SEEING GREEN

The new controversial Science of Plant sentience, ‘Plant blindness’, Climate change and what can Climate Art achieve? 

Are you a plant killer? 

I used to be a plant murderer in that I was never able to keep any plant alive, either I put them in the wrong spot, over zealously watered them – taking the phrase ‘kill them with kindness’, a bit too literally or forgetting to water them, or just never took the time to understand what they collectively and individually needed! I used to tell myself, I am not a green fingers type of person, and I abdicated that care and responsibility to my husband, because I convinced myself he naturally loved gardening. 

I have been mulling over when the turning point, in my attitude and relationship with all plants around me took place, because fast forward a couple of years and I have had a complete reformed epiphany, in my attitude and relationship to all plants. 

In March 2020, the whole world literally came to a standstill, and Covid 19 forced all of us to practically stay indoors. In Johannesburg, South Africa where I live, we would spend most of our time in our garden and walk in all our public, botanical parks, and man-made forests in our city. 

During these walks, we both became acutely aware of how different we felt, emotionally and how we started seeing all shades of green plants and noticing the symbiotic relationships, all around us.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock, writes in her book, ‘Into the forest – the secret language of trees’ that Impressionist paintings show trees shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow, but the forest still predominates in green: the shy yellow green of springtime treetops, the cold silver – green of spruce needles, the ruddy green of moss underfoot. All derive from the miracle of photosynthesis, by which plants source the energy they need to stay alive. Many studies reveal that we benefit from time deliberately spent in green spaces, whether parks or forests or even rooms with houseplants. 

The silver lining of this period of confinement and social isolation was I became interested in our relationship with sentient, and non-sentient beings, thinking about regenerative, mutualistic systems and relationships in nature, motivated by all the time I had to witness these forms of cooperation in our garden. I would make it part of my daily ritual to stop by my Salvia flowerbeds, with all the happy buzzing pollinating bees, on the way to my studio, and basically found myself doing a ‘check-in’ with all our plants. I started planting my own seeds, and started with sunflower seeds, which brought us both great joy as we became fully aware of their heliotropism, their circadian rhythm in their growing phase, which allows them to turn their heads, tracking the suns path, across the summer sky, which allows them to take advantage of the suns heat which increases pollinator visits as well as the speed at which their seeds develop. After sunset, turning to face east again.

My art practice is interested in existential philosophy, consciousness, sentience and responding to climate change and ecology, bio-diversity loss challenges. I am inspired in my practice, by Biologist George Haskell who writes, We’re all trees, humans, insects, bacteria – pluralities. Life is embodied network. There is no ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ separate and apart from humans, we are part of community, composed of relationships with others, so the human/nature duality is from a biological perspective illusionary.  

In this awareness I started thinking about ‘what is it like to be a plant?’ 

In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nigel asked; ‘What is it like to be a bat?’

This strange question stimulated decades of tongue-in-cheek additions to the long-standing conversations about the nature of consciousness.

Nigel argued that if there was something that it was like to be a creature; then the creature must have some form of consciousness. Subjective experience is equated to consciousness at some level. We might accept that there is a subjective ‘bat experience’ but the bridge to understanding it is long and tenuous.

Picturing what it is like to be a plant – that is even more of an extreme leap of imagination. So much so that many argue that plants have no subjective experience at all.

How can we imagine the experience of a radically different life form, when its way of existing is so far removed from ours?

Technology and time-lapse photography have condensed plant growth into visible movement, and artist Alex Metcalf designed a hyper-sensitive microphone to record the noises of tree transpiration, transfusing the imperceptible into the audible realm for human ears. These technologies allow us to peer through the keyhole of other species’ experiences. But they only put human perception in their place, they don’t show us what the organisms are perceiving and feeling.

We cannot possibly comprehend what it is like to be a plant, unless we are willing to give up anthropomorphizing, to break out of what it is like to be a human and explore other ways of being and understanding the world. 

We live in a world of green. Trees, lawns, weeds, gardens surround us, yet Biology Educator James Wandersee and Botanist Elizabeth Schussler, coined the term ‘plant blindness’ in the 1990’, by suggesting that in the west, wider society culture suffers from an inability to appreciate plants in the biosphere, the inability to see the unique beauty and biological features of plants, to notice plants, and to recognize their ecological importance and economic value to humans. It is only when plants flower – the bright yellow dandelion, the cheerful cherry blossoms that we notice the plants around us. 

