The supposed supremacy of the human being as a species is an old tale that should be as obsolete as so many other stale stories that have been discarded.
But not.
It is thought that humanity is the pinnacle of creation, as if they wanted to deny the evidence of a much more complex and rich world.
Stefano Mancuso, professor at the University of Florence and passionate director of the International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology, as well as the writer of several successful books on this subject, advocates rethinking that old axiom so that plants can earn our respect and admiration at once. for all.
Because without them nothing would exist.
ASK.
For you, what is a plant?
ANSWER.
It is not easy to define it.
Normally, when you ask a scientist what the main characteristic of a plant is, he defines it as something without movement, a living organism capable of photosynthesis.
And this is true, but I prefer to define them in opposition to animals.
We look at the world with our eyes, with our animal gaze, and it is difficult for us to understand living beings as different from us as plants.
They are slow, we are fast.
The plants are preyed on, we are the predators.
But the most important difference for me is that animals are beings that have an organization in which they have concentrated vital functions in a few organs, and plants have a decentralized organization, where we appreciate a modular structure and no part is completely indispensable.
So, in a nutshell,
yin-yang
of life, but with a difference: that all animals together represent 0.3% of biomass, an irrelevant part of reality.
On the contrary, 87% of the biomass is made up of plants.
So, if you ask me for a one-sentence definition, I would say that they are the life of our planet.
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Stefano Mancuso: "We do not know how life on the planet works"
Q.
Is there a place for humanity without them?
R.
It is impossible to imagine life on our planet without plants.
All animals are dependent on plants and they are not dependent 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 knows there would be a problem with the food.
In a few months there would be no more food on the planet.
But a main characteristic of plants, and one of the least understood, is that they are capable of fixing carbon dioxide.
So if 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 begin to boil and the planet would be completely sterilized, like Mars or Venus.
Q.
An intelligent engine, because of what they teach us with their behavior.
R.
Normally we think that we are the only intelligent beings on the planet, or maybe not only us, but only a few animals very close to us and nothing else.
I think this is a very ridiculous way of looking at the world.
Absurd and also presumptuous.
If we could say that intelligence is linked to having a brain, then only 0.3% of living forms have a brain.
So if intelligence depends on having a brain, we say that 99.7% of life is stupid, a kind of mechanical machine.
For me, as a biologist and researcher, this is something impossible to imagine.
Every living organism needs to solve problems.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.
Even a bacterium or a virus needs to solve problems, it is impossible for them not to, or they would have gone extinct immediately.
Q.
And how is that plant intelligence?
A.
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 more intelligent than humans.
I do not want to provoke anyone with this, it is true from a biological point of view.
We animals use movement as our main response to the environment.
For us, movement is everything.
It is impossible for an animal to imagine finding food without such movement or escaping from a predator.
But animals do not solve problems, rather they avoid them.
In the case of plants, this is not possible, you need to solve the problem.
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Q.
Are plants self-aware?
A.
We don't know exactly what consciousness is, even for humans.
It is very difficult.
The only thing we can say is if one is aware of oneself, but one can no longer know the awareness of the other person in front of us.
For me, it's the ability to live.
We can imagine it as the ability to detect yourself in relation to the environment in which we live.
Thus, plants are extremely sensitive to the environment in which they live, because they are more sensitive than us to everything that surrounds them.
That is the problem we have when judging plants: they are very different from us.
But of course they are self-aware.
Q.
What are the plants in their environment capable of analyzing?
A.
This talks about sensitivity and the senses of plants.
Because they can't run away, they need to feel every little change to adapt their physiology to what's about to happen, which is why they're incredibly sensitive to things we're completely blind to, like chemical gradients or electromagnetic fields.
They are also capable of detecting sounds, such as a certain frequency of about 200 hertz, which is very important for plants.
When we produce that frequency with a loudspeaker, all the roots grow towards the origin of that sound: it is the same sound of flowing water.
That's why plants are drawn to underground pipes, because they feel the sound of rushing water.
Q.
Should we change our ethics when it comes to treating plants?
R.
Yes, we have to 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 a big brain that allows us to do things that other living beings cannot.
If you ask a million people you will not find anyone who says that we are no better than a cow or an apple tree.
We feel that we are better, deeply convinced that we are better.
And that is an incredible mistake.
Because, first, what does it mean to be better?
That is a human idea.
Everything is measured: if you run that distance faster, you are better.
But, in life, what does it mean to be better?
The real goal of life, of any organism, is to survive.
And plants have lived many more years than we have on the face of the Earth,
so we have a lot to learn, not to teach.
We should have a more respectful and humble attitude towards other living beings.
Q.
And what could be taught to a child so that he would remain fascinated for the rest of his life by plants and respect them?
R.
First of all, each child is more interested in plants than we usually think.
If we tell them what happens in a garden, any child will be very interested in the amazing life of that garden.
We must be able to convey that plants are living beings, and, from that point of view, take care of them.
I always recommend doing a very simple experiment: take two identical pots and plant a bean in each one, providing them with the same amount of water, light... keeping one pot next to the other.
Once they germinate, and for just 30 seconds each day, we very gently touch one of the plants, but not the other, and observe what happens.
After two weeks, we will see that the plant that is being touched is smaller than the other, because they don't like to be touched (laughs),
they feel that touch as a kind of aggression from a predator.
Another experiment, less scientific, is to take one of them and say cute and adorable things for a minute, and just ugly things to the other.
We did it in the laboratory, and each one changed its way of growing.
It is not for something fantastic or esoteric.
It is only because they are very sensitive, and they feel if we are a good or bad animal for them.
As simple as that.