Paco Calvo

What is it like to be a plant?
It's not a question we might think to contemplate, even though many of us live surrounded by plants. Science has long explored the wonderful ways in which plants communicate, behave and shape their environments: from chemical warfare to turning their predators to cannibalism. But they're usually just the backdrop to our frenetic animal lives.
While plants may not have brains or move around as we do, cutting-edge science is revealing that they have astonishing show more inner worlds of an alternate kind to ours. They can plan ahead, learn, recognise their relatives, assess risks and make decisions. They can even be put to sleep. Innovative new tools might allow us to actually see them do these things - from electrophysiological recordings to MRI and PET scans. If you can look in the right way, a world full of drama unfurls.
In PLANTA SAPIENS, Professor Paco Calvo offers a bold new perspective on plant biology and cognitive science. Using the latest scientific findings, Calvo challenges us to make an imaginative leap into a world that is so close and yet so alien - one that will expand our understanding of our own minds. From their rich subjective experiences to how they are inspiring novel ways of approaching the ecological crisis, PLANTA SAPIENS is a dazzling exploration of the lives of plants and a call to approach how we think about the natural world in a new, maverick way.
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Wie ist es, eine Pflanze zu sein?
Das ist keine Frage, über die wir vielleicht nachdenken, obwohl viele von uns von Pflanzen umgeben sind. Die Wissenschaft erforscht seit langem die wunderbare Art und Weise, in der Pflanzen kommunizieren, sich verhalten und ihre Umgebung gestalten: von chemischer Kriegsführung bis hin zum Kannibalismus ihrer Feinde. Aber normalerweise sind sie nur die Kulisse für unser hektisches Tierleben.
Pflanzen haben zwar kein Gehirn und bewegen sich nicht so wie wir, aber die neueste Wissenschaft zeigt, dass sie über eine erstaunliche innere Welt verfügen, die sich von der unseren unterscheidet. Sie können vorausplanen, lernen, ihre Verwandten erkennen, Risiken einschätzen und Entscheidungen treffen. Man kann sie sogar in Schlaf versetzen. Innovative neue Instrumente könnten es uns ermöglichen, sie bei diesen Dingen zu beobachten - von elektrophysiologischen Aufzeichnungen bis hin zu MRT- und PET-Scans. Wenn man richtig hinschaut, entfaltet sich eine Welt voller Dramatik.
In PLANTA SAPIENS bietet Professor Paco Calvo eine kühne neue Perspektive auf die Pflanzenbiologie und die Kognitionswissenschaft. Auf der Grundlage neuester wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse fordert Calvo uns zu einem phantasievollen Sprung in eine Welt heraus, die so nah und doch so fremd ist - eine Welt, die unser Verständnis unseres eigenen Verstandes erweitern wird. Von den reichhaltigen subjektiven Erfahrungen der Pflanzen bis hin zu der Frage, wie sie uns dazu inspirieren, die ökologische Krise zu bewältigen, ist PLANTA SAPIENS eine schillernde Erkundung des Lebens der Pflanzen und eine Aufforderung, unser Denken über die natürliche Welt auf eine neue, unkonventionelle Weise zu gestalten. show less

'...we need to connect to the concrete and specific nature of particular plants and their worlds. We must acknowledge that plants are animate without slipping into animism; relinquish the anthropocentric hegemony on intelligence by not being anthropomorphic.'

This book starts by a startling yet fascinating experience: that of anaesthetizing plants. As it turns out, when under anaesthetics plants stops photosynthesising; they stop folding their leaves; they stop bending their stems; and their show more seeds even stop germinating! In other words: they 'go to sleep'. This is fascinating for one thing -if plants can 'go to sleep', then doesn't it mean that they also have a 'waking state' in the first place? And what is a 'waking state', but a sense of awareness, even, perhaps, a state of consciousness, thought, and intelligence?

Now, of course, it's not the first time that some speculative thinker pushes the boundaries in trying to explain what it means to be 'alive'. The philosopher Thomas Nigel, for instance, had already famously asked 'what is it like to be a bat?' back in 1974; and Darwin himself had not been shy in ascribing 'emotions', even to insects, back in the 19th century. The idea has been pushed so far, in fact, that our otherwise deeply entrenched anthropocentrism has taken yet a serious blow in the past few decades, with our understanding of how other animals than us can feel, and 'be', having had quite a shattering impact; for example, when it comes to animals' rights. The thing, though, is that such radical understanding of 'being' when it comes to other species has rarely, if ever, been applied to plants. We may be less and less anthropocentric, yet we still remain stubbornly 'zoocentric'. Does it matter?

