The huge oblong leaves of Magnolia trees and waxy Rhododendrons brushed up against my
shoulders as I passed through tight trails. Gaps in the dense overstory canopy gave way to thick
blooming patches of ferns and Poplar saplings. On distant slopes I could see the massive trunks
of 200-year-old trees peppered throughout the holler. This was also my first time in the mixed
mesophytic forests of Appalachia. Eminent botanist Lucy Braun coined that term, mixed
mesophytic, for these exceptional forests that harbor an impressively biodiverse mix of species
from the South, North, coast, and mountain regions.41 There were some species I recognized
from Vermont that were on the edge of their range in these warm mountains. I found Hemlock,
Beech, Birches, Black Cherry were all still scattered throughout the forest. There was also an
array of new species such as Sourwood, Sassafras, and various Hickory’s. On the herbaceous
layer I recognized the New England Ferns and Stinging Nettle, but all the plants were much
larger here, thriving on the long growing season.
Shortly into our hike we found ourselves arranged by our various ecological specialties.
The mammalian researchers pulled to the front, the birders and herpetologists who were stopping
to listen for calls and branching off of the trail to flip over rocks made up the middle. In the back,
as always, were us plant ecologists. There is something called ‘a botanist’s pace’—about ten feet
for every fifty everyone else is taking—and it is an excruciatingly real thing. The other plant
ecology student was from Kentucky and he was familiar with a surprising number of the species
in the area. As we went along, he pointed out species after species, and I asked him about any
that he might have missed. Walking ahead of me, he stops short on the trail and bends to the
ground. I stop and stoop down alongside him. It is a marvelously intricate, low growing plant.
Pastel green leaves are pronounced against the dark organic ground, and we move aside another
41
Lucy Braun, Deciduous Forests of North America.
26
small plant to get a clear look at the rosette of basal leaves. The egg-shaped leaves are covered in
a white labyrinthine pattern, and a single long stalk rises far above the ground and leaf rosette.
He tells me this beauty is a Rattlesnake Orchid—Goodyera pubescens. It is a lovely and
uncommon Appalachian representative of the orchid family.
I start to examine the leaves of the plant we had moved aside. A single stem rising up
split into four at the same point. From those, small leaves of odd lobes and shapes filled out the
square shape of this herbaceous plant. I asked what this was. He said it was none other than Blue
Cohosh—Caulophyllum thalictroides—noting that the healthy covering of this species here is
characteristic of particularly nutrient rich soils here. We stand and take a step back to the trail,
but before we can go my eyes get lost in the understory. Large oblong leaves come into focus a
few feet in front of me. I’m new to these plants, but I take a guess that this is PawPaw—asimina
triloba. Nick leans in and notices that PawPaw would have even larger leaves; he takes a leaf and
bites it. Instantly his face puckers up. He plucks off another leaf and hands it to me, so I give it a
bite too. He says this one is Sourwood—Oxydendrum arboretum—whose Latin name literally
means “sour-wood.” I taste the acrid leaf dancing on my tongue and try to commit the name to
memory.
We finally catch a glimpse up and peer along the trail. The last of the hepatologists is
rounding the crest of the nearest slope. We begin to go on, but just then I take notice of some
impressively gargantuan stalks of Tree Moss on the rock next to me. We’re stopped again,
peering into yet another world.
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A behemoth before me: trunk diameter wider than my arm span and towering some 60 or
70 feet overhead. The deep ridges of the bark running long up the sides until they all blur into
27
dark rough trunk against the bright blue sky. Standing at its base, head cocked back nearly 90
degrees, is a humbling thing. This giant was a Scarlet Oak—Quercus coccinea—a somewhat
uncommon species in the area with very particular nutrient needs. I had the pleasure to meet this
individual in an old growth forest in Southeastern Kentucky. The station manager told us they
believed that this Oak was around 300 years old, although they weren’t positive because no tree
cores could be taken in the old growth. It is there, at the buttress of the massive trunk, when
confronted with the reality of such longevity that we begin to empathize with the tree before us, I
certainly do. These moments of respectful awe at a plant Other are powerful. Through the avenue
of empathetic consideration one can start utilizing plant-thinking in their encounters. I stand
there and consider the similarity and dissimilarity in the shared subjective experience that the
tree and I have of just a single year. Or of a single day. What a flash it must be. Then again,
perhaps not. Perhaps the constant disturbance and subsequent micro-adjustment maintains one's
presence in the present. Every moment equally full and each day just as long as the last.
Pondering the subjectivity of the tree while acknowledging my own interpretation of that
subjectivity gives the mind freedom to wander in the metaphysical world we create for ourselves.
In the safety of our mind we become open to new ideas and thoughts, and more receptive to
changes in our thinking.
Back in Vermont after my research in Kentucky, I am in a forest of young trees. Young,
of course, being relative since even a few of the oldest trees are still over 100 years old. Here,
and through the juxtaposition of these forests I have been in, one can understand long term
impacts of anthropogenic land use. Although there are actually a number of factors contributing
to this visual size comparison—the short growing season in the North, the life histories and
maximum height of different species, and the flatter terrain—Vermont forests are especially
28
different than the mixed mesophytic old growth because of their land use history. Only 100 years
ago the lush forested state experienced a devastating 80% deforestation due to logging,
anthropogenic development, and natural fire disturbances. Then, in the early 1900’s efforts to
reforest Vermont began in earnest so today it proudly holds its title of the Green Mountain
State.42 In these forests, with this pertinent history and visually apparent consequences, it is
impossible to separate the anthropogenic impact from some perceivably random or “natural”
assembly of species. The artificial dichotomies of human/nature and artificial/natural are
resolved in the fact that we are a factor of nature same as the beaver who dams the stream or the
algae who eutrify the lake.43
The old growth forests on the other hand, with these awe-striking individuals, are prone
to helping us think the opposite, they reinforce a disconnect between humans and natural
landscapes with images like the virginal forest. A theoretical place which is of value specifically
because no humans have impacted it. However, this is only an illusion; we humans have been a
historic part of the forest. Moreover, even though the trees in these protected forests are safe
from development, they are at the mercy of the climate and abiotic factors as any other.
Pollutants washed downstream through water sources seep into the soils and roots. Seeds of
sometimes harmful non-native species are tracked in by visitors and have their impacts on the
native soil, flora, and fauna. Gasses and fumes from nearby roads and industries are carried into
42
McCullough, Robert, "A Regional Town Forest Timeline." In the early 1900’s more land was being designated to
municipal or federal management which allowed for large scale assessment of forested land, reforestation, and land
management programs. In 1923, 400,000 seedlings were planted alone. Additionally, the establishment of the
National Conservation Commission by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 and subsequent report encouraged the
preservation and practical management of the forests nationally.
43
There are many examples of one individual’s ability to make ecosystem scale changes, and many are less
aggressive and objectively damaging than beavers or algae. For instance: nitrogen fixing plants alter the soil
nutrients available to other plants, the selection of soil microbes greatly alters the pH and nutrients of areas, and
even megafauna like deer who create forest paths and selectively feed on particular plant species alter the habitat
suitable for particular species to grow. However, I use the beaver and algae intentionally because I think we are
more aptly compared to their ecosystem scale impacts.
29
the protected places all the same. These places are not immune to the myriad of climatic changes
that we are all increasingly experiencing today.
