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March 18 - June 2, 2025
Everything seems to strain upward and downward and outward at once.
All things here are so thoroughly absorbed into their own living
All around me are complex adaptive systems. Each creature is folded into layers of interrelationship with surrounding creatures that cascade from the largest to the smallest scale.
Everyone in this situation comes within a hair of death to ultimately flourish. This is the push and pull of interdependence and competition.
pushing and pulling and coalescing, as I have come to understand, is a sign of tremendous biological creativity.
Plants are the very definition of creative becoming: they are in constant motion, albeit slow motion, probing the air and soil in a relentless quest for a livable future.
Controversy in a scientific field tends to be a harbinger of something new, some new understanding of its subject.
In this ruined global moment, plants offer a window into a verdant way of thinking. For us to truly be part of this world, to be awake to its roiling aliveness, we need to understand plants.
octopuses could taste with their arms, use tools, remember human faces, see their world far more sensitively than we can ours; that they have neurons distributed throughout their bodies like a multitude of disparate miniature brains.
It was so green it looked lit from within.
the numinous moment—the
the tall corn, the strong sun, the old man, become one. This is one of those moments, indescribable, when there is a sense of intense reality, an almost preternatural reality—and then we are descending the trail to the gate, reboarding the bus, all in a sort of trance or daze, as if we had had a sudden vision of the sacred, but were now back in the secular, everyday world.
experience of flashes of the eternal, the real, the gestalt, runs like a thread throughout naturalist literature.
“Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul,” he wrote; “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” and therefore nature “gives the impression of the whole.”
the planet as a living whole, with climatic systems and interlocking biological and geological patterns bound up as a “net-like, intricate fabric.” This was Western science’s earliest glimmer of ecological thinking, where the natural world became a series of biotic communities, each acting upon the others.
that plants could be thought to behave at all was still an enchanting possibility.
According to botanists working at the time, the damage that Secret Life caused to the field cannot be overstated.
a wide variety of plants are able to distinguish themselves from others, and can tell whether or not those others are genetic kin.
Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them, and several plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off.
Girls of that nature tend to build complex internal worlds that they proceed to drape like a blanket over the world around them.
Children are known to be inborn animists.
children have an “open-system attitude” that allows them a certain emotional proximity to the natural world.
that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.
Science is a conservative institution for a reason. Conservatism is a crucial backstop against false knowledge.
Science indeed has no agreed-upon definition for life, death, intelligence, nor consciousness. Words certainly matter, but the definitions of these words are not settled, and are therefore expansive.
Making the mental space to imagine truly different intelligences, without jumping to easy human conclusions, is a difficult task.
Nature is not a puzzle waiting to be put together, or a codex waiting to be deciphered. Nature is chaos in motion. Biological life is a spiraling diffusion of possibilities, fractal in its profusion. Every organism, and certainly every plant, has ricocheted out of another fragment of the evolutionary web of green leafy things to variate further.
The light darkened and the temperature dropped, thanks to the exhale of millions of plants at once.
Researchers had just found that plants could remember, but not where those memories were stored. They’d found kin recognition, but not how those kin are recognized. These discoveries were more like hints, fragments that pointed toward something larger, something whole.
Facts are theory-laden; theories are value-laden; values are history-laden.
As the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia puts it, they constructed our cosmos; “The world is, above all, everything the plants could make of it.”
The meat of our bones and indeed the bones themselves carry the signature of their molecules. Our bodies are fabricated with the threads of material plants first spun.
this way we are, at every moment, brought into conversation with plants, and they with us.
When plants are allowed to evolve without fear, they get scrupulously and flamboyantly specific.
synthesize the exact compounds to summon its predator.
“plant blindness,” the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout.
We are too seriously engaged in the funny business of drawing lines in the sand between subjects and objects, she says. “The philosophical project of naming where subjectivity begins and ends is too often bound up with fantasies of a human uniqueness,” she writes in her book Vibrant Matter.
Plato described plants as having a “desiring” and “sensing” soul,
Aristotle intensified that hierarchy. He described a ladder of life, a scala naturae, with plants on the bottom and humanity at the top.
described the core of trees as “heartwood,” a term we still use today.
In 2012, a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to formally confer consciousness on all mammals, birds, and “many other creatures, including octopuses.” Nonhuman animals had all the physical markers of conscious states, and clearly acted with a sense of intention. “Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness,” they declared.
Moisture, nutrients, obstacles, dangers: the root cap was sensing them all, sorting and steering accordingly. Darwin called it a “root-brain.”
A paradigm can’t ask questions about something it doesn’t see as existing in the first place.
What happens after a paradigm shift takes place? Kuhn says everyone goes back to normal. It quickly becomes hard to believe that any other idea ever held sway. What started as a few agitated stones has provoked an avalanche, and there is nothing to do but join the flow. In fact there is only the flow. Most everyone who was originally hesitant embraces the new paradigm as though it were always obvious, natural, preordained.
Glutamate and glycine, two of the most common neurotransmitters in animal brains, are present in plants also, and seem to be crucial to how they pass information through their stems and leaves. They have been found to form, store, and access memories, sense incredibly subtle changes in their environment, and send highly sophisticated chemicals aloft on the air in response.
I ankled out like a deer,
The language of scent, they said, was wafting messages on the air. I began to understand that a many-layered drama was playing out all around me, with more characters and plot lines than a Russian epic.
Communication implies a recognition of self and what lies beyond it—the existence of other selves.
It’s a way to make one life useful to other lives, to make oneself important to other selves.
paper, published in Plant Resistance to Insects, a relatively obscure (if you can believe it) publication by the American Chemical Society,