Why this cultural bias? 

Starting with the psychology of perception, we view plants as a backdrop, not only a context for the action and behaviour of animals, but also a homogenized wall of green, from which we tend to not single out individuals. In psychology speak, plants have ‘low signal value’. Plants do not move, talk, eat, fight or sleep, they do not have eyes that stare back at us, all reasons we find animals interesting and plants less so. 

Plant blindness is a problem that afflicts us all from a very young age. We all but ignore the photosynthetic creatures that make up much of our environment. Our predilection to prioritise animals over plants is deeply ingrained. A 1980s study found that many children did not even consider an organism to be a ‘plant’ unless it had flowers.

The irony is that plants form the basis for most ecosystems on the planet, and more than half of the worlds’ endangered species are plants. They make up one in 8 species threatened by extinction. 16,460 out of 31,030. (IUCN 2020)

The Royal Botanical Gardens hosted a conference at Kew this year, titled ‘The State of the World Plants and Fungi’, and it has been suggested that 45% of all flowering plant species are under threat of extinction. Extinction is a natural process but pressure on plants is greater than ever. Findings have indicated that epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants, (bromeliads – orchids) were the most threatened, plant form while those with an annual life cycle were the least threatened. 

There are between 20 000 and 30 000 orchid species, but according to the international union for conservation of nature, 80% of its varieties are in danger of extinction. The cause is twofold, destruction of the natural ecosystem through forest clearing, illegal trafficking of orchids and climate change. Most orchid species grow in tropical forests, of which a third have been lost over the past 10 years. Orchids in general are very dependent on Mycorrhizas, a cornerstone of woodland ecosystems, for all or part of their life cycle, and cannot germinate fully without being infected by a fungus. Co-operation and mutual benefits are the foundation of countless interactions in nature, win-win partnerships that play a vital role in the forest. 

Orchids are one of the most sensitive angiosperms, not surprisingly, find themselves threated by climate change and human activity. Orchids are vibrant plants; they interact with their environment extensively and are indicators of the health of the ecosystem. They depend on mycorrhiza for germination, and pollinators like insects for their propagation. 

Humans according to Dr Mathilde Brown, Conservation Science analyst at RBG Kew are changing biodiversity patterns at the highest levels, and quite a lot of these changes are leading to homogenisation of global flora, which will lead to the loss of distinctive ecosystems and the services they provide. 

How can society recognise that plant conservation is one of humanity’s most crucial issues, when it literally cannot see plants. 

Scientist Monica Gagliano (2013), in her paper ‘Seeing Green: The rediscovery of plants and natures wisdom’, proposes available evidence that plants, like all living organisms, are very sensitive and active, monitoring and integrating lots of parameters from their environment and using numerous systems to sense, assess and even facilitate each other by actively acquiring information from their surrounds. Many plants literally ‘help’ each other by improving growth, fixing nitrogen, nurse cropping, controlling pests or attracting beneficial organisms such as insects or mycorrhizae. 

In the book, ‘Planta Sapiens’ Professor of Science (MINT Lab), Paco Calvo (2022), uses the latest research to cautiously start thinking about the sapience – intelligence and ‘inner lives’ of plants. We are so entrenched in the dogma of neuronal intelligence, brain-centric consciousness, that we find it difficult to imagine alternative kinds of internal experiences. We are just about beginning to acknowledge that non-human animals might have intelligence, but accepting plants might require a radical shift.

Paco Calvo (2022) suggests that ‘When we consider what our consciousness is, what it is like to be a human, what might spring to mind is the ability to form abstract thoughts or conceive of ideas. But is this just a veneer on top of the internal drivers of what goes on inside us? 

We cannot escape the fact that a large proportion of our behaviour is emotionally driven, whether that be behaviours that express emotional states – such as laughing, crying, or frowning- or behaviours that are not about communication but have emotional underpinnings such as fear, anger, affection, and other emotions are essential drives motivating our interactions with the world, and possibly those of other organisms too.

