Animal rights have been around for quite a while now, but I have spotted the next big thing for the misanthropic left: plant rights. I’m not making this up.
The New York Review of Books has a book review by and follow-up interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, who up to this point has distinguished herself as one of the leading climate change hysterics. Her newest obsession might be called “the secret life of plants.” Because guess what? Plants are intelligent, and communicate! But since we eat them and trample on them, sounds like the next favored oppressed group for the Democratic Party.
Think I am being facetious? Let’s take in some samples:
A body of recent scientific research suggests that plants can adapt to new information, predict the future, communicate with animals, and confer privately with each other. Should we think of them as sentient? . . . Plants communicate with one another. . . Plants are also able to confer privately, with just their kin, by emitting chemicals only relatives can interpret.
What do these structures and stratagems reveal about the inner lives of plants? Many biologists say not much. From asters to zinnias, there is, this group insists, no inner life to analyze. Others argue that this is a form of prejudice—call it antibotanical bias. . .
Ultimately the lesson the nation of plants wants to deliver is: wise up! At the rate people are running through resources, mowing down forests, heating up the globe, and driving other species to extinction, there isn’t much time before the entire biosphere starts to unravel. “I do not believe that the gravity of the situation is clear to most people,” Mancuso writes.
Calvo argues that people have undervalued vegetable intelligence because plants are so different from us: “We can’t look at their faces to understand what is going on internally.” Still, he believes, it should be possible for us to sympathetically engage with them, to imagine—to paraphrase Thomas Nagel—what it is like to be a bamboo.
People who consider it their ethical obligation to reduce animal suffering can—and often do—become vegans. (Any kind of agriculture, it’s worth noting, inflicts death and suffering on the animals who are displaced, so even vegans shouldn’t get a bye here.) But no human or, for that matter, animal of any kind can survive without consuming plants, either directly or indirectly. As the nation of plants, which is to say Mancuso, observes, everything people eat traces its origins back to photosynthetic organisms. If cucumber vines and banana trees possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response? Perhaps it would still be okay to eat seeds and grains, but harvesting them would be tough. Could people in good conscience mow down a field of wheat or rice plants? Could we even sow a field of wheat or rice, knowing that the plants might be suffering from a sense of overcrowding, say, or panic, but be locked into silence, unable to express themselves?
Calvo seems reluctant to follow his logic to its logical conclusion. The furthest he’s willing to go is to ask: “Were plants to be given the status of ‘sentient,’ would this give them rights that might encumber our exploitation of them?” People have, he acknowledges, “been slow to consider these issues.”
The idea of plant consciousness or intelligence stops being cool and fun as soon as you start thinking through the implications. Yes, a worldview less hierarchical than our own would have to allow that sentience is widely distributed across the phylogenetic tree. It would also accept a wider distribution of suffering. Evolution has no particular stake in ethics; plants may understand this even if we don’t.
In your recent article, you write that there is essentially no way human beings can live without harming plants. What do you think, then, we should take from discoveries about plant sentience, if anything?
We tend to reserve qualities like intelligence and even sentience for ourselves and those creatures we identify as being like us. But just about everything we have learned about the natural world in recent decades suggests that these qualities are much more widely distributed across the animal kingdom. Discoveries about plants should at the very least shake us up. If plants, too, are sentient, or intelligent—a term that’s admittedly hard to define in this context—that raises a whole host of questions about how we treat (or mistreat) them.
Dust off your copy of the famous 1970 law review article “Should Trees Have Standing?“, and await the first class-action lawsuit on behalf of oppressed plants everywhere.
I am reminded here of a stanza of a poem by the contemplative monk Thomas Merton:
Keep away, son, these lakes are salt. These flowers
Eat insects. Here private lunatics
Yell and skip in a very dry country.