This year was the first spring that the prodigious Scarlet Oak of the old growth didn’t leaf
out signaling the premature death of the tree. However, it exemplified for me how land use
history defines plant communities just as the plant themselves define place.
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There are few examples where plant growth occurs fast enough for it to be registered by
the pace that we perceive movement. Although we can see the movements that were made by the
fresh leaves and branches because they eventually spawn, or the appearance of fruits grow larger
and larger—we know there is something happening that we do not see. A moment in time when
the active plant is responding to environmental signals and when, just out of sight, meristematic
cells are taking shape. A novel tool that has made impactful contributions to our understanding
of these moments and the ecological life of plants is time-lapsed video. The ability this footage
gives us, to adjust the temporality in which we view life, is otherworldly. Suddenly, we can see
the tiny circular movements (nutations) that spin the shoots of tall plants round and round as it
compensates to balance itself. We can watch the bark of young trees grow decades old in just a
few moments: smooth bark fills with creases and scars like the wrinkles on our faces. Flowers
pulse with the cycles of the sun pulling their petals closed at night to retain their heat and
unfurling them to greet the daytime pollinators. In the whimsical videos (of which there are
plenty) we are given the chance to see these wonderful displays of plant activity that otherwise
go unregistered and unnoticed.
As shoots grow taller it’s fascinating to see them put out their lateral stems and dance. After
engaging them this way, I am tempted to sit myself outside and watch the plants grow myself; I
30
am inspired to slow myself down and try to catch a moment of another time. This is the magic in
their lives (and perhaps also ours) that we have so often missed. A glimpse into the life of plants
with this method is not only beautiful and exciting since a whole new world of detail is revealed,
but also assists in reorienting us to plant Others all together. In light of the revealing footage, we
can recognize that there is a different temporality and experience of time for most plants. It
seems that the time of plants must be one of these critical points of sheer difference between
human and plants. However, the great dissimilarity makes it a proportionately important aspect
of their experience to consider. With an excitement and knowledge about plants temporality I
wonder what I might gain from slowing down, even if only for a moment, like the plant. What
nutation’s might I feel in myself, and how might I compensate? Perhaps these are the questions
we all ought to be encouraged by the plant world to ask ourselves.
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One barrier to an empathetic and respectful relationship with plants is our inability to
conceive of them as both equal and equivalent dissimilar. Plants are both like us and different
from us; they are different in the same ways in which we in different from them. Insofar as we as
a species place value on human intelligence and sensory experiences, individuals can discredit
the experiences of other beings who do not readily exhibit these traits. In brief, we believe the
lack of central nervous system prevents plants from experiencing the world subjectively, and that
they are a less evolutionarily complex being than us, and thus they do not warrant our ethical
considerations. The experience of an individual plant is inaccessible to us, it is a world of and for
plants. Our experience of the plant world is distinctly our experience of the plants’ experience.
Thus, although primarily subconsciously, we overlay our experience—the experience of the
world that is accessible to us—onto our understanding of the plants’ lived experience. This is not
31
a unique process I am describing here, it is how humans can empathize with one another and
understand the experience of others in our world, how we communicate with pets, it is an
evolutionary adaptation for our social lives.44 However, such an adaption comes to the limits of
its efficacy in communication with very different kinds of beings. Because of this unavoidable
programming, for lack of a better term, it is futile to try to speak concretely beyond our lived
experience. However, the exercise of empathizing with the plant and speculating about its life is
not made useless by this fact. It is the opposite; otherness, when approached without dualistic
presupposition that would seek to categorize and divide us, forms the metaphysical scaffolding
on which to construct rich philosophical considerations about the world and our personal lives is
provided.
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There is a disproportionate amount of attention and empathy given to creatures in the
degree that they display human-like qualities. The effects of this subtle value framework can be
felt in our everyday encounters with plants but are especially exemplified in the disproportionate
amount of attention given to particular lines of study in the sciences. Interest and attention are
disproportionately focused on non-human Others which resemble humans in some way.45 Take
the Venus Flytrap—Dionaea muscipula—as a poignant example.
Out of all the variety of plants, and out of all the unique life strategies of herbaceous
plants, and even out of all the different methods of consumption of carnivorous plant species,
there is paper after paper focusing on the Venus Flytrap. And furthermore, even out of the
species of Dionaea, the large mouth-like trap of Dionaea muscipula has warranted the most
44
Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 166.
45
32
inquiry. Even though these species have unique interactions with light, soil nutrients, and other
nearby plants, a disproportionate amount of interest has been paid to the mouth-like growth form
and rapid movements of the Venus Flytrap simply, I argue, because of its novel similarity with
characteristics and aspect of human and animal consumption.
By conforming to zoocentric distinctions between beings, our actions toward the natural
environment are not weighed fairly. By focusing on aspects of the world that resemble humans,
we risk damaging ecosystems from lack of understanding and attention, and hurting individuals
through a lack of consideration for their differential needs in our shared environments. As a basic
starting point from which to revise our orientation to plants and our ethical relationship to the
other we can adopt a outlooks that realize that, as Paul Taylor describes, “rejecting the notion of
human superiority entails its positive counterpart: the doctrine of species impartiality. One who
accepts that doctrine regards all living things as possessing inherent worth--the same inherent
worth, since no one species has been shown to be “higher” or “lower” than any other.”46
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The Dodder Vine—Cuscuta pentagona—a hemiparasitic47 vine which attaches to and
feeds on other species, has often been used as an example of intelligent, foraging behavior in
plants. A time lapsed video of this foraging behavior is titled Dodder vine sniffs out its prey.48 It
features a pale, vining stem, no thicker than a pencil, with a small sensitive tip. The Dodder spins
its weight in place, which, over the course of a few hours sends the tip of the vine swirling in
46
Taylor, “Ethics of Respect for Nature,” 217. I will take up this notion of how we can best conceptualize our
relationship and navigate our treatment of plants in an upcoming section.
47
Pennings and Callaway, “Parasitic Plants.” Hemiparasitic plants still produce some of their own chlorophyll and
survive autotrophically, but they are supplemented by a host that is better adapted to collect nutrients, so the vine
can take advantage of this other species while avoiding underground resource capture competition between the two.
Uncoincidentally, the understudied realm of parasitic plants benefits from drawing close comparisons between
herbivore and parasitic plant effects on prey/host plants.
48
Dodder Vine Sniffs out its Prey, originally from What Plants Talk About, PBS film clip.
33
slow, wide circles. If you didn’t know what was going on you might not know what to make of
the video at all, but this is indeed the Dodder ‘foraging’ as it were. The Dodder requires another
plant to live off of, hence its hemiparasitic, non-photosynthetic nature, and as it spins in the air it
is searching for a host. When it runs into a nearby stem of another plant, it attaches itself there
and begins to coil around the plant growing with and feeding off it.
What makes the Dodder so intriguing to watch is that it does not just attach to the nearest
