Stephan: In the early 1970s two friends of mine, Christopher Bird, and Peter Tompkins, after interviewing several people interested in biodynamic gardening who, in turn, led them to several scientists wrote first an article in Harpers Magazine and, then, a book, The Secret Life of Plants, that created an international sensation. The idea that plants have consciousness was considered my materialist scientists the worse kind of woo-woo thinking. Conferences were held deriding the idea, papers were written, and derogatory interviews filled the media, even as the book became a bigger and bigger best seller. It changed Chris' and Peter's lives forever.
I had another friend Alan Chadwick, the leading biodynamist of his day whose gardens remain world famous, who was also a kind of remote viewer who specialized in plants, who told me that what Secret Life of Plants was saying was true. Plants not only had consciousness individually, but they they and all life were part of a matrix of consciousness. Then the Gaia Hypothesis emerged, that hinted at this nonlocal consciousness network without quite saying it.
Now, years later, it turns out the materialists were wrong; there is indeed a matrix of consciousness. Here is some of the recent plant research supporting that concept.
‘You need to imagine a plant as a huge brain’ … the plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso. Credit: Alessandro Moggi
I had hoped to interview the plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso at his laboratory at the University of Florence. I picture it as a botanical utopia: a place where flora is respected for its awareness and intelligence; where sensitive mimosa plants can demonstrate their long memories; and where humans are invited to learn how to be a better species by observing the behaviour of our verdant fellow organisms.
But because we are both on lockdown, we Skype from our homes. Instead of meeting his clever plants, I make do with admiring a pile of cannonball-like pods from an aquatic species, on the bookshelves behind him. “They’re used for propagation,” he says. “I am always collecting seeds.”
Before Mancuso’s lab started work in 2005, plant neurobiology was largely seen as a laughable concept. “We were interested in problems that were, until that moment, just related to animals, like intelligence and even behaviour,” he says. At the time, it was “almost forbidden” to talk about behaviour in plants. […]
Yes, it’s typical of humans to think that we have a monopoly on consciousness. And it’s just hubris to think that the human consciousness is the only form of consciousness.
Yes, it’s typical of humans to think that we have a monopoly on consciousness. And it’s just hubris to think that the human consciousness is the only form of consciousness.