‘To understand nature through degrees of complexity rather than levels of hierarchy scaffolded with self-reference is to find ourselves no longer the pinnacle of creation. We are only beginning to comprehend non-human minds, only just beginning to concede that there are infinitely many other ways of seeing and other ways of being within the same reality, we would sooner grant consciousness to AI, modeled on our own minds arising from nervous systems crowned with brains, than consider different forms of intelligence as portals to a wider conception of consciousness. (Popova 2024)

Journalist Zoe Schanger in her book, The Light Eaters  writes: ‘A life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing, us included. Many are so ingenious that they seem nearly impossible for an order of life we’ve relegated to the margins of our lives, the decoration that frames the theatrics of being an animal, She suggests that,’controversy in a scientific field tends to be a harbinger of something new, some new understanding of its subject. This tendency to mistake our models of reality itself, universal to the human animal and manifested across all cultures in different ways, and this blind spot of Western Science, unshared by indigenous and Eastern traditions, have left our view of plants on par with Descartes view of non-human animals.For us to be truly part of this world, to be awake to its roiling aliveness, we need to understand plants. They suffuse our atmosphere with the oxygen we breathe, and they quite literally build our bodies out of sugars they spin from sunlight. 

We know that without the evolution of flowers, we wouldn’t exist, we know that chlorophyll is the crowning molecular miracle of nature, the only thing that can convert the inanimate elements of air and light into sugar, that lifeblood of the living world.’

Plants may be rooted in one spot, but that means that they must be better at dealing with the changes around them. They can’t move to greener pastures like animals can, they must take things as they come. There is a long list of plant behaviours that we can suspect are underpinned by cognitive processes, from learning and memory to competitive, risk-sensitive behaviours. Memory itself, for example, must be learned, and this is seen with plants that show numerous examples of responses to something they have encountered before. 

Plants speak the silent language of scents. They do it through their leaves, shoots and roots, flowers, and fruits. Virtually all plants have mastered the trick of chemical talk, synthesizing, and releasing into the air many different volatiles through their whole bodies for a whole number of purposes. For example, the characteristic ‘green odour’ that you can smell from freshly mowed grass is a result of wounding the grass leaves. VOC distress signals warn other grasses nearby that danger is at hand and alert them to mount defences. 

These messages cross the boundaries of the plant world for example tomato plants produce chemicals to muddle the brains of herbivores feeding on them and turn them into cannibals. Other plants and trees under attack will recruit their own ‘bodyguards’ by using airborne chemicals to attract predatory insects that happen to have an appetite for the herbivore threatening them.

This constant network of communication suggests that plants have some kind of social intelligence.

Plants can assess the risks of the choices they make, which is important when resources are limited. Plant growth tends to be enhanced in richer soil patches, but roots do not just care for water and nutrients. After judicious cost-benefit analyses, plants decide where to invest their precious metabolic resources.

An exciting area of research into plant intelligence, reveals that plants can both learn and remember. Monica Gagliano (2014) authored the paper ‘Thus spoke the Plant’, where the Mimosa plant’s habituation tendencies was investigated at the University of Western Australia in 2014. They found that when a plant was in an environment where there wasn’t much light, it was much quicker to they found that when a plant was in an environment where there wasn’t much light, it was much quicker to habituate and stop folding up in response to touch, than plants in situations where light was plentiful. 

Second, the mimosa’s habituation was not short-lived, it could last for up to twenty-eight days. Mimosas seem to have long-term memory. (Habituation is a simple form of learning, where a stimulus happens so frequently and inconsequentially that the reaction to it is blunted and eventually ignored). Despite recent research, resistance to acknowledging the very concept of plant learning remains fierce. According to conventional wisdom, while animals learn, plants evolve adaptions.

Paco (2022) concludes that Plants are not just a complex ‘living air-conditioning system’. If we can see plants as cognitive beings, we might be able to shift our perspective on humanity’s role in the Earth’s biosphere and facilitate plants in rebalancing our effects on the ecosystem.

He states that’ as Nobel laureate X-ray crystallographer Richard Axel’s invocation, ‘ thinking outside of the box, between the lines and beyond the horizon to break out of the shell bounding our current frames of thought. If we are ever to come to a new way of thinking, a new way of existing, we must change our priorities. We must allow new questions to be asked, to imagine ourselves in the alternate natures of the beings that exist alongside us. If we can truly understand what it is like to be a plant, we will learn much about what it means to be human, and how we might be ourselves in ways that work with the organic world rather than destroying it.

