Thus Spoke the Plant

Author: Monica Gagliano
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1623172438
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
A research scientist’s fascinating study of plant communication reveals how we “have been misunderstanding plants, and ourselves, for all of history” (The Paris Review). “A compelling story of discovery . . . [that] will change the way you see the world”—for fans of The Hidden Life of Trees (Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass) In this “phytobiography”—a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant—research scientist Monica Gagliano shares genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition. By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people—beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it. Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.

Thus Spoke the Plant

Author: Monica Gagliano
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780369307323
Category : Human-plant relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it. Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing.

The Mind of Plants

Author: John C. Ryan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780907791874
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
The idea that plants have a mind of their own has been a prominent feature of some Indigenous narratives, literary works, and philosophical discourses. Recent scientific research in the field of plant cognition similarly highlights the capacity of botanical life to discern between options and learn from prior experiences or, in other words, to think. The Mind of Plants offers an accessible account of the idea of "the plant mind" by bringing together short essays and poems on plants and their interactions with humans. The texts interpret the theme broadly--from the ways that humans mind and unmind plants to the mindedness or unmindedness of plants themselves. Authors from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences have written about their personal connections to particular plants, reflecting upon their research on plant studies in a style amenable to a broad audience. Each of the authors has selected a plant that functions as a guiding thread to their interpretation of "the mind of plants." From the ubiquitous rose to the ugly hornwort, from the Amazonian ayahuasca to tobacco, the texts reflect the multifarious interactions between humans and flora. These personal narratives, filled with anecdotes, experiences, and musings, offer cutting-edge insights into the different meanings and dimensions of "the mind of plants." Contributors to The Mind of Plants are key figures in the fields of ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, plant behavior and cognition, and critical plant studies. Included are simple, thumbnail-style, black-and-white illustrations of the plants to enhance readers' appreciation of the narratives.

Plants as Persons

Author: Matthew Hall
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438434308
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Plants are people too? No, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought as well as modern science for attitudes toward plants, noting the particular resources for plant personhood and those modes of thought which most exclude plants. The most hierarchical systems typically put plants at the bottom, but Hall finds much to support a more positive view of plants. Indeed, some indigenous animisms actually recognize plants as relational, intelligent beings who are the appropriate recipeints of care and respect. New scientific findings encourage this perspective, revealing that plants possess many of the capacities of sentience and mentality traditionally denied them.

The Language of Plants

Author: Monica Gagliano
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452954127
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
The eighteenth-century naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) argued that plants are animate, living beings and attributed them sensation, movement, and a certain degree of mental activity, emphasizing the continuity between humankind and plant existence. Two centuries later, the understanding of plants as active and communicative organisms has reemerged in such diverse fields as plant neurobiology, philosophical posthumanism, and ecocriticism. The Language of Plants brings together groundbreaking essays from across the disciplines to foster a dialogue between the biological sciences and the humanities and to reconsider our relation to the vegetal world in new ethical and political terms. Viewing plants as sophisticated information-processing organisms with complex communication strategies (they can sense and respond to environmental cues and play an active role in their own survival and reproduction through chemical languages) radically transforms our notion of plants as unresponsive beings, ready to be instrumentally appropriated. By providing multifaceted understandings of plants, informed by the latest developments in evolutionary ecology, the philosophy of biology, and ecocritical theory, The Language of Plants promotes the freedom of imagination necessary for a new ecological awareness and more sustainable interactions with diverse life forms. Contributors: Joni Adamson, Arizona State U; Nancy E. Baker, Sarah Lawrence College; Karen L. F. Houle, U of Guelph; Luce Irigaray, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Erin James, U of Idaho; Richard Karban, U of California at Davis; André Kessler, Cornell U; Isabel Kranz, U of Vienna; Michael Marder, U of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU); Timothy Morton, Rice U; Christian Nansen, U of California at Davis; Robert A. Raguso, Cornell U; Catriona Sandilands, York U.

What a Plant Knows

Author: Daniel Chamovitz
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374288739
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Explores the secret lives of various plants, from the colors they see to whether or not they really like classical music to their ability to sense nearby danger.

