Planta Sapiens

In the 1980s, I gave a series of seminars with Sir George Trevelyan in the south of France. George was educated in Goethean science through his knowledge of the work of Rudolf Steiner, who as a young man had edited Goethe's scientific works.

He suggested that we all go out and find a plant or tree with which to communicate. I found myself on a terrace contemplating a plant rooted in the stonework, and I distinctly heard a voice inside my head – it did not come across as my own thought – saying 'it was the best we could do in the circumstances'. Given the challenges of plants growing out of stonework in a dry climate, this was a pertinent observation. As it happens, the work of Goethe is absent from this cutting-edge study. His perspective could have enriched the thesis as plants are contemplated rather than objectively observed, with an emphasis on the process of becoming that can be elaborated through a series of leaf forms culminating in the flower – see especially the work of Margaret Colquhoun, but also Henri Bortoft, Brian Goodwin and Arthur Zajonc on what Brian called a science of qualities. Also absent is any reference to work on the intelligence of trees (Peter Wohlleben) and fungi (Merlin Sheldrake).

Perhaps more immediately relevant to the thesis of the book is the work of Austrian forester Viktor Schauberger, as Paco asks the question parallel to the famous essay on bats by Thomas Nagel – what is it like to be a plant? Schauberger found that he was able to enter directly into the intelligence of water, and understand it from the inside, again contemplatively rather than as an outside observer. Paco highlights the shortcomings of traditional human perception of plants and the association of intelligence with movement. Interestingly, his PhD is in philosophy from Glasgow, while he is also trained in psychology and plant science. Such an interdisciplinary perspective is essential in doing justice to questions pertaining to plant intelligence, sentience, consciousness, and the relationship between these terms. A philosophical handicap identified early in the book is the entrenched dogma of neuronal intelligence and brain-centric consciousness (pp. 3, 18) – this is also at stake in fungal intelligence. Paco steers a careful course through experimental observations and discussion of the implications of his findings.

Interestingly, Darwin's meticulous work on plants forms a historical starting point. He was confined to bed for some weeks, which gave him the opportunity of watching the filigree tendrils of young cucumber plants explore their environment as they grew from their pots on his windowsill. The outcome was a 118-page Linnean Society monograph entitled The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants. As plants grow so slowly, timelapse photography can give us a much more dynamic understanding of plant behaviour, which raises questions of flexibility, cognition, intelligence, consciousness and 'intention' on the part of the plant. The use of such terminology has created strong resistance among orthodox plants scientists. As Paco points out, we want to avoid both extremes of anthropomorphism and 'the anthropocentric refusal to acknowledge continuities that exist between ourselves and other forms of life.' (p. 61)

The work of the MINT lab seeks to study plant behaviour and what makes it goal-directed. They use protocols from animal studies and apply these to plants. The orthodox view is that all behaviour and adaptation can be explained as automatic responses to stimuli, whereas Paco argues that the observed behaviour 'cannot be fully explained as mere reflex responses' but is due to plant cognition. Not surprisingly and in common with other mechanistic positions (p. 135), the preferred metaphor of plant scientists is computation, so plant intelligence becomes a story of computation. The MINT lab advocates the idea of ecological cognition, looking at the relationship between plants and their surroundings, and how this affects what plants actually do. In 2020, this all became too much for conventional thinking, and a paper was published entitled Debunking a myth: plant consciousness, in which the authors accused Paco and his colleagues of 'dismantling respectable science from within.' (p. 104). They even called for funding agencies to refuse them and journals to reject their papers – in other words this was unacceptable heresy - or an immune response to radical novelty.

Paco asks how we could explore how plants function from the inside, rather than just through studying external signals – this is just what Goethe and Schauberger were trying to do. He considers the philosophical and ethical implications of regarding plants as conscious in relation to how we treat them, making vegans uneasy in the process. He reports attending a talk by Al Gore in 2021, where he outlined science-based solutions to our environmental predicament, arguing contra Gore that more is required in terms of shared interdisciplinary frameworks. Plants and trees are not simply a green backdrop to our animal activities, but rather co-inhabitants, co-creative participants, cognitive beings, and agents of photosynthesis which grow through space. We need new ways of thinking, and this pioneering book helps us in this respect, insisting that we need – like Darwin – to think differently and clearly outside conventional frameworks; and indeed 'to know less and instead to think more.' (p. 223) And I agree that it is fundamentally a question of learning to work with the organic world rather than destroying it, which requires a radical revolution in the way we think and therefore behave, as many other thinkers have argued.