> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter 1 - The Question of Plant Consciousness In 1973, a book called *The Secret Life of Plants* written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird became a bestseller. It made extravagant claims about plant intelligence, claims that were later shown to be bogus. The fallout from the book shut the door on any funding for research into plant intelligence, a field that is only now gaining some acceptance. The writer uncovered different levels of trigger words with her interviewees, each one more senstive than the one before: - plant sensing - plant behaviour - plant intelligence - plant consciousness When she hit a trigger word, she could immediately sense the person clam up. She had to learn what not to say in order to keep the person on the phone. (It would be useful to identify these gradations in all sensitive topics. For example, talking about culpability in capitalism.) Joseph Priestley thought that the function of photosynthesis was to purify air. He tested this by experimenting with mice and exposing them to various noxious environments, which plants seemed able to "restore": - https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-19-02-0136 ### Chapter 2 - How Science Changes Its Mind All plants and animals descend from alga-like cells. Plants descend from an alga-like cell that swallowed a cyanobacteria. There are about a half million species of plants. Plants amount to 80 percent of Earth's living matter. Plants climbed out of the ocean about 500 million years ago. The atmosphere was primarily carbon dioxide and hydrogen. They had already learned to unlock oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the oceans. They tipped the balance of the atmosphere towards oxygenation, and birthed the habitable world. They have made every iota of sugar we have consumed. A leaf is the only thing that can manufacture sugar out of components that are not alive - sunlight and air. Chloroplasts convert sunlight into chemical energy. Stomata in the underside of the leaf suck in air. The carbon dioxide in the air combines with the chemical energy and the water that is coursing through the plant. Half of the oxygen molecules from CO2 and the water are ripped apart and breathed back out through the stomata. The carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that remains are spun into glucose. > To be precise, it takes six molecules of carbon dioxide and six molecules of water, torn apart by power from the sun, to form six molecules of oxygen and–the true aim of this whole process–one precious molecule of glucose. Our bodies are made of glucose. All our vital functions depend on it. Our brain is a machine that runs on glucose. The first plants with seeds and flowers appeared 200 million years ago. Seeds are embryos encased in nutrients. One seed scientist calls them "a plant in a box with its lunch". Once a seed decides to grow a root, it can no longer move. A baby plant root has 48 hours to find water and nutrients and push out a leaf or two for photosynthesis before it dies. The first green parts of a plant, called a plantlet, are folded, and preassembled in the seed. One of the plant's most ingenious adaptations is anatomical decentralisation. Without a central nervous system, it can re-grow from any part of its body. > Every part of the architecture of a plant's body is there for a reason, calibrated to fit its task. No more, no less. Plants are synthetic chemists. > Several species of plants have been found to identify a caterpillar's species by sensing the compounds in its saliva, and then synthesize the exact compounds to summon its predator. Parasitic wasps then obligingly arrive to take care of the caterpillars. Hawaiian plants are "naive"; the only native predator are bats, so they didn't have to evolve a lot of defenses. Invasive species now threaten them, and about one plant a year goes extinct, compared to a background rate of one every ten thousand years. Plant blindness - the tendency to see plant life as an indistinguishable mass, rather than as thousands of genetically separate individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion from a trout. The Anishinaabe, who live around the Great Lakes, consider plants to be the world's second brothers, created after wind, rocks, rain, snow and thunder, who are the "elder brothers". Animals are the "third brother", and humans the "fourth brother". Mary Siisip 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 being alive, being active. The early Greeks believed that plants had souls. Even Plato granted them feelings and desires. But Aristotle placed them at the bottom of a hierarchy, with animals in the middle, and man at the top. He denied that plants had intelligence. His student, Theophrastus, thought differently. His book, *Historia Plantarum*, written around 350 BC, is considered the first text of plant science. Unfortunately, Artistotle's views became dominant in science, and was reinforced by Descartes in the seventeenth-century. Live animal vivisection was commonly practiced, because animals were thought of as machines. In the 1860s, Charles Darwin became fascinated with plants. All his books after *Origin of Species* are about plants. Darwin discovered the tip of a root is like a brain, intelligently sensing its environment. It is the only part of a plant that will grow back exactly the same if it is cut off. He called it a root-brain. His second to last book was called *The Power of Movement in Plants*. It was based on experiments he did with his son Francis. > “We believe that there is no structure in plants more wonderful, as far as its functions are concerned, than the tip of the radicle,” Charles and Francis wrote in the book’s last paragraph with unabashed glee. No matter what they did to the root cap, it reacted in kind. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed, and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body; receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.” This reminds me of how Steiner believed that the plant's roots are its brain, and its body is what sticks out of the earth. None of his contemporaries agreed with Darwin, and the root-brain hypothesis lay dormant for 125 years. It is still unknown if it is true. In 1944, Donald Griffin and a colleague discovered that bats could navigate by echolocation. In 1976, he was the first to argue, in *The Question of Animal Awareness*, that animal cognition should be taken seriously. In 2012, a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to formally confer consciousness upon mammals, birds, and octopuses. ### Chapter 3 - The Communicating Plant # Quotes # References Bennett, Jane. ‘Vibrant Matter A Political Ecology of Things’ - “The philosophical project of naming where subjectivity begins and ends is too often bound up with fantasies of a human uniqueness."