The author addresses some of the reasons behind such 'plant blindness'. More to the point, he demonstrates that under such blindness lies a serious ignorance of how plants actually behave; an ignorance that has a serious impact not only upon our dealing with environmental issues, but, also, and above all, ethics. For this is the core of the debate, a debate which has been raging on among experts for decades now: are plants 'intelligent' and 'conscious'? And, if so, what does it mean for us morally?

The interest of this book is not in the arguments advanced by the author to claim that plants are, indeed, fully capable of 'cognition'. We know that plants are very complex beings, actively engaged in very complex behaviours with their environments; complex behaviours that requires not only a subjective and sensitive awareness to interact, but, also, flexibility, anticipation, having goals, and having the ability to retain information and learn. He argues, then, against those claiming that such behaviours are merely 'adaptive'; and the arguments pro and con can be found elsewhere -nothing much new here from a botanical perspective. The interest of this book lies, in fact, in the background and so angle of the author.

Paco Calvo is not only a plant biologist. He is, also, an expert both in psychology and in philosophy. This, then, provides him with an intellectual baggage that others, whose views are far too limited by their own one-and-only field, don't have; and so it provides him with an ability to think outside the box when it comes to such debate. In other words, unlike others, still entrapped by their own unique specialism to tackle the question (whatever their side of the argument), he taps into other discipline to re-question our understanding of what it means to be 'intelligent', and what it means to be 'conscious'. Mostly, he relies indeed on biosemiotics to defend the view that plants have their own Umwelt too. And it's this approach that makes 'Planta Sapiens' such an engrossing, fascinating read, challenging all of our preconceptions about other states of 'being'.

Channelling views ranging from botany to philosophy, psychology, and neurosciences, it could have been a daunting book, far too absorbed in its multiple expertise to be accessible. Thanks to the very engaging and powerful writing of the author, though, it's everything but. Paco Calvo's radical views are in fact exposed very clearly, powerfully and straightforwardly argued, which make them even more persuasive. What about morale, though? If plants indeed have an Umwelt of their own, then here's a serious shift in our perspective that (as was the case following our understanding of other animals ability to feel) ought to lead to very important debates regarding how we treat them. As such, I cannot but highly, highly recommend it. I rarely give 5 stars to a book, unless they drastically shift my thinking and/ or offer me a deeply challenging view of the world around me. This one is right up there among the few! In fact, I believe that it deserves the success and impact that, said, Animal Liberation by Peter Singer had when it comes to animals. A must read. show less

This book is an argument for the validity of the scientific exploration of sentience and intelligence in plants. Calvo actually talks very little about plants and plant intelligence in this book: if you're looking for information about ways plants demonstrate intelligence, you will find very little of it here. Instead, Calvo provides a justification for why it is not unreasonable to think that plants might have awareness of their surroundings, intelligence, and sentience. He is the director show more of a scientific organization that is studying plant intelligence, so in some ways this book feels like a part of a grant proposal: so far, he has very little scientific information, but he desperately needs to justify why he is doing this work so that he can actually get some scientific information. He makes a strong argument, but as someone who is already convinced that plants might be intelligent and wants more information about what we currently know about plant intelligence, I was not the target audience for this book at all.

I was surprised by one glaring omission in this book: Calvo completely fails to look outside of traditional Western science. He has a chapter discussing "plant blindness" - how humans tend to focus disproportionately on animals, and never think about the abundance of plants that are around us all the time. And yet he completely fails to consider whether there are any non-Western cultures that do not see plants this way. I could practically hear Robin Wall Kimmerer yelling in the background as I read this book. There have been so many times when non-Western cultures' ideas have been vindicated by Western science once we bother to consider them with an open mind, and I am certain that there are cultures who already see plants as sentient whose ideas about how plants function could open all sorts of avenues for scientific study. show less

I've read the Light Eaters earlier this year which has a similar vibe to this, but I think this one is slightly better. I have to say the idea of plant rights is laughable when humans are still fighting for rights all over the globe, but the more we learn about plant responses to stimuli the better.