Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Notes Chapter 1 1. The context in which Jensen and McBay raise the question is grim. What, they ask, will be our legacy? What will we leave behind? We may do our best to live sustainably, but this is an impossible task so long as we inhabit and depend on a society and economy that are unsustainable—not to mention physically, socially, and psychologically toxic. 2. Lest you assume that notions like those articulated by Descartes and Bacon no longer have cultural currency, Jensen cites theo- retical physicist Gerard Milburn, who states that “The aim of modern science is to reach an understanding of the world, not merely purely for aesthetic reasons, but that it may be ordered to our purpose” (2000, 20). Chapter 2 1. Plant neurobiology bears no resemblance to the ideas proffered by Cleve Baxter (1968), who contends that plants react teleki- netically to human thoughts and emotions. Nor do plant neu- robiologists contend, like Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird (1973), that plants have a “secret” psychical life. These sorts of propositions have not proven to be scientifically replicable. 2. To be a subject-of- a- life, according to Regan, is to be a being who can experience pleasure and pain, perceive, remember, have a sense of the future, and be cognizant of one’s psychophysical identity over time (1983, 243). This ostensibly marks a higher bar than sentience, but we will see that plants may well have many of these capacities anyway. 3. For Regan, we devalue subjects- of- a- life, and perhaps sentient beings as well, if we casually consume animals who may not quite meet comparable standards. We encourage the habit of viewing animals as mere means for our ends rather than ends in themselves. Singer’s adherence to the precautionary principle is most evident with respect to his stance regarding mollusks. 132 Notes He contends that “while one cannot with any confidence say that these creatures do feel pain, so can one equally have little confidence in saying that they do not feel pain. [ . ] Since it is so easy to avoid eating them, I now think it better to do so” (2004, 174). 4. “Lacking the ability to learn to distinguish between being touched by a harmless stimulus and by a potentially harmful stimulus,” Deckers elaborates, “it [a plant] will respond in a similar fashion irrespective of the kind of stimulus that is provided. This lack of past experiences suggests that plants have more limited abilities to respond to external factors compared to animals and at least some other organisms. Since plants are less aware of their surroundings, it does not mean much to them to be controlled by external factors. Organisms who are capable of more complex modes of experiencing, however, can take in more information, and adapt themselves more rapidly and flexibly” (2009, 588). 5. The activation of nociceptors is not a conscious event per se, although the detection of noxious stimuli often is accompanied by conscious— typically painful— events. 6. Perhaps plants are not conscious in the sense of having something like subjective awareness of themselves experiencing the world, but they certainly can be awake and aware of the world around them. Interestingly, Marder notes that plants are much like us with respect to consciousness, at least in one sense: They sleep. “What largely determines vegetal activity above ground level is the plants’ tending toward photosynthetic processing of sunlight. We would expect that in the absence of light, plants would be asleep. And they are! Anyone who has seen the time- lapse footage contrasting plant movements in the light and in the dark is struck by the difference between their purpose- oriented waking movements and the dreamy and somewhat chaotic vacil- lations at night” (2014, 182). 7. Auxins play a crucial role in coordinating plant growth and behavior, sometimes via long- distance signaling (Struik et al. 2008, 369). When the plant is wounded, auxins often induce cell differentiation and regeneration of vascular tissue. 8. Many plant scientists see such responses as reflexive. Phillips reports, though, that Trewavas sees them as flexible and adapt- able. “Plasticity is foresight. Plants adjust their growth and devel- opment to maximize their fitness in a variable environment” (Phillips 2002, 40). This response is not unlike the contention by some philosophers that our free will is quite limited but that we have just as much of it as we need. It would be prohibitively time consuming if everything we do were to require a conscious Notes 133 decision. Our biological “hardwiring” takes care of many life processes, which is an evolutionary advantage (Tancredi 2005). Perhaps this also is the case for plants. 9. “Brains come in handy for creatures that move around a lot,” Pollan states, “but they’re a disadvantage for ones that are rooted in place. Impressive as it is to us, self- consciousness is just another tool for living, good for some jobs, unhelpful for others” (2013, 92). 