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Do plants have minds of their own? Scholars in the sciences and the humanities are reconsidering vegetal capacities such as intelligence and cognition. This research, long recognized in some Indigenous thought, has implications for how humans interact with plants. The new book The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence includes stories, poems, and essays centered around plants themselves and our connections with plants.
Join scholars and editors of The Mind of Plants John Charles Ryan, Patricia Vieira and Monica Gagliano with moderator Laura Pustarfi, board member of The Plant Initiative, for a conversation on plant thought, including what plants themselves think, and the varied and entangled relations between humans and plants. There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. The program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.
Do plants have minds of their own? Scholars in the sciences and the humanities are reconsidering vegetal capacities such as intelligence and cognition. This research, long recognized in some Indigenous thought, has implications for how humans interact with plants. The new book The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence includes stories, poems, and essays centered around plants themselves and our connections with plants.
Join scholars and editors of The Mind of Plants John Charles Ryan, Patricia Vieira and Monica Gagliano with moderator Laura Pustarfi, board member of The Plant Initiative, for a conversation on plant thought, including what plants themselves think, and the varied and entangled relations between humans and plants. There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. The program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.
Buy The Mind of Plants here.
Use coupon "plantminds20" for 20% off your purchase of the book, now through January 1st.
More about the book:
The Mind of Plants brings together a collection of short essays, narratives and poetry on plants and their interaction with humans. Authors from the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences write about their connection to a particular plant, reflecting upon their research on plant studies in a style accessible for a general audience.
The idea that plants have a mind of their own has been a prominent feature of some Indigenous narratives, literary works and philosophical discourses. Recent scientific research in the field of plant cognition also highlights the capacity of botanical life to discern between options and learn from prior experiences or, in other words, to think. This collection includes texts that interpret the mind of plants broadly—from the ways that humans mind and unmind plants to the mindedness or unmindedness of plants themselves. Each of the authors has selected a plant that functions as a guiding thread to their interpretation of the mind of plants. From the ubiquitous rose to the ugly hornwort, from the Amazonian ayahuasca to tobacco, the texts reflect the multifarious interactions between humans and flora. Personal reflections, poems, essays and narratives offer cutting edge insights into the different meanings of the mind of plants.
John Charles Ryan is Adjunct Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia, and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia. His interests include Aboriginal Australian and Southeast Asian literature, ecocriticism, ecopoetics, critical plant studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change (2022, Brill) and coauthor of Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2021, Routledge). He has recently served as a Writer-in-Residence at Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia.
Patrícia Vieira is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, at Georgetown University. Her fields of expertise are Latin American and Iberian Literatures and Cultures, Portuguese and Brazilian Cinema, Utopian Studies and the Environmental Humanities. Her most recent monograph is States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture (SUNY UP, 2018) and her most recent co-edited book is Portuguese Literature and the Environment (Lexington, 2019). She has published numerous articles in her fields of expertize, as well as op-eds in The New York Times, the LA Review of Books and The European, among others. For more information visit: www.patriciavieira.net
Monica Gagliano is a Research Associate Professor in evolutionary ecology. A former fellow of the Australian Research Council, she is Research Associate Professor (adjunct) at the University of Western Australia and a Member of the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of Sydney. She is currently based at Southern Cross University where she directs the BI Lab–Biological Intelligence Lab as part of the Diverse Intelligences Initiative of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Her work has extended the concept of cognition (including perception, learning processes, memory) in plants. Her latest book is Thus Spoke the Plant (North Atlantic Books, 2018). For more information: www.monicagagliano.com
Laura Pustarfi is a scholar and writer focusing on trees in the Western philosophical tradition. She completed her doctoral work in Philosophy and Religion with a focus on Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2019. She is a board member with The Plant Initiative.
Buy The Mind of Plants here.
Use coupon "plantminds20" for 20% off your purchase of the book, now through January 1st.