People are passively intelligent. What does this mean for plants?

A co-blogger sent me a link to Cynthia Sue Larson's website today, where I found a link to an article called Plants are Actively intelligent. (Do you find this headline as frighteningly backward as I do, I wonder? It was not written by Cynthia Sue Larson, by the way.)

After my initial "duh" moment I became more than a little angry with the angle of the article, intimated by the second sentence of the title: What Does This Mean for Vegetarians?

As a vegetarian, I am rather used to shallow silliness parading as intellectually powerful insight - usually coming from people who find themselves unable to give up eating meat, even if they know how it's "harvested". (So much for will power and/or moral strength...)
So I surfed on to the original source of the article - the New York Times.

Unsurprisingly, the "angle" was the same, and the title just as obnoxious, or even more so: Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too.
(And by the way... what is the author "sorry" about, I wonder?)

But the article itself really deserves your attention. It is thoughtfully - and well - written.

Yes, plants are actively (whatever that means) intelligent ; and yes, brussel sprouts are alive and presumably would prefer to stay that way - even those of us who are not vegans are familiar with that simple fact of life; have been for quite a while, as a matter of fact.

But, fair enough, what does it mean to us?

It means that we have to acknowledge - once again - that the the limits separating the "I" and the "Other" are all but fictitious; and that the "Other" includes plants.
But that much many of us - albeit not nearly enough of us - know already.

It also means we have to acknowledge - yet again -that we do not really know how the alchemy of nature works.
And there is also the fact that individual plants - unlike individual animals - are not necessarily destroyed by the act of cutting or digging out a part of them.

Oh, a cop out!, I hear you say.
No, not exactly. Ignorance is not bliss, certainly not in this case; certainly not for those who are aware enough to even ponder on these things.
In this case, ignorance is painful.
(Which should at least appease, if not make happy, all those who see pain, either emotional or physical or both, as apparently the only way to redeem oneself.)

But there is another question, conveniently (albeit not very smartly or elegantly) left unaddressed: why should it mean something for vegans and vegetarians, specifically? How about all the other people? Mankind in general?

There are always choices to be made; and they always affect someone or something else.
And they should be made with the full awareness that that someone or something is no less entitled to Life as you, as I, making those choices uncomfortable.

Whatever it means to you, you'll the one who'll have to come to grips with it.
But you should know about this, if you didn't already, and that is why I am posting this.


P.S. It also makes the efforts of this blogging colleague of ours all the more intriguing, doesn't it? ;)

I am a ficus, hear me roar