I have always had a love and fascination for plants. I began growing them as a young boy at the start of grade school. I spent my childhood in the forest, learning the names of the plants and animals and understanding how they functioned as an ecosystem.
I was destined to be a farmer because growing plants is fundamental to our work. Now, in my 70s, I continue to farm because my passion for growing plants and raising animals remains strong, and I will never quit.
Two events profoundly influenced my approach to agriculture. In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published ” The Secret Life of Plants,” which confirmed what I had known as a child: plants are sentient beings that communicate.
The second event occurred when I attempted to develop a diet that did not involve killing any sentient beings. I was a vegetarian following Ahimsa, the path of non-violence. I worked out which plants I could grow without harming anything to produce food. I began preparing the seedbed to plant these crops when I realized I was killing weeds. Weeds are sentient beings and play essential roles in regenerating ecosystems.
I had to rethink everything I believed at that time. I came to understand that I could not live without sentient beings dying to provide my food. I had a right to live, so I resolved to change my lifestyle to minimize the death and injury of sentient beings while maximizing their well-being. It was at that point that I gave up being a vegetarian, as plants are sentient like animals and should be regarded as equals, not as inferior forms of life. My farming became based on perennial systems of plants and animals to minimize disturbance and maximize diversity, complexity, harmony, and resilience.
The Secret Life of Plants sparked significant debate. It highlighted various experiments demonstrating plant sentience and showed that plants interact with a range of living entities, including humans.
Scientists heavily criticized it, stating that it promoted pseudoscientific claims. Fast-forward 50 years, and a vast body of scientific evidence shows that ” The Secret Life of Plants ” was correct.
Prof. Stefano Mancuso is a leading authority in plant neurobiology, investigating signaling and communication across all levels of biological organization. Plant neurobiology demonstrates that plants possess nervous systems and consciousness comparable to those of animals. He is a professor at the University of Florence and has published numerous books and papers on plants.
Forester and author Peter Wohlleben illustrates that trees are social beings and that the forest operates as a social network. He employs groundbreaking scientific discoveries to highlight the parallels between trees and human families: tree parents coexist with their offspring, interact with them, provide support during their growth, share nutrients with those in need, and alert each other to potential threats.
Wohlleben conveys his profound love for woods and forests, describing the extraordinary processes of life, death, and regeneration he has witnessed in his woodland.
Dr. Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and the author of ” Finding the Mother Tree. ” She is a pioneer in the field of plant communication and intelligence.
Simard is known for her research on how trees interact and communicate through below-ground fungal networks. This research led to the recognition that forests contain hub trees, also called Mother Trees. These large, highly connected trees play a crucial role in the flow of information and resources within a forest. She illustrates how these Mother Trees nurture their young and assist other species.
Her research explores how these intricate relationships enhance forest resilience, adaptability, and recovery. This work holds significant implications for the management and regeneration of forests affected by human activities, including climate change.
Research scientist Dr. Monica Gagliano offers authentic, firsthand insights from her studies on plant communication and cognition. Thus Spoke the Plant explores her findings and how plants aided her throughout her journey.
Gagliano has written numerous peer-reviewed articles investigating the Pavlovian-like reactions of plants to various stimuli, showcasing their capacity for learning, memory, and communication with neighboring plants. She has pioneered the new field of plant bioacoustics, providing experimental proof that plants emit their own ‘voices’ and can sense and react to environmental sounds. Her studies reveal that learning extends beyond the animal kingdom, indicating that plants are sentient organisms. She demonstrates that they exhibit subjectivity, consciousness, and will.
Numerous researchers are exploring the field of plant sentience and communication. They have found that plants:
- Plants can hear
- Plants communicate through sound – they scream in high frequencies when in pain!
- Plants communicate through volatile chemicals
- Plants have vision – they have more light receptors than animals
- Plants can smell – they have more smell genes than animals
- Plants can make decisions
- Plants have memories and can learn
- Plants have social lives with many species
- Plants nurture their young and look after each other
- Plants feel stress and pain and fight to live!
So, how can plants be conscious, sentient, learn, have memories, communicate, and make decisions if they don’t have a brain?
Due to their stationary nature, plants cannot escape from predators. If plants had specialized organs for specific functions, such as hearts, kidneys, livers, and brains, they would not survive if these organs were attacked by insects or grazed by herbivores. Instead, plants possess numerous organelles that perform these functions and are distributed throughout their bodies, particularly in the leaves and stems. They can lose parts of their bodies to predation, as all essential functions for life are replicated millions of times throughout their structures. The remaining tissues can still function and assist in recovery.
The images below illustrate how plants possess a nervous system and experience pain. The first picture highlights the area of the leaf that has been torn. The neurotransmitter glutamate travels through the vascular system (veins).
Plants utilize the neurotransmitter glutamate similarly to animals. However, instead of having a distinct nervous system composed of nerve cells, electrical signals (pain) travel through the vascular system (veins).