plant stem, but instead has some ability to discern which plants it is spinning near and which one
will be the most beneficial for it to attach to. The Dodder prefers the easy to penetrate and sugary
stems of the tomato plant, and in laboratory experiments the Dodder more often attached to
Tomato than other species.49 By blocking various senses between the Dodder and Tomato, i.e.
putting a colored curtain between them, potting them in different soil, and using only volatile
scent chemicals, the researchers determined that the Dodder was indeed using scent cues to find
the Tomato plant.50 Further, it was making adjustments to a position itself on this plant instead of
another species. Although you would not know this is happening just by watching the plant in
real time, it is clear that complex behaviors such as foraging—an intelligent behavior which
requires abilities such as dexterity, knowledge of food berries, and discernment of ripeness to
accomplish—also exists in the plant world.51 The Dodder Vine examples how plant abilities
cannot be excluded from human and animal behavior on the basis that it is a plant doing the
activity.
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49
Runyon, Mescher and De Moraes, “Volatile Chemical Cues Guide Host Location and Host Selection by Parasitic
Plants.”
50
Ibid.
51
Trewavas, Aspects of Plant Intelligence, 15.
34
Climbing up the snowy hills of campus, nose burrowed into my scarf, I make my way to
the library. I can feel the small ice crystals spattering across my exposed skin as the icy top layer
of snow is carried up by cold wind. Whole hillsides of powder move like sand dunes.
Immediately through the doors and into the heat, I can feel my shoulders relax. I walk to the top
floor, to my favorite place to sit. It is a secluded area obscured by the rows of fiction books with
wall-sized windows to distract myself. Snowflakes pat at the windows and my attention is drawn
to the striking dark and stoic tree trunks against the ivory hills. Empathizing from my subjective
experience of shivering in the frost, I wonder how the trees can weather the winter. Do they
suffer through the cold?
Here, however, is where it is critical to recognize each plants’ subjectivity as unique to its
own physiology and environment. Because of our evolutionary history, humans have a thermal
neutral zone of African/tropical species, but the species in Vermont are adapted to these
conditions.52 But I still wondered, if they do not suffer what is that they feel then? Humans have
nocireceptors that help us to feel pain in the deep cold, so we are encouraged to react by
warming ourselves. Plants lack these receptors, so they do not ‘feel’ the cold persay. I didn’t find
this answer appeasing though. The cold is generally just as dangerous to their cells as ours:
risking internal freezing which would cause cell death. Cell death, being the antithesis of the goal
of the cell, is painful for many multicellular organisms like ourselves.
52
The thermal neutral zone is the temperature range in which our metabolisms undergo normal function with little
extra effort. This means that human metabolism is adapted to the thermal neutral zone of African species, where our
ancestors hail from. Because this part of the world experiences little temperature variation, our metabolisms function
best in the between a narrow temperature range. Our cellular function begins to work overtime above or below that
narrow range. We are only able to withstand colder temperatures due to heating methods and winter gear which
allow us to survive in these conditions. Species adapted to cold regions, however, have much larger internal heat
capacities so their metabolisms can be maintained without extra energetic input in a larger range. This is only the
case for homeotherms that maintain a body temperature like humans. Most plants are actually poikilotherms that do
not internally regulate their heat at all and instead have adapted other mechanisms for combating unfavorable
conditions in a wide range of temperatures.
35
Recently I got a better answer from biochemistry. Working with Sugar Maple Trees—
Acer Saccharum—our lab class learned about the proteins in plants (and artic ice fish) that
allows them to withstand the cold temperatures of their environments that they live in.53 The
proteins bind to ice forming within cells and prevent it from continuing to crystalize and pierce
the cell. The tree creates more proteins seasonally in preparation and/or response to the cold.54
To coordinate its response the plant must ‘feel’ something in the temperature drop, but there
would be no reason for it to hurt the tree; it makes no sense to equate the plant in the cold to my
experience of it. When carrying dualistic presuppositions, we barricade ourselves from properly
encountering plants and rendering them in our metaphysics in a number of instances. Plants
ought to be encountered using a framework of plant-thinking so that in the face of their sheer and
untranslatable differences, we are able to respect the individual plants as well as explore what
could be meaningful about the overlap in the Venn diagram of our worlds. I do not worry for the
tree now. Instead, when I look out from the windows onto the growing layers of ice and snow I
think of their peaceful indifference to the weather, ever fascinated by their subjectivity.
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There are several succulent plants lining the North-facing windowsills of my apartment.
Reaching out of their pots and toward the sunlight are a few of the waxy lotus-like species. A
fuzzy succulent with soft, hairy leaves that fade from green to brown called a Chocolate
Soldier—Kalanchoe tomentosa—leans up against the window glass nearly a foot above the soil.
When all of these plants came home after being under the grow lights at the stores and nurseries,
they were squat their succulent modified leaves were wide and flat like mandalas. The Chocolate
53
Bredow and Walker, “Ice-Binding proteins in Plants,” 4.
54
Bertrand et. al., “Changes in ABA and Gene Expression in Cold-Acclimated Sugar Maple,” 34.
36
Soldier was tight to itself putting out many new leaves all at once, they were packed together like
a Yucca cactus. Now, after months in the Vermont winter, they have etiolated. They’ve grown
taller and narrowed their fleshy leaves. They increased the spaces between the whorls or
alternated the direction they arrange their leaves to maximize the light hitting each individual
photosynthetic part of the plant. Amazingly, the same plant can express both this low lateral
form when in high light, and this slender, etiolated form when kept in low light conditions. The
enthralling capacity to change the expression of particular observable characteristics
(phenotypes) of genes based on external stimuli, is called phenotypic plasticity, and it is a
whimsical aspect of plant life.
Biologist Anthony Trewavas makes the case that exhibiting and utilizing phenotypic
plasticity in their growth as a way to interact with their external environment qualifies as an
example of intelligent behavior in plants.55 Unlike the terminating growth in humans where most
cells (aside from stem cells) have fairly linear predetermined growth, plants grow from numerous
meristematic points which are points of concentrated cell division in the plant body. Importantly,
meristems can differentiate into various kinds of cells depending on what circumstances the plant
is experiencing.56 So, the directed physiological response embodied in growth acts like the
intelligent abilities of motile animals. In the life of many plants, growth is a much more active
and involved capacity than for animals, but no less complex and responsive. Trewavas further
explains that, “phenotypic plasticity is a visible witness to the complex computation capacity
55
Anthony Trewavas, Plant Intelligence, 402.
56
Meristems are points of concentrated cell division somewhat like our stem cells, but we have one area of stem
cells while meristems exist at various points throughout the plant. Humans are also capable of cell division and
production of new cell after injury; however, plants can regrow limbs and reproductive parts from the same
meristematic, unlike humans. The ability to regrow full appendages and shift which appendage is growing in an area
is a unique and valuable quality for plant life.
37
plants can bring to bear to finely scrutinize the local environment and act upon it.”57 These
behaviors, as they can rightly be called, provide evidence that growth is, in effect, an example of
movement and intelligence in plants.
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When I was first learning about plant signaling and communication it was enthralling to
learn about the incredible shared abilities between plants and people. A book I read early on
about this subject was What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz.
