The supposed dominance of humans as a species is an old story that should be as outdated as so many other outdated stories that have been discarded. But not. Mankind is believed to be the pinnacle of creation, as if to deny the evidence of a much more complex and richer world. Stefano Mancuso, professor at the University of Florence and passionate director of the International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology and author of several successful books on the subject, advocates rethinking this ancient axiom so that plants can immediately earn our respect and admiration. for all. Because without them there would be nothing.
QUESTIONS. What is a plant for you?
ANSWER. It’s not easy to define. If you ask a scientist what the main characteristic of a plant is, they usually define it as something without movement, a living organism capable of photosynthesis. And that’s true, but I prefer to define them against animals. We look at the world through our eyes, through our animal eyes, and we have a hard time understanding creatures that are as different from us as plants. You are slow, we are fast. The plants are hunted, we are the predators. But the most important difference for me is that animals have an organization where they have vital functions concentrated in a few organs, and plants have a decentralized organization where we value modularity and no part is entirely indispensable. So, in a few words, we could say that we are like a yin-yang of life, but with one difference: that all animals together make up 0.3% of biomass, an irrelevant part of reality. On the contrary, 87% of the biomass consists of plants. So if you ask me for a one sentence definition, I would say they are the life of our planet.
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Q Is there a place for humanity without them?
R Plants have become indispensable on our planet. All animals depend on plants and they do not depend on animals. If we could look at plants and animals objectively, there would be no doubt that they are the true queens of our planet. If they disappeared tomorrow, everyone would know there would be a problem with the food. In a few months there would be no food left on the planet. But a key feature of plants, and one of the least understood, is their ability to fix carbon dioxide. So if the plants died tomorrow and released all the CO₂ into the atmosphere, global warming would rise to levels that models suggest would be incompatible with the liquid state of water. This would start to boil and the planet would be completely sterilized, like Mars or Venus. Again we see that they are the engine of life on our planet.
Q An intelligent motor, they teach us with their behavior.
R We usually think that we are the only intelligent beings on the planet, or maybe not just us but just a few animals very close to us and nothing else. I think that’s a very ridiculous way to see the world. Absurd and also presumptuous. If we could say that intelligence is associated with a brain, then only 0.3% of living beings have a brain. So if intelligence depends on having a brain, let’s say 99.7% of life is stupid, some kind of mechanical machine. For me as a biologist and researcher, this is unimaginable. Every living organism has problems to solve. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Even a bacterium or a virus has to solve problems, they cannot do that, otherwise they would have died out immediately.
Q And how is this plant intelligence?
R Plants are so incredibly different from us… They move and act on a very different time scale than we do… But there is no doubt that they are intelligent. In fact, I often say that they are smarter than humans. I don’t want to provoke anyone with this, it’s true from a biological point of view. We animals use exercise as our primary response to the environment. Movement is everything for us. It is impossible for an animal to imagine finding food or escaping a predator without such movement. But animals don’t solve problems, they avoid them. With plants this is not possible, you need to solve the problem.
Q Are plants self-aware?
R We don’t know exactly what consciousness is, even for humans. It is very difficult. The only thing we can say is when one is aware of oneself, but one can no longer know the awareness of the other person in front of us. For me it is the ability to live. We can think of it as the ability to recognize oneself in relation to the environment in which we live. Therefore, plants are extremely sensitive to the environment in which they live, because they are more sensitive than we are to everything that surrounds them. That’s the problem we have when judging plants: they’re very different from us. But of course they are confident.
Q What can the plants analyze in their environment?
R This is about sensitivity and the senses of plants. Because they can’t run away, they need to sense every little change to adjust their physiology to what’s about to happen, which is why they’re incredibly sensitive to things we’re totally blind to, like chemical gradients or electromagnetic fields. They are also able to detect sounds, such as a specific frequency of around 200 hertz, which is very important for plants. When we generate this frequency with a loudspeaker, all roots grow towards the origin of this sound: it is the same sound of running water. This is why plants are attracted to underground pipes because they feel the sound of rushing water.
Q Should we change our ethics in treating plants?
R Yes, we must change our position when comparing all living organisms. We think that we humans are the most beautiful, that there is nothing like us, because we have big brains that allow us to do things that other living beings cannot. If you ask a million people, you won’t find anyone saying we’re no better than a cow or an apple tree. We feel that we are better, deeply convinced that we are better. And that’s an incredible mistake. Because first, what does it mean to be better? That’s a human idea. Everything is measured: Whoever runs this distance faster is better. But what does it mean in life to be better? The true goal of life, of any organism, is to survive. And plants have lived many more years than we have on Earth, so we have a lot to learn, not teach. We should have a more respectful and humble attitude towards other sentient beings.
Q And what could be taught to a child so that it will be fascinated by and respect plants for the rest of its life?
R First of all, every child is more interested in plants than we usually think. If we tell them what happens in a garden, every child will be very interested in the amazing life in that garden. We need to be able to convey that plants are living things and take care of them accordingly. I always recommend a very simple experiment: take two identical pots and plant a bean in each, provide them with the same amount of water, light…keep one pot next to the other. As soon as they germinate, and only for 30 seconds each day, we very gently touch one of the plants but not the other and see what happens. After two weeks we will see that the plant that is being touched is smaller than the other one because it doesn’t like being touched (laughs), they perceive this touch as a kind of predatory aggression. Another, less scientific experiment is to take one of them and say cute and adorable things for a minute and only ugly things to the other. We did it in the lab and each one changed their way of growing. It’s not for anything fantastic or esoteric. It’s just that they are very sensitive and can sense if we are a good animal or a bad one for them. As simple as that.