10. As Thomas Seeley and Royce Levien note, “It is not too much to say that a bee colony is capable of cognition in much the same way that a human being is. The colony gathers and continually updates diverse information about its surroundings, combines this with internal information about its internal state and makes decisions that reconcile its well-being with its environment” (1987, 39). 11. Fruitarianism may not be as free from harm as its proponents suggest anyway. In response to the claim by some fruitarians that fruit is the only freely given food, Lierre Keith remarks that “The point of fruit is not humans. The point is the seeds. The reason that the tree expends such tremendous resources accumulating fibers and sugars is to secure the best possible future for its offspring. And we take that offspring, in its swaddling of sweetness, and kill it” (2009, 14). This is because, unlike other animals, the people of our culture do not generally deposit seeds back in the earth. Even if we compost them, she adds, “time, heat, and bacteria kill them” (ibid., 13). 12. As Jensen comments, “Death is everywhere, and will seek me out no matter where I hide, now and again in the causing, and later in the receiving. This understanding came to me, oddly enough, when I was using the toilet. I realized that every time I defecate, I kill millions of bacteria. Every time I drink I swallow microorganisms, every time I scratch my head I kill tiny mites” (2000, 198). Chapter 3 1. Plumwood has referred to herself as a “philosophical animist” (2013, 447). But it is not clear exactly what she means by this. 2. Plumwood provides examples like the following to demonstrate why the problem we should be concerned about is not the use of others per se but the “reductive treatment of the other as no more than something of use, as a means to an end” (2012, 82): “The circus performers who stand on one another’s shoulders to reach the trapeze are not involved in any oppressively instrumental 134 Notes practices. Neither is someone who collects animal droppings to improve a vegetable garden. In both cases the other is used, but is also seen as more than something to be used, and hence not treated instrumentally” (2004, 350). 3. Plumwood elaborates: “Although ontological vegans present themselves as extending our sympathies for our companion life forms on this planet, their rejection of sacred eating carries as its hidden underside another unstated project, that of narrowing and blunting our sympathies and sensibilities for the excluded class of living beings who are needed for our food” (2000, 302). I discuss sacred eating shortly. 4. I emphasize that attending with genuine concern to the needs and interests of plants just as we do to those of animals is not a “diversionary” tactic driven by “corpse eaters’ fear of giving up the eating of animals,” as Adams suggests (1994, 220, n. 60). Nor does giving plants their due somehow prevent us from maintaining different modes of solidarity with and different sorts of commitments to plants than we do to animals. 5. It is worth noting, in the words of Graham Harvey, that animism “is not an exercise in ‘primitivism’ because animism is far from primitive, nor is it about premodernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather, animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than- modern ways of being human. Modernity rather than animism or any form of indigeneity is exceptional among ways of being human in this world” (2006, xxi). 6. Daniel Quinn states the following: “I can’t imagine that anyone has undertaken either (1) to actually submit to aboriginal peoples worldwide any description or collection of descriptions of animism for them to rate as reflecting their own actual beliefs and perceptions or, (2) much better, to submit to them a care- fully constructed test (‘Do you agree completely, somewhat, or not at all with the following 215 statements?’) that could actually serve as a scientific basis for saying what the commonality of worldview actually is among them. Until number 2 is done (or at least number 1), any definition of this invention called animism (including my own [ . ]) is ultimately nothing more than a fabrication that we outsiders find satisfactory” (personal com- munication 2015). 7. “There is nothing in these discourses that should be understood as implying (let alone asserting) that humans are the primary exemplars of personhood,” Harvey declares. “[Irving] Hallow- ell’s term ‘other-than- human- person’ celebrates two facts but does not confuse them: First, it arises from animist engagement Notes 135 with a world that is full of persons, only some of whom are human; secondly, it arises from an animist acknowledgment that humans’ most intimate relationships are had with other humans.

Load more