He overviews the five human senses and explains how similar abilities and physiology arises
concurrently in plants and animals. I found that the comparisons brought to light a connection
between plants and humans in the way we similarly navigate our worlds. For instance, when
reading I was captivated by the identical mechanism that allows plants and humans to sense
gravity.58
Our inner ears house a small chamber filled with incredibly small balls of calcium called
statoliths. The statoliths are ever-so-slightly weighted so as we lean our body, or specifically our
head, to one side the statoliths all fall to that side of the chamber. We feel the sensation of that
increased weight on the side of the chamber and our body registers that we are not upright.
What’s more is that the statoliths not only detect that we are not upright, but we register which
part of the ear chamber they are weighing on and process that information into the physical
world around us, allowing us to navigate how to align our body to the ground. Amazingly, but
not surprisingly, many plants have a nearly identical mechanism. In plants the statoliths are
formed out of starch and are contained in cell membranes in the sensitive root and shoot tips. The
57
Trewavas, Aspects of Plant Intelligence, 13.
58
Chamovitz, What A Plant Knows, 81.
38
starch statolith roll around the membrane and allow the growing parts of the plant to detect
which direction they are growing in. This is how roots know to grow down, how shoots know to
grow up, and how plants that have fallen or are placed upside down are able to reorient their
continued growth in the proper direction.59
A testament to our shared relationships and experiences within the vast difference
between humans and plants, shared physiological mechanisms help give us the most visceral
connection within their otherness. At the cellular level, these similarities provide increasingly
exciting insight to the unique, but not altogether exclusive, subjectivity of plant life. On this
point, reports from Frantisek Baluska and Stephan Mancuso at their university laboratory in
Germany have gone so far as to coin the term plant neurobiology.60 Despite the reluctance and
backlash they have received from the larger scientific community, in the preface to their
collection of articles, Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life they attest that,
“as we enter the new millennium, plant biology is witnessing dramatic advancements in studies
related to the complex behavior of higher plants which are now beginning to reveal intelligent
behavior.”61 Baluska and Mancuso ultimately suggest that their research into cellular physiology
of plants provides evidence for cellular communication throughout the plant that is, more or less,
analogous to the cellular communication between the human body and brain.62
I am riveted by these accounts of plants, however I am skeptical of the pursuit of plant
capabilities on the fact that they bear resemblance to ours, as is done more accessible by
59
Chamovitz, 82.
60
Baluska, Mancuso and Volkmann (Eds.), Communication in Plants, 20.
61
Baluska, Mancuso and Volkmann, “Preface,” in Communication in Plants, v.
62
Importantly, the authors in the collection and the editors do not suggest that plants have a brain or neurons, they
very much understand the term neurobiology is eccentric, but they stand that the eccentric term is needed to capture
attention. They suggest that the ways plants conduct coordinated responses to environmental stimuli, although not
neuronal technically, does warrant consideration and attention equivalent to that of neurobiology because it the plant
‘equivalent’ so to speak.
39
Chamovitz and more regimented by Baluska, Mancuso, and Volkmann. I myself found it helpful
and exciting to understand how very similar we are fundamentally: it greatly reinforces a visceral
kinship between us and them. Nonetheless, I worry that supporting only the research and
elements of plant life that do overlap with our own—which are surely less numerous than the
ones that do not—research risks repeating similar metaphysical violence to neglecting them
entirely. As we come to find new and astounding elements to the life of plants, we must guard
against scrambling for similarities and seek to find a way to be comfortable in the area of
distance between us. This was the case clearly with the Venus Flytrap that we fetishize for its
mouth-like structure, and the Dodder Vine that we must equate to foraging to honor its intelligent
capacity, but it is no less true for the world of more obscure and confounding abilities on hand to
plant life.
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Plants live a mutualistic and dispersed life that is even engendered in the very physiology
of some species. The most abundant plant family, the Asters—Asteraceae—are defined by
solitary flowers that appear to be one center area of the reproductive parts with a ring of petals.
Looking into the brilliant center of a Black-Eyed Susan—Rudbeckia hirta—the form of a
solitary flower becomes obscured. In the dark center there are actually hundreds of small
flowers, called florets, packed tightly together. The yellow ring of “petals” encircling the florets
are also unique, small individual florets of another kind.63
63
The florets are considered individual flowers because they each reproduce individually and have separate, tiny
reproductive parts. The florets also each have their own dark-colored petals that form the center, in asters these are
known as disc flowers. The yellow ‘petals’ are also a type of floret, these flowers with a single long petal are known
as ray flowers.
40
The problem we face in our encounters with these multitudinous individuals is again
approaching the plant with our presuppositions. In this case, the presuppositions to guard against
are our basic assumptions about individuals and consciousness as being singular. Considering the
subjectivity of a plant from our singular and centralized conceptualization of the world, it is
difficult to even envision how to approach the plant as part of a many. However, we must do so
or we risk neglecting the fascinating multiplicity of their experience, and altogether missing the
point of the encounters, which are to approach the plant with respect to its subjectivity.
In sum, our contrasting singularity and multiplicity proper to humans is clearly distinct
from that proper to plants. The inconceivable multiplicity that is proper to many plants lends
itself to a dispersed and nonhierarchical framework for conceptualizing the world that will be
particularly useful for rethinking even our basic presumptions and generalizations. The many
florets tightly packed into the whole that is the Black-Eyed Susan I encounter, remind me that an
individual is not is not always one. Instead, reimaging our approach to these synergistic multiples
will help to leave space for the multiplicity, diversity, and open mindedness that is beneficial in
our own thoughts and decision making. If we do not use the incredible multiplicity of plant lives
to sentence them to dualistic otherness, where our experiences are so disparate that they are
incomparable, but instead allow our differences to exist and for them to be explored without
judgement. Then, this multiplicity and their obscure otherness is not a chasm between our
kinship with plants but an opening for our fascination, inquiry, and rumination.
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When I was taking an herbalism and field botany course in Colorado a few summers ago
I fell in love with Beebalm--Monarda fistulosa. A member of the mint family that gives off a
strong aromatic scent: the tingling of mint but warm and spicy instead of cooling. It is
41
somewhere between oregano and wintergreen, and it is one of my favorite smells. The course
took us to public and private areas in the nearby mountains where the knowledgeable and
conscientious teachers had been returning for multiple years to teach about particular plants and
conduct small harvests for medicine making. The intense perfume of sweet, warm mint could be
smelled nearly 20 meters before we got up to the flowers. Rounding the crest of a hill, I was
suddenly overlooking a rolling meadow of the delightful flowers. Tall green stalks holding a
bursting purple flower like a floral firework frozen in time.
We went about collecting a small number of flowers and leaves to make into tinctures (or
the mostly delightfully flavored honey). Walking in the field with slow and gentle footsteps to
not damage any plants unintentionally, but the array of pollinators are eager to hop around at the
smallest movements. I see a pollen-coated bee homing in on some nearby Monarda and before
disturbing it, I stop to watch the amazing show. The bee bouncing back and forth toward the
flower in an innocuous dance that is simultaneously critical for the two disparate individuals.
Soon the bee landed, and its coat grew heavier in fluffy white grains. I decided to walk toward
