musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The poems the earth writes upon the sky


I don’t know… ever since I read Suzanne Simard’s ‘Finding the Mother Tree’ a few years ago, I’ve felt differently about plants -about Nature. Simard, a professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, ‘is known for her work on how trees interact and communicate using below-ground fungal networks, which has led to the recognition that forests have hub trees, or Mother Trees, which are large, highly connected trees that play an important role in the flow of information and resources in a forest,’ to quote her online biography.

Although I’d heard about things like that before -about the so-called ‘web of Life’- the book changed how I thought about the world around me. Another influence was the late Ojibway author Richard Wagamese and his several novels; more especially, his meditations on Nature: for example, ‘Embers’ in which he writes ‘From our very first breath, we are in relationship. With that indrawn draft of air, we become joined to everything that ever was, is and ever will be. When we exhale, we forge that relationship by virtue of the act of living. Our breath commingles with all breath, and we are a part of everything. That’s the simple fact of things. We are born into a state of relationship…‘

We are Nature; the world is not so much out there as in us -in each of us without exception. So to talk about Nature as if it were an alien thing with which we can choose whether or not to interact, misses the point. A better way to understand it, perhaps, is to wonder whether or not it understands us;  and whether it is important to know the answer.

Although I don’t think we really understand how a dog, say, or maybe a cat understands us, we sense that they do… We, and they live in different Magisteria, and yet share the same resources, breathe the same air, and interact with us -but on their terms, not ours…

I think Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ was my first introduction to the difficulties of understanding the world in which animals live. He suggested that human consciousness cannot be compared to the consciousness of bats… But those limitations don’t stop us from knowing something meaningful about how other animals think. Just  not ‘how it feels to be inside the mind of a badger, a swift, a praying mantis.’

There are many ways of communication that, at best, humans scarcely notice in the same way as in other species might; we are by and large a word species, a brain species, and tend to judge the intelligence -the agency– of other creatures as requiring these to qualify for a spot on our stage. We are not so accomplished with odours, chemicals, taste, or vibrations to guide our way along the trails we take. But is depending on any of these other methods indicative of inferiority… or merely difference?

There seems to be a fair amount of opinion, and hence literature out there on plant intelligence, but much of it is so… woo-woo, so New Agey, that I find it difficult to read it. I did manage to make it through The Secret Lives of Plants, the 1973 book by Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird, but it seemed a little too good to be believable. I suppose that is where Simard’s ‘Finding the Mother tree’  was so unexpectedly -and scientifically- refreshing.

And yet, although somewhat ‘primitive’ by today’s standards, there was one other piece of writing that caught my eye: Gustav Theodor Fechner’s ‘Nanna, or On the Soul Life of Plants’, published in 1848 (instead of ‘soul’ I think we would use the word ‘consciousness’ nowadays).

I discovered it in a recent essay in Aeon.[i] In it Fechner ‘asserts that we can only ever infer the existence of inner experience through outward physical expressions. And although we cannot fully know nature from within – eg, we can never get inside the mind of a plant – we can get close through comparison… The inherent interiority of things requires an endless process of approximation. For this reason, Fechner’s preferred rhetorical strategy is analogy… He contends that plants possess something analogous to animals’ nervous systems, constituted by plant fibres and filaments. But he also questions why plants could not have subjective sensations without nerves. Why grant the nervous system an exceptional status… Nature seeks diverse means to achieve similar ends. The violin, for example, requires strings to intone. We might imagine the strings as nerves. But one would then conclude that a flute or trombone makes no sound because it lacks strings. Animals might just be the ‘string instruments of sensation, and the plants the wind instruments’. I love that analogy!

But analogies are seldom perfect of course, and I admire how Fechner gets around the imperfections: ‘his epistemological humility converts into a kind of ontological generosity. To those who say plants do not move, Fechner says (as Charles Darwin did) that we simply lack the patience to observe their slowness. To those who say plants lack speech, Fechner holds forth on a lexicon of fragrance, scent poured from chalice to chalice like great gossipy chatter.’

‘Fechner imagines that plants could apply their own soul [that is, ‘consciousness’] criteria to humans and find us lacking. Plants may assume, based on their own experience, that the soul [consciousness] is evidenced by a capacity to self-generate and self-adorn, to create one’s body leaf by leaf. But humans must ‘leave our body as it is’ and don external garments.’ An interesting observation, don’t you think? ‘To Fechner, a soul [consciousness] is something with an interiority, a subjective awareness’… an ‘inward luminosity corresponding to the outward luminosity which is apparent in its body’… Cast in modern terms, we might simply say a soul [consciousness] is the capacity for subjective experience – what some cognitive scientists call primary or phenomenal consciousness. For Fechner, there is, as Thomas Nagel put it, ‘something it is like’ to be a plant.’

I think you can grasp my fascination with Fechner’s ideas, as dated and lacking in scientific verification as they may seem, so I don’t want to recapitulate the entire essay. But it does bring me rather close to those thoughts of Wagamese’ Embers about our kinship with all of Nature, don’t you think?

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-see-past-our-soul-blindness-to-recognise-plant-minds

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