Monica Gagliano - Imagining the New World: Science and the Mind of Plants

Monica Gagliano - Imagining the New World: Science and the Mind of Plants

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Synopsis: From ancient myths and legends to enchanting tales and modern blockbuster movies, humanity has recounted thousands of stories where an apparently aloof and motionless vegetal world promptly comes to life to voice opinions, foretell the future, whisper words of comfort, sing and at times, even scream. What if these stories were more than the fruit of our vivid imagination? By attuning its ears to vegetal ‘voices’, contemporary science has finally started lifting the veil of human plant-blindness to provide us with significant means of reimagining and rethinking plants as people. By reconceiving the connections between plants and humanity, and revitalising our relationship with the soul of Nature, this new imaginative science restores a more intimate way of perceiving the world, an expanded perspective where the solutions to our current eco-cultural predicament become available.

Bio: Monica is a research associate professor in evolutionary ecology and a former fellow of the Australian Research Council. She is now based at the University of Sydney as a Research Affiliate at the Sydney Environment Institute and a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences. In the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, she has established the brand new BI Lab–Biological Intelligence Lab as part of the Diverse Intelligences Initiative of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Though she began her career by studying animal behaviour, she quickly turned her attention to plant behaviour and cognition.

Over the last decade, she has blazed the trail for a brand new field called plant bioacoustics, showing that plants do make sounds; and by demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, she has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. Her studies have led her to author numerous groundbreaking scientific articles and to co-edit The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lexington Books, 2015), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy and Literature (Minnesota University Press, 2017) and Memory and Learning in Plants (Springer, 2018). Her research transcends the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism and encourages us to rethink plants as people–beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices.

In her latest book, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic Books, 2018), which she calls a “phytobiography”, she describes her experiments that opened the space to begin to understand how to make contact with this other-than-human intelligence. More info: www.monicagagliano.com

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