The images show the neurotransmitter traveling throughout the plant as part of a nerve signal network that responds to the damaged leaf. This network represents a neural network similar to those found in animal brains.
The entire body of a plant functions as a neural network- effectively, a brain. This system allows a plant to lose part of its neural network without sacrificing consciousness or bodily functions, unlike how similar damage affects animals when their brains are harmed.
Plant Networks and Communication
Plants and fungi are interconnected in a complex web, communicating and exchanging nutrients and information. Researchers refer to this network as the Wood Wide Web—a living Internet.
Caption: Network model showing the linkages between Douglas-fir trees through the fungal network. The arrow points to the Mother Tree – the most highly connected tree. Diagram from Beiler et al. 2010.
Plants combine water and carbon dioxide (CO2), using solar energy from photosynthesis to produce glucose. They convert glucose into sugars, starches, oils, proteins, and wood.
Plant roots secrete around 30 percent of the glucose carbon compounds to feed the soil microbiome and build Soil Organic Matter (SOM).
Plants provide glucose and other molecules to microorganisms like fungi. These vital molecules serve as the primary energy source that fuels the entire ecosystem. In return, fungi extend the reach of plant roots over great distances, supplying nutrients, water, and protective compounds. They also protect their hosts from pests and diseases.
Symbiotic fungi connect with various plants to form a network that exchanges nutrients, water, protective compounds, energy, and conveys information. Research is revealing sentience in fungi and other microorganisms.
Ecosystems, including agroecosystems, are complex, interconnected networks of sentient beings, such as plants, microorganisms, and animals. This complexity has many implications for our food and farming systems.
Pesticides such as Roundup, fungicides, and synthetic chemical fertilizers kill beneficial organisms, disrupting their network connections. Instead of poisoning and killing this network of sentient beings, we need to redesign our systems to reduce their death and injury while enhancing their well-being.
Many examples of these systems exist and will be discussed in future articles.
The Implications of Plant Sentience
Plant sentience raises numerous substantial issues. The fact that plants are conscious, self-aware, and can feel stress and pain, valuing their lives like animals, means that we need to treat plants in the same way we believe in humanely treating animals. Plants are not a lesser form of life; in fact, they are fundamental to the existence of most life forms on this planet. Nearly every lifeform owes its existence to the products of plant photosynthesis – glucose and all the molecules of life produced from it. Glucose and molecules such as ketones made from it serve as the fuel source for 99.999999% of life on Earth. They are also responsible for most of the oxygen we breathe. Without this, much life would not exist. Instead of being relegated to a low status, plants must be valued as the most important life forms and treated accordingly.
Instead of giving these sentient beings the respect they deserve, humans are at war with them, constantly killing them, clearing their ecosystems, poisoning them with herbicides, and plowing them up to create bare ground. None of this is necessary to produce the food, fiber, medicine, and construction materials we need. All of this can be produced with humane perennial systems that minimize the destruction of plants and ensure that most of them experience well-being.
Alan Savory has demonstrated through holistic managed grazing that it is possible to run large numbers of livestock without killing a single plant. In fact, these systems enhance the diversity and abundance of plants and animals, allowing them to coexist in harmony and synergistically support all the living entities in the ecosystem.
Another issue is that it is difficult to kill a plant humanely. Because all the functions of life are distributed throughout a plant’s body, when a plant is cut down, plowed out, or poisoned, it dies a slow and painful death. Take carrots as an example: they are pulled out of the ground and experience stress and pain, gradually dying over weeks until they are cooked. Humans ignore this pain and distress. The carrots people buy are living entities that can be replanted and allowed to recover. Most people are horrified and disgusted when animals are treated cruelly like this, yet they are completely blind to the distress they cause to plants.
On the other hand, animals can be killed humanely. They can be treated kindly and rendered unconscious instantly before being killed, ensuring there is no fear, pain, or distress. This is not possible with plants. Research shows that plants experience fear, distress, and pain as they die slowly. Plants emit high-frequency sounds when in pain, although we cannot hear them. However, researchers can record and convert these sounds into frequencies that we can hear.
Now that we know plants are sentient beings that nurture their young, care for the sick and injured, feed the ecosystem with the molecules of life, feel pain and stress, communicate on many levels, remember, learn, make decisions, hear, and see, we must treat them humanely, just as we do animals.
Plants provide us with fruits and seeds in exchange for our assistance in their reproduction. Other plants, such as grasses, have evolved alongside animals, allowing them to tolerate a loss of leaves in return for the urine and dung that fertilize the soil. Instead of exploiting and harming plants as the basis of agriculture, we need to redesign our food systems to function like interconnected ecosystems, where relationships are synergistic and mutually beneficial to all, especially plants, since their photosynthesis powers all ecosystems.
We should celebrate the magnificence of plants. Our lives depend on them!
The post Plant Sentience Changes Everything appeared first on Regeneration International.
