Gagliano, who began her career as a marine scientist, says her work with plants triggered a profound epiphany. “The main discovery for me was not the fact that plants themselves must be something more than we give them credit for, but what if everything around us is much more than we give it credit for, whether it’s animal, plant, bacteria, whatever.”
She is aware of the criticisms of other scientists, who warn against anthropomorphising vegetation. But she argues that there is no other door to understanding the inner lives of all these other beings. Thinking about ourselves provides a subjective sense of the inner life of a tree or a bush, but it does not exclude the possibility that vegetations may be italy mobile number leading a rich existence in their own right. On the contrary, it prompts us to explore the difficult questions about their lives. “For me, the role of science is to explore, and to explore especially what we don’t know. But the reality is that a lot of research in academia tends to explore what we already know because it is certain,” she argues.
Acknowledging plant intelligence might put us in an awkward position. There might not be anything we can eat that isn’t a form of murder — not even salad. Also, if we discover that kinship relationships between plants are real, we’ll have to acknowledge that cutting down trees for furniture means breaking up families. More than that, expanding the definitions of consciousness and intelligence might mean admitting that we’ve been limited in our view of the world altogether. What if everything around us is intelligent in its own way, and we’re just not smart enough to see it?