another patch of blooming flowers, leaving the flower and bee.
Much later, when I began to study the responsive and interactive elements of plant life, I
learned about the amazing and unseen exchange taking place in this interaction. There is a
fantastic electrostatic negotiation happening between the two species that are nearly
imperceptible to us.64 In short, by being attached to the Earth, which has a negative charge,
flowers have a very slight negative charge themselves. An intriguing study showed that the
different flora shapes conferred a different level of change in different regions, and they suggest
64
Although research is still new, and I do not intend to anthropomorphize this interaction since it is entirely
probable that it could take place subconsciously or without physical feeling at all between both parties. Insofar as
this is an important element in bee attraction to plants, it seems reasonable to think of it as a sensory experience
unique to plant life and outside of our perception.
42
this could be an adaptive trait in different species to differentially attract bees.65 At the same
time, the friction of the rapidly beating wings on bees give the pollinators a slight positive
charge.66 Pollen grains are more easily able to transfer and adhere to bees because of this
interaction that is entirely invisible to us. With the advent of new technology, it is now possible
to observe these hidden abilities of plants, and we have not only found what we might expect,
but we have been surprised by new senses and types of interactions altogether. The world of
plants is highly interactive and dynamic in ways we did not even think, and by acknowledging
this we can start changing the narrative that leads to the continued mistreatment of plants and
replace it with imagination and open-mindedness that cultivates positive encounters.
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At the heart of my argument is this fact: through cultivating an empathetic consideration
for plant Others by bringing attention to their experience, researchers and gardeners alike may
better conceptualize and respect the life and needs of plant individuals. It is from a lack of
empathetic consideration that we have ended up in the current situation where our ideas of nature
and our place within it are construed in such a way that sanctions unapologetic exploitation and
degradation of ecosystems. It follows that to begin remedying the situation in which plants have
been deindividualized and misinterpreted, we require an orientation to the world that encourages
and cultivates the empathetic consideration for other life. However, this solution still raises the
question of how we are to cultivate empathetic consideration in the face of such sheer otherness?
Cultivating plant-thinking and the ability to be attentive to plant subjectivity relies on our ability
to hear and implement the beautiful wisdom now available to us about and from the lives of
65
Clark, Morley and Robert, The Bee, the Flower, and the Electric Field, 742.
66
Ibid.
43
plants thanks to new research, technology, and renewed awareness for our ecological presence.
We need not all be biologists with detailed physiological knowledge to encounter plants in this
way that is both true to their lives and beneficial to our metaphysics and ethics. We need only to
observe more carefully. Perhaps, when necessary, we ought to consult available research, but this
seems a small price to pay to the primary producers of the Earth as we know it. Thus,
encountering the plant with a fresh and biocentric perspective that is informed by the best
available information on plant physiology, and that does not that does not make unwarranted
presuppositions or tightly adhere to one method of understanding, we can do justice to the
individual by reinterpreting their experiences from the perspective of the plants themselves.
Then—not despite their otherness, but because of it—plants can provide the scaffolding on
which we may think critically about our own ethics and metaphysics, personally and
culturally. Bringing these ideas into my own life, I have found no shortage of captivating plant
abilities nor inspiring frameworks therein.
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I am always astonished to see in the trammeled down dirt paths and cracks in the
sidewalk, ruderal plant species persisting despite, and in many cases because of, the
environmental stress associated with those areas. In North America, and especially here in
Vermont, those ruderals almost always include the Common Plantain—Plantago major. Bearing
no relation to the tropical fruit, Common Plantain is a short and low growing forb. Narrow stems
sprawl out from the central rosette into large rounded leaves, and a few thin stalks stand nearly a
half a foot above the ground-covering leaves. This plantain has been called the “white man’s
footprint,” since the native peoples noticed this foreign species establishing on the trodden paths
used by the colonists. In Europe, the herb has been used medicinally for hundreds of years, and
44
in some places it is even revered. The shift in disposition and treatment of the same plant in its
European home versus where it has entered North American habitats has always perplexed me.
Recognizing that the impacts of invasive species in many communities do have
detrimental effects on native populations and abiotic processes, the militaristic attitude toward
invading species seems heavy handed and oversimplified for the complex issue at hand. The
establishment and success of invasive species is often a consequence of human activities and a
mirror of our own anthropogenic impacts, yet we are able to subvert our contribution to the
problem by painting these individuals as heartless invaders. However, the “white man’s
footprint” as it were, is nonetheless a plant Other with its own subjectivity. I pass through the
plantain-lined dirt road along the back of campus, I find it difficult to imagine the landscape
without the resilient rosettes. In the same instant a Common Plantain at my feet is a subjective
Other with an individuality and life unique to it and yet also a human-inflicted strain on the
natural community.
At this crux between humans, plants, and changing natural systems, the invasive species
ask us to consider both plant individuals and the ecological greater good at once. While the
plants themselves have a subjectivity, the native communities foster a collection of subjectivities
and interactions often including humans. The rhetoric of invasive plants as malicious invaders
oversimplifies the complex network of interactions taking place with a dualistic mentality. Both
the specific pressures imparted on the native individuals by the invasive presence and the
possible benefits other native individuals receive from release of normal competitors or increased
45
resources are voided all the same in the narrative of an alien attacker.67 What is lost in this
interpretation is the acknowledgement of the underlying dilemma we face: how can we justify
the protection of natural communities over the needs of individuals. However, if approached
with a lens of plant-thinking that can to bring life and dimension to the dilemma we can reorient
ourselves to the complex network of interactions before us. We can acknowledge the dissonance
in our interactions with species that are at once an individual and a source of destructive change,
while also avoiding prescriptivist language by reorienting to the traits and qualities of plant
individuals. By allowing the time to encounter both the native species and non-native species
without presupposition we develop a better understanding of the traits and qualities that are
encouraging a non-native plants success as well as a native plants inability to compete.
A conscientious treatment of invasive species, then, can be created by concurrently
uncovering the factors conducive to an invader’s success, understanding the threat to native
individuals, and considering the long-term consequences for the whole community of
interactions. These elements shine a nuanced light onto our rhetoric and management of non-
native species that can simultaneously improve the efficacy of management techniques and
honor the inherent ethical dilemma in removing the invading plant itself.
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67
Few invasive are a one-size-decimates-all variety. Determining the specific effects that a non-native species is
having on an area (the area is a critical element), can elucidate the pathways by which that non-native may affect an
ecosystem. Knowing that a tree releases allelopathic chemicals into the soil to inhibit the growth of competitors, for
example, allows us to better anticipate the magnitude of the impact it will have on the soil and abiotic processes. On
the other hand, species often migrate and associate with new ecosystems naturally, and communities are equipped to
