“Humans are not the lords of this earth,” Geniusz writes. “We are the babies of this family of ours. We are the weakest because we are the most dependent.” Where Geniusz talks of linkages, of dependance and kin, most European thought is fixated on distance and detachment. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in our corruption of the word vegetable, which is now a crude word for a brain-dead human being. But vegetabilis came from the medieval Latin, meaning something that is growing or flourishing. Vegetāre, the verb, meant to animate or enliven. Vegēre was the very state of
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