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qLANTA SAPIENS
Some plant scientists have begun to try and shake up our views of plants in the global ecosystem. Usually, plants are described in climate change models simply as “passive carbon-fixing entities.” My friends and colleagues František Baluška and Stefano Mancuso argue that they “possess a plant-specific intelligence, with which they manipulate both their abiotic and biotic environment, including climate patterns and whole ecosystems.” Plants are not ecosystem functions, they argue. Plants and their root networks of symbionts are proactive engineers of their environments that we need to work with if we are to undo the changes we have wrought. I would go still further: plants are not just a complex “living air-conditioning system.” If we can see plants as cognitive beings, we might be able to shift our own perspective on humanity’s role in the Earth’s biosphere and facilitate plants in rebalancing our own effects on the ecosystem.9 We could think how they might experience and explore an extra-terrestrial environment, how they might shape it into something habitable for themselves, rather than confining them to encapsulated biotic loops with silkworms, or developing inept, legged robots to tend to them in extraterrestrial plantations.
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