combat and adapt to new individuals. To develop the whole image of this case where an allelopathic tree that enters
a new ecosystem, we also ought to ask which species might benefit from a change. My own research on invasive
trees in the old growth forest in Kentucky is an ideal example of this. I began only asking about which native species
were most at risk and damaged by the invasion, and despite my neglectful framework what the data revealed was
that diversity (a common proxy for ecosystem health and functionality) actually increased in plots where the tree
invaded relative to paired uninvaded control areas. Individuals of species that could tolerate a higher pH or that may
have been feverishly competing with other, less successful, native species benefitted from a release of competition
or increased access or recourses by virtue of their individual traits.
46
I have sought to be both a conscientious ecologist and to have an ecological
consciousness. Although similar, these are decisively distinct from one another. Not everyone
has an interest in being an ecologist, but for those who do, this first orientation is critical to
develop, and many do. A conscientious attention to your study organisms as well as the wider
environment, ecologically and socially, will no doubt produce the most robust and considerate
results, solutions, and methods. Kind and considerate ecology provides the groundwork from
which we can consider our institutional and personal treatment of plant life. Considering the
ecology of a species closely and without presupposition, in turn allows us to devise ways we can
interact with plants and other species that neither cause them damage nor inconvenience us.
My favorite example of this attainable goal of human-plant relationships comes again
from Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. She gives an excellent example of how
contentious research can assist us in this task of helping us to develop mutual relationships by
reimagining plant lives as well as our lives with plants. A chapter in her book entitled “Mishkos
Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass,” makes this connection between learning about plants
and learning from them explicitly clear. A graduate student of hers found that compared to no
interaction, native sweetgrass stands were improved the following year by indigenous harvesting
methods.68 To explain her exciting findings, she suggested that a similar relationship was at play
to the grass and the buffalo who both benefit from the grazing on the rangelands, the buffalo is
fed by eating the grass, and the grass is better able to grow back by the grazing. Kimmerer writes
that, “the system was well balanced, but only if the herd uses the grass respectfully. Free-range
68
Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 162. Kimmerer’s graduate students, Laurie, conducted an experiment where
plots of sweetgrass were either harvested by a nearby tribe that utilized the grass for basketmaking or left untouched
for two years. By the end, the difference in the health of the sweetgrass stands was visually apparent. The stand with
no interaction was browning and dying under the weight of its dead stems, while the harvested one was lush and
yellow and had replaced nearly all that was taken with healthy new growth.
47
buffalo graze and move on, not returning to the same place for many months. Thus, they obey
the [Potawatomi] rule of not taking more than half, of not overgrazing. Why shouldn’t it also be
true for people and sweetgrass?”69 It is not only our ability, but also our place to foster positive
interaction with plants—as long as we respect and honor the individual plants the same as we
ought to respect and honor the animals we eat and the water we drink. We need not either wholly
let plants be, nor only use them as a resource. Using our ecological knowledge and personal
metaphysics to critically examine our relationship to plants can help us to find, construct, and
understand the ways we can have mutually beneficial exchanges that benefit both us and the
plant. Marvelously, this is often easier than we expect.
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As much as I would think that there may be something innate in us humans that
encourages our empathetic consideration of all types of Others, the repeated instances of our
misunderstanding, exploitation, and disrespect of other beings keeps me wary. There is
dissonance between a view that honors plant subjectivity and a view that adheres to the needs of
human individuals because we believe doing one of these negates the other. Regardless of if we
are intrinsically predisposed to this type of metaphysical violence or if our empathy has simply
been suppressed by a culture that encourages this dissonance, there is no reason why we could
not, and in the face of rapidly accelerating anthropogenic climate change no reason why we
should not, rethink our practices now. The complex issue of respecting plant ecology as well as
honoring the personal and societal factors of our own life, requires an orientation to plant life
that provides a navigation scheme for these issue as opposed to a dissonance. Ethical accounts of
right action that have employed intrinsic value or societal standards have generally proven
69
Kimmerer, 164.
48
inadequate to change the opinions of individuals who are responsible for environmentally
degrading practices.70 On this, philosopher Ronald Sanders suggests that the way our
environmental ethic discourse is often done through legislation which creates standards of
societal action toward the environment in this legal context alone. He critiques that, “it is always
people—with character traits, attitudes, and dispositions—who preform actions, promote
policies, and lobby for laws. So while we decry removing mountaintops, filling wetland, and
poisoning wolves and we make our case against these practices before lawmaker, the courts, and
the public, we must also consider the character of persons responsible for them.71 It seems, then,
that there are two critical assumptions that must be addressed by an ethic: it ought to recognize
that (as I have argued elsewhere) our relationship plants and the environment directly informs the
consideration and treatment afforded to non-human individuals, and that such a relationship
arises from character traits within ourselves that inform our actions. Sanders continues, “Indeed,
how one interacts with the environment is largely determined by ones disposition toward it and it
seems to many that the cause of reckless environmental exploitation is the attitude that nature is
merely a boundless resource for satisfying human needs and wants.”72
Appealing to this second assumption can provide an ethical framework for navigating
through the dissonant encounters we have. A system that offers such a framework is
environmental virtue ethics. Insofar as the actions of an individual person are predisposed by
their attitude and the personal character traits they adhere to, a practical environmental ethic
ought to arise from these character traits. Throughout history and despite my generalizations, it
seems that there have been both those who have mistreated the environment and those who have
70
Sandler, “Introduction,” in Environmental Virtue Ethics, 2
71
Sandler, “Introduction,” 2
72
Ibid.
49
sought to protect it. Cultivating environmental virtue ethics will help to encourage character
traits and dispositions that benefit both the environment and ourselves. As previous individuals
with these ecologically oriented traits have shown us, those who possess these character traits
also receive more benefits themselves.73 They feel connected to the world and in feeling like they
have acted properly according their values and virtues in their interactions they feel just and
happy! “Those who possess it are better off than those that don’t fore they are able to find
reward, satisfaction, and comfort from their relationship with nature; and it is their character—
the capacity to appreciate, respect, and love nature—that opens them up to these benefits.”74
Developing an orientation to plants that, because is it ecologically informed and arises from our
own volition allows us to discern for ourselves how we ought to act in a variety of plan-human
and human-environment interactions we have. The new orientation taken to our encounters
directly assists us in our task of forming mutually beneficial relationships to respect plant life as
well as bring a sense of success to our own.
Instead of using accounts of intrinsic value or appeals to the human moral obligation—
which seem to do little to shift the character of dogmatic adults—proponents of virtue ethics look
to the character traits of individuals. They argue that we should cultivate an understanding of
what a right action is to us individually, through our attitudes and dispositions, and that doing so
