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The Secret Lives of Plants
How much do we really know about them?
Happy Baashkaakodin-Giizis (Freezing Moon)! The weather has certainly gotten much colder lately, and the days are getting shorter, but we hope that you are having a good start to the cold weather season anyways!
This time of year has traditionally been a time for gathering and preserving foods in preparation for the coming Winter. In the present day, most of us probably give little thought and effort to preserving and storing food, because we have easy access to pre-preserved foods in cans or jars, and we can also get fresh foods from greenhouses or other countries. In the past, however, this was not the case, and different peoples across the world had different ways to preserve the foods they had harvested in gathered to make them last through the winter.
“Storage of crops was within and outside the long house. Seed corn was left on the cob hanging on braided strands of husk and hung from the rafters of the long house until just before planting. Elm bark containers held dried foods above sleeping bunks to keep them readily available. The Haudenosaunee also used a pit type of storage where they kept their food underground with low oxygen levels to prevent spoiling. Pits three to six feet deep were lined with gravel and sand and then bark or bluestem grass. These pits could hold up to ten bushels of food. Hemlock bark covered the pits opening which was then covered over with soil.”
“Our Anishinaabe grandmas were self-sufficient badasses; they grew and harvested their own food, cooked over a wood fire, had root cellars, and preserved through canning and drying. Pre-colonization, our ancestors followed the natural harvesting cycles of our homelands. The Rez [Reservation] system, which confined us to a tiny fraction of our territories, seriously restricted access to our traditional food sources. Rations replaced our healthy ancestral foods, so instead of our land providing all the sustenance our indigenous bodies needed, we were given what is now known as the three white devils of nutrition: flour, sugar, and dairy. These became a staple out of necessity, and it was out of resilience and our grandmother’s ingenuity that our precious frybread was born. Yes, believe it, or not our beloved Indian Tacos and Klik weren’t part of our traditional diet! Not only is the modern convenience diet wreaking havoc on our bodies but industrial agriculture is also hurting Shkagamikwe (Mother Earth).”
Announcements
Thank you to those of you who joined us in October to help with our final planting at the Grenville Park Little Forest - it is always so inspiring to see our community in action!
Upcoming events:
Come see Youth Art that envisions a Better Future at the Youth Imagine the Future Exhibition. December 3-12, at the Education Library (Duncan McArthur Hall), Queens University, 511 Union St. Open Mon-Thursday 8-7, Friday 8-4:30, and Sunday, 12:30-5. Local youth will show you how our future should and could look, if we rely on renewable energy, restore biodiversity, and have social justice.
How much do we really know about Plants?
For centuries, western science told us that plants can’t communicate with each other. Despite the insistence of populations that lived intimately with the Land, such as Indigenous peoples, western scientists only “discovered” and began to accept that plants communicate with each other in the past few decades - a topic which is still subject to debate at times. Communication is achieved by transmitting chemicals through the air and underground, as well as electrical signals (like those the human brain uses to communicate messages to the rest of your body) through the roots of trees. Some plants even communicate with sounds. Researchers like Stefano Mancuso from the University of Florence and Suzanne Simard from UBC are discovering new things about plants all the time, despite opposition from others in their field.
Illustration representing the Mycorrhizal network. Source: An Darach
There is still so much we have yet to discover. One study, though perhaps not scientifically rigorous enough for it to be widely accepted, has shown evidence that some plants can see - a vine from South America was found to mimic the leaf shapes of nearby plants, even one made of plastic, without touching them. Some humans have also attributed the transparent outer layer of cells on some plants’ leaves as evidence plants can see; if the leaves’ purpose was only to perform photosynthesis, chlorophyll would turn the cells green, while clear cells could be used as lenses, much like eyes. Another study demonstrated that anaesthetics have a similar effect on plants as they do on humans - plants under anaesthesia lose their ability to produce electrical signals, and also lose their ability to move (as demonstrated by a venus flytrap, who could not close their leaf trap). Plants also exhibit pain responses to harm from outside sources. What else might we not know?
This research is exciting, but what I find the most interesting is how this new research might affect the way in which we relate to and interact with plants. Lately, I’ve been wondering if plants need social connections like humans do…my houseplants might be lonely because they are all in their own pots and can’t communicate through root connections. If plants can see, does that mean they feel cared for when we are around, and feel abandoned when we are gone, like dogs or cats might? If plants can send and detect sounds, does the sound of our movements or our tone of voice affect how plants feel? If anaesthetics cause plants to stop moving, does that mean that they can “fall asleep” like humans? A reporter asked one of the researchers, Baluška, whether plants wake up like we do after being under general anesthesia. His response pertains to many of our questions: “No one can answer this because you cannot ask [the plants].”
Egocentrism vs Ecocentrism. Source: World Economic Forum
Humans have assumed for too long that they are superior to other species, and that animals are smarter or more aware than plants are. Perhaps it is us humans that are the simple beings, too naive to see that all species are equally important and valuable for our ecosystems, and that we all live and interact with one-another in ways far more complex than we imagined.
I hope that we can all start to think of our ecological kin as complex beings, with their own ways of living, their own values, and their own cultures; we might not be able to speak with plants, but we there are many languages we can use to communicate - we just have to find the right ones.
— Robert