Seeing Green: The Re-discovery of Plants and Nature’s Wisdom

Abstract

Abstract:In this article, I endeavor to recount the odd history of how we have come to perceive plants like we do, and illustrate how plants themselves perceive and sense the world and, most importantly, what they can tell us about Nature. Through examples of the ingenious ways plants have evolved to thrive, I engage the idea that our modern society is afflicted by a severe disorder known as plant blindness, a pervasive condition inherited from our forefather Aristotle and accountable for the current state of vegetal disregard and hence environmental dilapidation. I propose that the solution to this state of affairs rests in a radical change of perspective, one that brings the prevailing, yet defective, Aristotelian paradigm together with its expectations on how Nature should behave to an end. Enacted, such change releases us into a new experience of reality, where the coherent nature of Nature is revealed.Keywords: plant blindness; coherence; cooperation; facilitation; competition; plant behavior; sensing Sensing the World through Historical DeviationsWe have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.-Theoretical physicist and philosopher Werner Heisenberg [1] Everything any living organism knows about the world comes to it through its senses. Such a deceptively simple task bears the most crucial challenge all living organisms are confronted with-the requirement to evolve and use numerous signal-transduction systems (i.e., stimulus-response pathways; [2]) to sense the surrounding environment and ensure the most appropriate adaptive responses in order to survive and proliferate in a range of biological niches. By definition then, all OPEN ACCESS

Plant blindness and sustainability

“…There seems, in certain cultures, to be a philosophical disposition to undervalue plants, which some scholars have traced back to Aristotle. In his enquiries into the nature of the soul, he concluded that plants could not have anything that could be called a soul and therefore, by definition, are not alive (Gagliano, 2013;. The origin of the very words "animal" and "animate" is Latin anima, meaning breath or soul; the OED defines it as "The animating principle in living things, the soul; some part or aspect of the soul, esp.…”

The Pet Plant Project: Treating Plant Blindness by Making Plants Personal

“…Over time, this has resulted in a widespread condition referred to as "plant blindness" (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999), where an individual fails to notice plants or recognize their importance to the world. The implications of plant blindness are far reaching: generations of teachers and students are botanically illiterate (Hershey, 1996;Gagliano, 2013), resulting in the devaluation of plants as they relate to environmental sustainability, public health, and the economy (Tomescu, 2009;Balding & Williams, 2016). Yet plants and other photosynthetic organisms form the foundation for life on earth, and failure to acknowledge their biological significance will result in dire consequences for the health of the planet and our species.…”

Meat Culture

“…Although articles formulating the emergence of plant studies had already begun to appear in journals such as Quanta (McGowan 2013), Mother Earth News (Angier 2013), Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (Miller 2012), Societies (Gagliano 2013;Ryan 2012), and even the Journal for Critical Animal Studies (Houle 2011), plant studies emerged into popular culture through the publication of Michael Pollan's (2013) "The Intelligent Plant" in The New Yorker. There, Pollan reports the findings of biologists-molecular, cell, plant-confirming capacities that new materialists call agency (Coole and Frost 2010) and suggesting paradigm-shifting parallels to animal capacities as well (see Table 1).…”