In her work exploring notions of plant intelligence, Zoë Schlanger speaks to Tony Trewavas, emeritus professor of plant physiology at the University of Edinburgh, who says:
“Everything is intelligent. When people say they can’t see it, they’re talking about academic intelligence. They assume what they’ve heard in school about IQ and human intelligence is what it is.…[But that] academic achievement, that’s not about survival. What I’m talking about is not academic intelligence. It’s biological intelligence….Every organism on this earth acts intelligently. When a zebra runs away from a lion, is that intelligent behavior? Of course it is, it’s survival!…But when an insect bites a leaf and the plant produces a natural pesticide to ward it off, is that intelligence? It’s no different. It’s not running away from threats, but it’s finding a way of survival.”
Schlanger, The Light Eaters, page 243
I’ll note a few things about this: the first is that this is a direct rejection of the notion of “academic” intelligence as ground for understanding intelligence generally. Academic intelligence is by definition hierarchical, not binary: it’s not a matter of if someone is intelligent but how much intelligence they have. We resort to this model of intelligence almost reflexively now, having absorbed it for generations, and are barely aware of its implications. But as I’ve noted before, any understanding of intelligence as hierarchical necessarily includes assertions of value, and becomes inescapably entangled with the other ways we rank and order each other—via gender, race, disability, and more. That is, our notions of intelligence as constructed by rank and achievement are by design discriminatory, and used to justify the lack of care and freedom that creatures (people and otherwise) deemed less intelligent are made to bear.
What Trewavas and Schlanger are gesturing towards with a notion of intelligence rooted in biology—or, as I might restate it, intelligence rooted in bodies—is an intelligence that is not interested in hierarchy or rank. One being does not have more or less intelligence than another, because intelligence isn’t a quantity to be measured and ordered. Rather, every living thing, everything with a body, however large or small, is intelligent. Intelligence is the basic condition of being alive.
The second thing I’ll note is what that intelligence is for: finding a way to survive. We sometimes use that word today to refer only to the meanest conditions of survival—that is, to survive but not to thrive—but I think that demeans the work of survival. The word comes from the Latin vīvere, that is to live, to be alive. To be alive in all our fullness, in all our joy and all our love, in everything that makes us feel completely alive, and in the trials and suffering and pain that comes along with it—because there can be no life without pain and loss.
In her review of The Light Eaters, Elizabeth Kolbert thinks that there is something a bit horrifying about the implication that plants have consciousness and can suffer. I’m not so sure. The refusal of plant consciousness has been part of a mechanistic and extractive approach to the more-than-human world that has led to destruction on a grand scale, and extraordinary levels of suffering for all living things, people included. And what’s to come is likely to be much worse, unless we change our ways, and change quickly. But in accepting the consciousness of plants, might we be invited to ask what it means to minimize harm, to live interdependently with other intelligent beings? Might we have some compassion for our greener brethren, in the sense of fellow-felling, of suffering with them? Might we also come to learn from them, to recognize that they know things we do not, to enlarge our own intelligence?
In Always Coming Home, Le Guin describes the ceremonies and rituals of death and dying among the people of the Kesh Valley, a civilization that may exist many years from now in the ruins of California. She writes:
Domestic animals killed for food were addressed before or during the act of killing by any member of the Blood Lodge—any adult or adolescent woman. She said to the animal:
Your life ends now,
your death begins.
Beautiful one,
give us our need,
We give you our words.
Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 90
This tradition extended beyond animals killed for food, to appear in a shorter form whenever any living thing was made to suffer at their hands:
Even when a corn-borer was squashed, a mosquito swatted, a branch broken, a flower picked, the formula was muttered in its ultimately reduced form: arrariv, “my word[s].” Although this one-word formula was spoken as mindlessly as our “bless you” to a sneeze, it was always spoken. The speaking of it maintained and contained the idea of need and fulfillment, demand and response, of relationship and interdependence; and this idea could be brought fully to mind when it was wanted. The stone, as they said, contains the mountain.
Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 93
Perhaps accepting that consciousness is not scarce—not something peculiar to only certain humans, but as abundant as grass and bee and root—could for us sustain that idea of interdependence, of reciprocity, of human lives as entangled and connected to the world around us, rather than separate or above it.
I wonder also about the exchange that the Kesh people propose with their incantation: give us our need, we give you our words. What does it mean to hold both words and need as equal? What makes words a fair price for a life? When we tell ourselves that we are apart from the world, that we are smarter than other living things, that we alone possess something like smarts, that death is not near—we cleave ourselves from the life around us. But when we acknowledge that we are more alike than not, when we see in another’s vulnerability and death our own fragility and mortality, we come home to that life. The words bind us to that understanding, to the awareness that death, ever present, is the only thing that makes life possible. They remind us, also, to take from the world only what we need. No less, and no more.