Reading the Guardian at the moment feels a bit like speaking to a “left-wing” relative and realising that she doesn’t realise that her views are somewhere to the right of Sadiq Khan. But cheers to it anyway for publishing Jeremy Hance’s review of Brilliant Green by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola.
Hance’s article got me thinking about plant sentience and behaviour, and made me much more aware of the complex ways plants negotiate and interact with their environments. They have (at last count) 20 senses as opposed to the human 5; they are able to communicate within and between species, cooperatively and aggressively; they register and respond to being damaged, and dying.
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| Some of my friends - Tree looked depressed, so I gave him a beer. |
Allowing for some semantic give-and-take, we can say that plants feel pain (also that they are dickheads, see below).The former idea can be a sore point for vegetarians and vegans who get ribbed about cruelty every time they eat a salad. As Hance points out, plants have evolved not to be individuals in the way animals are - Mancuso conceives of single plants as ‘colonies’, many of which are designed to be eaten, or at least to survive the odd nibble. And, of course, plants are so ontologically different from animals that it’s not easy to ascertain what pain is to them.
That said, it is undeniable and of interest that plants do feel. They send out distress signals when attacked; they deliberately set each other on fire (lookin at you, eucalyptus); someone once told me that flowers scream at rival species, like the bodysnatchers. I have included a 1914 account of a carrot being tortured below this post, for anyone who wants to feel as weird as I do.
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That’s all fairly creepy and opens up visions of a sentient and suffering universe that might encourage those so-inclined to stop up their moral ears and think “anything goes”. And on the flip-side there’s a risk of turning into some Avatar-watching pantheist (kudos to a film that thinks it can mask its crass racial stereotyping through cunning use of the colour blue). But a more curious and even respectful attitude to Auntie Flora might be a good thing, because 1.) plants make the planet habitable, and that’s a bit of an issue, and 2.) I think being, in principle, is worth something, if only in the sense that destruction shouldn’t be unconsidered or gratuitous. Attentiveness to things is a bit of a trendy concept, but a good one. Philosopher Simone Weil wrote that attention presupposes love, which I believe, though being attentive does not entail anything as alienating as soppiness, so it’s a good starting point in unfamiliar ethical territory.
In case you were wondering, mate, I am not going to stop eating my green brethren. We understand much more about the suffering of most farmed animals than about the suffering of plants. Harm felt by animals is harm we can understand, unless we choose not to. Comparing humans and animals (especially other mammals) makes endlessly more sense than comparing animals to plants, on account of the shared genetic material and all that. But comparing plants to Donald Sutherland, it turns out, makes the most sense of all.
"In a room near Maida Vale there is an unfortunate carrot strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector. Wires pass through two glass tubes full of a white substance; they are like two legs, whose feet are buried in the flesh of the carrot. When the vegetable is pinched with a pair of forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls the long arm of a very delicate level which actuates a tiny mirror. This casts a beam of light on the frieze at the other end of the room, and thus enormously exaggerates the tremor of the carrot. A pinch near the right hand tube sends the beam seven or eight feet to the right, and a stab near the other wire sends it far to the left. Thus can science reveal the feelings of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot."
(Extract from Sir Jagadesh Chantra Bose's article in Nation magazine, quoted in The Secret Life of Plants, Tompkins and Bird)