provides a much clearer path to improved environmental ethics than prescriptivist
generalizations. In her own account of environmental virtue ethics, proponent Rosalind
Hursthouse describes how we could think of a beneficial orientation to nature and plant Others,
73
Sandler. In the introduction to his edited book on environmental virtue ethics he describes that individuals he
terms “environmental hero’s” such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson receive great personal benefits
from their work. Their writings suggest that, “for those who are receptive to it, nature is a source of joy, peace,
renewal, and self-knowledge” (3).
74
Sandler, 3.
50
“not as an attitude founded on an adult’s rational recognition of such a one-sentence premise but
as a character trait arising from a childhood training that gives us particular reasons for action
(and omission) in particular contexts, and shapes our emotional response of wonder.”75 A child is
usually taught not to swat at creatures because they will harm it, or taught to water plants
because it is good for the plant if they do so. Thus they learn ‘right’ traits like cruelty is bad or
compassion is good.76 These morals then aren’t simply standards of society but rather become
standards of character one must judge oneself on, and choose to cultivate through actions and
interactions.
The orientation to the world that is cultivated through plant-thinking and by reimaging
plants through an empathetic consideration of their experience, is a virtue itself. When the ability
to recognize plant Others and be attentive to their dissimilar experience is cultivated as a virtuous
character trait, individual people are encouraged to be attentive to their different needs and
respond accordingly. This virtue works to provides a way to navigate our action and treatment of
plants and the environment they create. An empathetic consideration of plant subjectivity and
ecology allows us to craft our interactions with plants in ways that can be mutually beneficial,
and which avoids their exploitation or marginalization. Reimaging these types of empathetic
encounters and interactions as virtuous activity helps to forge a path for a healthy relationship to
plant Others, and in turn the ecosystems they support. This virtue can be taught and cultivated
through contentious attention to the responsive and exciting lives of plant individuals. When a
child becomes excited or interested in the bright yellow flower of the Dandelion—Taraxacum
officinale—let us not simply allow them to pluck it which reinforces this idea of plants as only
75
Hursthouse, “Environmental Virtue Ethics,” 166
76
Hursthouse, 166-167.
51
attainable objects. Instead, bend down to the earth with them and view the flower there.
Acknowledge the Dandelion as a subjective being(s) imbued in a rich life of ecological
interactions (the one between you and it included). This is where our characters traits arise, and
how they can be reinforced throughout our lives by our actions.
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In Colorado, lichen coat the mountains like grass. Every tree and rock you pass is alive
with a rainbow of colors and textures. Stopping to examine this mosaic on just one rock there is a
world of life. First, I’m drawn to a pale, whitish oval lying flat up against the curves of the
rock—Aspicilia caesiocinerea. This one is faded and thin, and it resembles a crust of dried paste
or film baked onto the rock. There is a mustard yellow conglomerate maintaining a near perfect
circle from the edges of individual tendrils that each branch out off of one another. The webbing
traces a path from the delicate edges to the matted center; it is the common—Hypogymnia
physodes. There's another light green lichen—Xanthoparmelia wyomingica—draped over the
thinning rock edges, it is made of an array of little lettuce leaves which rise just slightly off of the
rock surface. Caught by the lichens on the rock I take a careful look at each of them, the light
green foliose lichen is particularly interesting here. It has small little cup-like forms growing off
of the leafy plates, and these are its reproductive parts. They bear a striking resemblance to
strange inverted mushroom, and with good reason, the lichen is part fungus. Individual lichens
are named as singular beings by the species of fungi partner, but the actual plant—if it can still
be called—is the product of two to three individuals coming together to form the one being
indiscernible to our eye.
An algae partner provides food and energy for the pair via photosynthesis. In return the
algae cells, tied into the web of hyphae of one or two fungal partners, are shielded from the
52
elements and kept moist in dry spells. They are able to extend beyond their own physical and
metaphysical boundaries by incorporating the skills of another through forming these
mutualisms. This image of small single-celled algae wrapped in a network of fungal hyphae,
where a static singular is actually a synergistic multiple, provides us a useful philosophical
framework. How might we conceptualize ourselves and our relationship to the environment after
this example of productive symbiosis? If we understood that a cohesive whole made of even
disparate individuals is the most stable arrangement for both partners, might we start to leave
space for these mutually beneficial relationships in our lives? An individual lichen is a prime
example of the inherently multiple and interwoven life of plants. It showcases the active way
plants participate in complex relationships and may help recognize the ones we are a part of.
Personally, I think this way of encountering the world that I have advocated for, by
cultivating this ability to move between ways of knowing and focusing, makes us a lot like the
lichen. We hold dissimilar ideas, perspectives, and perceptions in the same whole network of
thought; the ecological rendering of a plant lives beside the metaphysical rendering. Instead of
cumulating in a cognitive dissonance, the framework of the lichen could help mediate these
perspectives with one another. We need not suppress one way of knowing for the other, but only
to find gaps in the explanatory power of our perspectives and allow those gaps to be filled in
with our other, perhaps disparate, ways of knowing.
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My first full year in New England I was struck by the crisp changes of season which
happened nearly overnight. Just a single night of warm rain at the end of winter flips a switch.
Suddenly buds emerge and the forest is alive with sound again. Over these seasons I watch the
different species of trees and plants dance between rising to the forefront and then melding back
53
into the forest. It is like the sections of a chorus: each voice—bass, tenor, alto, soprano—finding
a time to grow distinct and then fading back into the whole ensemble.
In the beginnings of spring the pregnant forest turns red as it becomes flushed with the
crimson buds of Red Maple trees—Acer rubrum. From the quiet hum of ice the red buds coat the
landscape like a dramatic first note into the rising procession. Soon, the caterpillar-green catkins
of Pussy Willows—Salix discolor—chime in with another full-bodied note across the growing
ballad. As the spring gives way to summer and the leaves fill in the skeletons of the trees, the
chorus of species begin to harmonize. Amongst the sea of green, the memorable shapes of Sugar
Maple leaves—Acer saccharum—are still make themselves seen. The common Sugar Maples in
the mix of hardwoods chant like the bass in the seasonal choir. Entering fall in the green
mountains the tempo picks up. The array becomes busy and I bounce between the colorful songs
of the different tree species. In the late fall, White Ash—Fraxinus americana—takes dominance
as it displays a fantastic change from a yellow to maroon, painting the forest with every shade in
between. Group by group the vocalists grow quiet as we enter into winter. The few leaves of the
Beech tree—Fagus grandifolia—and Oaks—Quercus alba—that remain on the tree let out
occasional pops of song long into the fading choir. Low tones of the White Pines—Pinus
strobus—and Hemlocks—Tsuga canadensis—hit their stride as the rest of the chorus goes quiet,
and they hum through the winter, until the song repeats.
I see species in the same communities, and even individuals of the same species exist in
unique niches with unique activity or growth patterns. This sets the stage for a resistance and
resilience in forest ecosystems. Bringing our awareness to the plant world and to these cycles
that shape their experience, draws our attention to plant individuals amongst the constantly
shifting symphony on the landscape, and invites us into an encounter with them.
54
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55
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Reimaging the Lives of Plants:

grab a succulent fruit.

green of the rainforest. My stepmother’s favorite flower, Peace Lily—Spathiphyllum wallisii,

out to me. I would catch the Sensitive Mimosas—Mimosa pudica—folding themselves in as I

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plants by painting them as unfeeling, passive, objects or inert raw material.

resources. Unsympathetic instrumentalization of other species, coupled with marginalization of

instrumentalizing, and misinterpretation of plant lives which he calls “the philosophical

urgency to leave plants in their ecological life are both honored.

relationships to the non-human all in more productive ways.

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that the leaves embody in myself, in my breath.

serendipitous discrepancy, suddenly, I am not looking at an Ostrya or a representative of a whole

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The separation we construct between human/nature, and human/plant within that, is

plants included, encourages an empathetic consideration of the experiences of other beings.

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in us becomes what contains us. To breathe means to be immersed in a medium that

atmosphere as greatly as it acts upon us.

amenability to the larger environment.

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humans, toward the prioritization of rational, causal explanations of natural phenomena.”18

Moving away from kinship-emphasizing animistic perspectives19 Socrates’ student Plato

from the divine.20

formula for the misinterpretation of plant Others.

them to participate in divine activity25

and plant-thinking directly belie this notion.

physical characteristics or capabilities. Insofar as rational intelligence seems preferable to

life histories of other species.

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deindividualized and misinterpreted by our inability to conceptualize their otherness, it is

make unwarranted presuppositions or tightly adhere to one method of understanding. To

beautiful wisdom available to us from the dissimilar lives of plants.

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comosus—and the common Heliconias—Heliconia Rostrata—whose bright red pendulums hung

stilts from there into the soil.

astonishing how plants defy our expectations if we only let them.

what harm is there in overestimating their capabilities?

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relation to them that is provided by recognizing their dynamic subjectivity.

their native ecological relationships—whether it be in commercialized agriculture or exotic

gardens—allows us to engage in similarly ethically questionable and ecologically unstable

plants need shifting even in our everyday life.

Industrialization of specialized breeding of food crops have produced lots of archetypal

unconventional and contribut to anthropogenic environmental damage. It may be hard at first to

our ubiquitous relationship with these creatures.

different experiences and simultaneously explore our difference without dualistically or

of which we are an irreducible part.

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the frameworks set forth already.

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a tendency to substitute meaningful knowledge about individuals, which is multidimensional and

a system of naming is able to consume the uniqueness of an individual sunflower. He suggests

ecological perspective that is inherently multidimensional, can be helpful in informing

we may know personally as that sunflower. As an ecologist I am indeed satisfied to know

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problematic for a number of other reasons, misguidedly conceptualizing the interconnected

ecological life of plants as embodying a dualistic orientation, contributes to the philosophical

connections play in aboveground plant communities. Fungal networks known as mycorrhizae

examined this relationship between Paper Birches—Betula papyrifera—a deciduous tree

network that itself has no beginning and no end.

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