Science

Author: Patricia Fara
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191655570
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 782

Book Description
Science: A Four Thousand Year History rewrites science's past. Instead of focussing on difficult experiments and abstract theories, Patricia Fara shows how science has always belonged to the practical world of war, politics, and business. Rather than glorifying scientists as idealized heroes, she tells true stories about real people - men (and some women) who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, and who trampled down their rivals in their quest for success. Fara sweeps through the centuries, from ancient Babylon right up to the latest hi-tech experiments in genetics and particle physics, illuminating the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and publishing enterprises that have made science the powerful global phenomenon that it is today. She also ranges internationally, illustrating the importance of scientific projects based around the world, from China to the Islamic empire, as well as the more familiar tale of science in Europe, from Copernicus to Charles Darwin and beyond. Above all, this four thousand year history challenges scientific supremacy, arguing controversially that science is successful not because it is always right - but because people have said that it is right.

The Green Thread

Author: Patrícia Vieira
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498510604
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in the emerging field of Plant Studies. The volume is the first of its kind to bring together a dynamic body of scholarship that shares a critique of long-standing human perceptions of plants as lacking autonomy, agency, consciousness, and, intelligence. The leading metaphor of the book—“the green thread”, echoing poet Dylan Thomas’ phrase “the green fuse”—carries multiple meanings. On a more apparent level, “the green thread” is what weaves together the diverse approaches of this collection: an interest in the vegetal that goes beyond single disciplines and specialist discourses, and one that not only encourages but necessitates interdisciplinary and even interspecies dialogue. On another level, “the green thread” links creative and historical productions to the materiality of the vegetal—a reality reflecting our symbiosis with oxygen-producing beings. In short, The Green Thread refers to the conversations about plants that transcend strict disciplinary boundaries as well as to the possibility of dialogue with plants.

Plant Sensing & Communication

Author: Richard Karban
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022626484X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
The news that a flowering weed—mousear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana)—can sense the particular chewing noise of its most common caterpillar predator and adjust its chemical defenses in response led to headlines announcing the discovery of the first “hearing” plant. As plants lack central nervous systems (and, indeed, ears), the mechanisms behind this “hearing” are unquestionably very different from those of our own acoustic sense, but the misleading headlines point to an overlooked truth: plants do in fact perceive environmental cues and respond rapidly to them by changing their chemical, morphological, and behavioral traits. In Plant Sensing and Communication, Richard Karban provides the first comprehensive overview of what is known about how plants perceive their environments, communicate those perceptions, and learn. Facing many of the same challenges as animals, plants have developed many similar capabilities: they sense light, chemicals, mechanical stimulation, temperature, electricity, and sound. Moreover, prior experiences have lasting impacts on sensitivity and response to cues; plants, in essence, have memory. Nor are their senses limited to the processes of an individual plant: plants eavesdrop on the cues and behaviors of neighbors and—for example, through flowers and fruits—exchange information with other types of organisms. Far from inanimate organisms limited by their stationary existence, plants, this book makes unquestionably clear, are in constant and lively discourse.

The Revolutionary Genius of Plants

Author: Stefano Mancuso
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501187872
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
"In this thought-provoking, handsomely illustrated book, Italian neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso considers the fundamental differences between plants and animals and challenges our assumptions about which is the ‘higher’ form of life.” —The Wall Street Journal “Fascinating…full of optimism…this quick, accessible read will appeal to anyone with interest in how plants continue to surprise us.” —Library Journal Do plants have intelligence? Do they have memory? Are they better problem solvers than people? The Revolutionary Genius of Plants—a fascinating, paradigm-shifting work that upends everything you thought you knew about plants—makes a compelling scientific case that these and other astonishing ideas are all true. Plants make up eighty percent of the weight of all living things on earth, and yet it is easy to forget that these innocuous, beautiful organisms are responsible for not only the air that lets us survive, but for many of our modern comforts: our medicine, food supply, even our fossil fuels. On the forefront of uncovering the essential truths about plants, world-renowned scientist Stefano Mancuso reveals the surprisingly sophisticated ability of plants to innovate, to remember, and to learn, offering us creative solutions to the most vexing technological and ecological problems that face us today. Despite not having brains or central nervous systems, plants perceive their surroundings with an even greater sensitivity than animals. They efficiently explore and react promptly to potentially damaging external events thanks to their cooperative, shared systems; without any central command centers, they are able to remember prior catastrophic events and to actively adapt to new ones. Every page of The Revolutionary Genius of Plants bubbles over with Stefano Mancuso’s infectious love for plants and for the eye-opening research that makes it more and more clear how remarkable our fellow inhabitants on this planet really are. In his hands, complicated science is wonderfully accessible, and he has loaded the book with gorgeous photographs that make for an unforgettable reading experience. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants opens the doors to a new understanding of life on earth.