OK so someone tells me that part 1 of this post contradicts the post called “Talk to plants and proud of it; some of them even answer back.” Here’s my analysis:

I am a human being and because of that I am wired to respond to the world as befits that primate coding and the subsequent (to my birth) enculturation that extends and modifies the substance of those hard-wired predispositions.

Like all human beings I see relationships everywhere. I am wired to seek inclusion, to read faces and bodies for signs of belonging and danger. The big eyes of babies effect me regardless of whether they are human or not, for example. One thing that trips-on the sense of belonging is deep knowledge. The more you know a person, experience them in all their moods, the more you sense that they belong to your group. You might not like them, of course, but they are a part of you anyway. This is what family is.  You spend a lifetime coming to know what happens to them the morning after they eat prunes for dessert, and other such moments of intimate knowledge. The thing is that in my life, part of my family – those I have come to know through constant exposure and experience, are plants.

As Atran and Medin point out in their book The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (see posts here, here and here), our knowledge of the natural world is getting pretty weak. There was one bit early on in the text where the authors recount that a significant difference was made in the capacity of a child to reason biologically if they had at least had a goldfish. Just a goldfish. That’s pretty pitiful really but it says a lot about how much we don’t know anymore. We need exposure to things, to the way they actually are, what they actually do, how they live in the world, how we relate to them as part of the world, in order to be able to reason about them. But when we do reason about them, we do it as humans, because that is what we are.

So, I do talk to plants, and I get a strong sense of inclusion in some eco-systems, and feel adrift in others.

Plants have lives of their own that interact with ours. The scope of that interaction is poorly understood but there are some inroads being made. Have you read The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan? In it he traces the codependent evolutionary relationship between four “domesticated” plants (apple, tulip, marijuana and potato) and us.

From the book:

So the question arose in my mind that day: Did I choose to plant these potatoes, or did the potato make me do it? In fact, both statements are true. I can remember the exact moment that spud seduced me, showing off its knobbly charms in the pages of a seed catalog. I think it was the tasty-sounding “buttery yellow flesh” that did it.

His larger thesis is that

All plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error these plant species have found that the best way to do that is to induce animals—bees or people, it hardly matters—to spread their genes.

The language of plant’s intention aside, his point is taken. Plants and people do effect each other’s natures; we have a long-term relationship. What is critical for me is that I must enter into that relationship as a human. I can hardly do anything else. And the plant is whatever specific kind of plant it is. So I read the world I have come to know so well, my body reacts with a rush of oxytocin and endorphins and I feel a specific way and because of that am led by my biology to act as I would if it were human kin that caused those feelings. But because I am human, and have the capacity for awareness and reason, what I don’t do is mistake my feelings for the facts of the case. I may feel this way because I am human, I may have a world view that enables me to see non-human beings as family, but I don’t mistake buckbrush for my auntie: I mean, really, I don’t try to pick my auntie’s leaves and I don’t take a shrub to the grocery store for milk – especially not if I want the shrub to live.

So what does it come down to? I can feel the rush of belonging and enter into it as if I were Verluis’ “sympathetic reader,” and still maintain the knowledge that this plant is, for me, another reality that must also be respected. What does the plant perceive when I walk by or stop to pick its leaves? Not me as I know myself, but probably an alteration of the quality of light, a sense of impact on its root system, the vascular alterations required when leaves become no longer present. What’s probably true is that the plant can’t tell me apart from a deer or a badger because it has no need to make that discernment. I can never forget that, not even when I am high on my sense of belonging to the world. To forget that would be to dismiss the real world of the plant, and you just don’t do something so rude to one of your relations.