Writing about family
Mon Nov 25
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To be a botanist today is to choose your words carefully. In her new book, The Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger details the caution with which botanists ascribe intelligence to plants. Some only dare say plants can “sense”—they are like machines receiving stimuli and outputting an appropriate response. Other botanists take a small risk in the eyes of their peers to ascribe plants with “behavior.” There are fewer still who are bold enough to use the word “intelligence” or, audible gasp, “consciousness” to describe the feats that plants achieve; these words put you in an entirely different camp of dubious respectability in the halls of academia. I can respect the desire for precise language in science, but it makes me wonder, why the trepidation? What would it cost if plants were to be considered intelligent?
Through her many conversations, Schlanger realized it would cost a lot, perhaps an entire worldview: “Over and over, I saw the debate [over plant intelligence] framed as a dispute over syntax. But it looked to me more of a dispute over worldview. Over the nature of reality. Over what plants were, particularly in contrast to ourselves.”
This is perhaps the clearest way of describing what Queer Ecology is: it is the study of living phenomena that would cost us our worldview. And good riddance.
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Tags:
investing
life
family
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