Climate change, the long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, is a phenomenon that affects all living beings equally. The factors drive climate change can be natural, such as changes in solar cycles and volcanic activity, however in recent times, the driving force of climate change has been rampant human activities. These changes have resulted in frequent wildfires, increased droughts, rising sea levels and other alarming outcomes such as severe loss of biodiversity. 

The Forums Global Risk report 2024, finds that environmental risks make up half of the top 10 risks over the next 10 years, with extreme weather events, critical change to Earths systems, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse being the top three. 

In South Africa, where I live, we have a struggling economy, where more than 40% of the population are unemployed, and our government owned Electricity Service provider, has fallen into corrupt practices, failing to meet the energy efficiency demands required for the population and economic growth needs. The transition from fossil fuels is contested, and effective renewable energy solutions hampered by political incapacity and direct sabotage. 

In view of this realpolitik incapacity for an effective climate policy, I believe art can play a role that enlightens, disseminates information, demanding accountability, shows connections, engages, and activates change. One can argue that we have known art about the Climate crisis for about 40 years, and artists such as American artist Dan Peterman, has pioneered ecologically conscious production and consistent recycling in his artistic work since the mid 1980’s, and yet politicians have taken so long to take it seriously, in all climates, nature and energy policies.  

Plants provide us with food, materials, medicines, and more. They regulate planetary cycles that provide us with the air we breathe, and the water we drink, and they contribute to our overall wellbeing.

If we are to safeguard life on Earth, we must end the current extinction crisis, in which plant species are dying out at least 500 times faster than before humans existed.

Climate activists urge us to support the planting of new forests to replace those that have been decimated to suck up carbon from the atmosphere. 

Paco Calvo (2022), feels that practical solutions such as planting trees, seem to be ineffectual plasters on a vast and much deeper problem, in that we may like to think we can plant our way out of climate change, replacing mature forests with flatpack carbon sinks of fast-growing timber, but evidence suggests that the two are very much not equivalent. He believes that one of the first obstacles we must face is to shift our mindset so that we no longer see plants merely as resources for carbon capture or safeguarding food production but as actors alongside us in the climate crisis.

We can understand the biology of plants all we like, but if we continue to see them only as the green backdrop to our animal drama on an abiotic stage, we will not solve the problems that we are facing.

Before us, the only other multicellular organisms to create such a dramatic change were plants that took over the terrestrial landscape hundreds of millions of years ago. They transformed Earth’s atmosphere when they began to photosynthesize and trap carbon dioxide in their tissues while pumping out oxygen.

The Climate change crisis has highlighted the urgency to reframe our relationship with the natural world, and this also means rethinking the language and modes by which we communicate about scientific research. I see Art being able to play an active role in this. Climate Art has in my view, therefore a role in the challenges posed by climate change, not only to respond with the intent of informing or reflecting a mirror to ourselves, so that we may change behaviours in our lifestyles, that are directly impacting the imbalances, and tipping points in our ecosystem. It has the responsibility to challenge ‘itself’ in so far as, understanding that creating Climate Art, it needs to be ecologically sustainable. It should be a driver in changing perception and behaviours, that are contributing to the over use of carbon emitters, such as fossil fuels, and it plays a role in counteracting the current anthropocentric worldview, that egotistically focuses on people, to creating a world view based on a ‘ contract of nature’ where all actors on earth, i.e. animals, plants and humans are accepted as equal, and an understanding that human rights also apply to plants and animals. 

References:  

• Plant Sapience – unmasking plant intelligence – Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence (2022) 
• Into the Forest – the secret language of trees – Susan Tyler Hitchcock
• The songs of trees: Stories from natures great connectors – David George Haskell 
• The philosopher’s plant: An intellectual Herbarium – Michael Marder 
• Plants as persons: A philosophical Botany – Mathew Hall
• The uninhabitable earth: A story of the future – David Wallace Wells
• Seeing Green: The rediscovery of plants and natures wisdom – Monica Gagliano (2013)
• Bachman,S et al. (2023) Extinction risk predictions for the worlds flowering plants to support their conservation 
• www.kew.org
• Think Wildlife Foundation – www.linkedin.com  (2023)
• The Light Eaters, The new science of plant intelligence, Joe Schanger