On Tuesday 22 October I went to hear Mary Kuhn, Assistant Professor of English at UVA, give a talk called “Plant Feeling in the Anthropocene.” Although this is science, she focuses on language and human treatment of other beings, and how that affects both them and us. Her speech focused on the move in science towards treatment of plants as highly skilled and intelligent as they are. So many books, articles, and podcasts have been published to try to break down the borders between human intelligence and the complex systems that plants carry out.
These ideas of plant sentience began to take off in the 19th century. It is interesting that, as she points out, we save terms such as “learning, memory, decision making” for creatures with actual brains. And even people in this industry stray away from using these terms, however, their resistance is because they believe it reduces their complex systems to our level. Moreover, our brains perform less complex systems than they. We use terms such as a vegetable to describe someone who is mentally dead. Many scientists believe that their treatment as subjects rather than objects plays a big role in our want to protect them. Knowing that trees experience pain and pleasure, and even that tree parents live along their children connects them more with humans and even animals. I think this is can moreover go in to understanding words and ways of thought that we use in order to justify discrimination against one another based on differences, by trying to make “the others” as different from “us” than possible.
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