In the opening sections of The Secret Life of Plants the authors speak of Raoul Francé. Writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, Francé says that plants can move, can reach for things they want. At the time this is news, and stunning in its implications. But what are they, those implications?

Tompkins and Bird:

Plants, says Francé are capable of intent: they can stretch toward, or seek out, what they want in ways as mysterious as the most fantastic creations of romance.

Earlier in the passage the authors have cited the ability of a tendril plant to move toward a support, and change course if that support is moved. That kind of observation leads to the idea that plants have intent. I understand the leap; if it were a human being faced with such a need, our movements almost certainly would be accompanied by the intent to seek what we need to grow. I get sleepy at work, my hand reaches for the tea cup and along with it goes the experience of intending to stay awake. It’s natural for us to assume the universe does things the same way we do, but one of the possibilities that come with having the capacity to reason (or the intent to reason) is its use in questioning such assumptions.

To go back to the questing plant: what’s so amazing about intent? It’s just one aspect of what humans do and is almost certainly a capacity that evolved because of our dependence on others of our kind, our need to know what is going to happen next, what these others are going to do, what they intend. What the plant actually does when it reaches for support, doesn’t come from the same set of evolutionary prompts. Not even close. What a plant can sense is what it depends upon for survival: light. What a plant does with its photo receptors, its cellular sensitivity to regions of light and dark, navigating toward light in some cases and towards shadow in other, that’s just as miraculous, just as amazing as the notion of intent.

What plants do, as miraculous as it is, does not require intent. By blindly ascribing primate (and probably non-primate) attributes to plants we do both them and us a disservice. It is not necessary for us to think of everything as human for us to  learn to treat the other with respect. It may be what we have done, but it is not necessary.

I think, in part, that we do this because we tend to know so very little about the actual being we are faced with.  For example, at some point in our history, we simply didn’t know about photo-sensitive cells, but now that we do, it is simply so much easier to ascribe motives with which we are familiar than to do the work that is required to come to understand an entirely different sensual universe, and that is what a plant has, an entirely different, non-human universe.

The odd thing is that I suspect our sense of wonder and belonging would be so much greater if we knew enough about the actual entities with which we share the earth to appreciate what it is they actually do rather than make them into strangely-shaped humans. And surely that is what motivated Tompkins and Bird to collect the stories, to write the book, a sense of wonder, awe and a desire to belong to a marvelous world.

The thing is, we do. We do belong. And the world is awe-full, marvelous and indeed, magical and this is exactly because the actual world cannot be equated with the world as perceived by us. There are universes a-plenty. Why on earth do we insist that there is only ours?