Review of PLANTA SAPIENS
Are plants conscious?
Tl;dr – This is a fascinating exploration of plant science and behavior that encourages the reader to take a radical new perspective of plants. How can we think of their movements as behaviors? Or of their behaviors as intelligence? The book also leads to bigger questions of consciousness beyond humans.
As I write this, I sit in my office staring at my sun bleached plant I left outside too long when moving homes recently. Does it know its leaves are damaged? Does it have a plan to recover? Why do I feel bad for it?
Most of us see plants as a single mass, a group of things, rather than individual species. There are trees, not trees, flowers, and the ones we bring inside and often kill due to our inability to water them correctly. But few of us probably think about what they might be “thinking” about. In Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence by Paco Calvo and Natalie Lawrence explain why plants may have a much more internal life than we probably ever imagined.
The book takes many directions and wades into several intellectually big areas, but there’s a few things that stood out to me. The first is that we often are blind to plant behavior because it doesn’t move at a human scale of perception. That’s why we use time-lapse to show plant movement, for example. We need to take that approach into the study of plant intelligence.
This perceptual scale problem also has other implications. Plants move slow in a fast-paced, evolutionary world of animals. Because evolution is conservative, plants must be thoughtful in their choices and behaviors especially because they don’t locomote, but only grow – slowly.
Second, is that language is limiting. Many of the words we use to describe intelligence and related constructs are rooted in human-centric terms that make their application to plants sound “silly” even though the concept maps on.
Third is that brains don’t need look like mammal brains to be a brain. Take octopus for instance, with their distributed (non-centralized) neural system. In plants, Calvo and Lawrence argue, the vascular system serves as the information highway for electrical signals to travel.
Fourth, the idea of plant intelligence opens the door to discussions of consciousness outside the human realm. Calvo and Lawrence draw on Peter Singers line of argumentation in Animal Liberation to highlight the potential for a similar change in perspective for plant liberation (with the implicit argument that our house plants might be depressed. My poor bleached plant almost certainly is).
I found this book quite fascinating, most notably because it forces you to come at these somewhat pedestrian concepts from a human standpoint and really morph your point of view to think about plants in a novel way. It’s a delightful book.
Published: March 2023
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (2012) by Merlin Sheldrake
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (2021) Suzanne Simard
