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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

What are the conditions for admittance to human legal protection?

I'm fascinated by the idea of granting legal personhood to the environment. We can see Marder's thinking referenced here replicated in recent moves to grant legal rights to rivers in New Zealand and Colombia, and in advocacy by Australia's First Nations people to recognise the distinct legal status of the Margaret River (see discussion in this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/01/its-only-natural-the-push-to-give-rivers-mountains-and-forests-legal-rights).

However, it's worth interrogating the philosophical basis upon which such acts are justified. I think that Marder's thinking here, though well-intentioned, betrays an adherence to the kind of green, capital-N nature of which Morton is so critical. It assumes that Nature is the detached Other requiring the benevolence of human protection, and so is imbued with an anthropocentric attitude. I suggest that we can better unpack this justification for granting plants rights by analysing the similar ontological justifications in animal-rights discourse. Peter Singer is the key theorist in this field and argues in favour of animal rights on the basis that animals share many of the emotions, capabilities and agency of humans. You can get a sense of his argument against animal cruelty through his analogous representations of human (specifically and emotively, baby-humans) cruelty:

"So it is worse to slap a baby than a horse, if both slaps are administered with equal force. But there must be some kind of blow - I don't know exactly what it would be, but perhaps a blow with a heavy stick - that would cause the horse as much pain as we cause a baby by slapping it with our hand. That is what I mean by 'the same amount of pain' and if we consider it wrong to inflict that much pain on a baby for no good reason then we must, unless we are speciesists, consider it equally wrong to inflict the same amount of pain on a horse for no good reason".

Singer clearly urges us to recognise the moral standing of animals (or by extension, plants) because they intimate the privileged capabilities of the human, and so deserve a place in our ethical–relational framework of law. Yet as pointed out by Wolfe, this argument "tacitly extends a model of human subjectivity to animals" and thereby reinforces the supremacy of the human subject. I would venture that the same criticism could be made of the argument that there should be a 'Universal Declaration of Plant Rights' because they share humanist behavioural and physical adaptations. Granted, Marder does recognise that there are standalone philosophical reasons for recognising the rights of plants, but I wonder whether this is a true antidote to his anthropocentrism. The whole concept of "rights from ... (freedom of deforestation etc)" invokes the idea that plants need protection from humans and reinstates the hierarchical structure between human/Nature. Instead, the broader project of ecological thinking is to allow us to appreciate the alterity of different life forms and see ourselves in an ontological field without demarcation or hierarchy. While it's important to be cognisant of the important alterity of plants; I suggest that we can do so without preserving the human legal framework as the privileged mode.

- Amelia Loughland

Extract of Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: Avon, 1975 https://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1979----.html

Wolfe, Cary. "Human, All too Human: 'Animal Studies' and the Humanities". Modern Language Association. vol 124, no. 2, March, 2009, pp. 564–575.

This page is referenced by:

Alice in the Land of Plants and Should Plants have rights? Annotated by Hiba Alhamidawi

The Plant world

The first text I chose on plant worlds is the first chapter from the book Alice in the land of plants: Biology of Plants and Their Importance for Planet Earth, written by Yiannis Manetas. Throughout this chapter Manetas argues that plants are often discredited and reduced to the simplistic value of consumption by animals and humans. Meaning that humans only study, value, or appreciate plants when they are useful for consumption. However, Manetas argues that this half-hearted appreciation of plants needs to be widened, challenged, and re-designed towards an appreciation, respect, and value for the plants that are insignificant. Thus, the appreciation of plant life should be shifted from the plants being important because they are useful to plants being important simply because they exist. Manetas further highlights the irony in human disregard for plant life by asserting that plants tend to be disregarded because their existence is perceived to be for the sole purpose of supplying for humans and animals, when on the contrary plants have existed long before humans or animals have on this planet. Therefore, humans need to abandon their anthropocentric views on plants if we are to really appreciate and value plants as significant living beings, especially when they shape the biological state of affairs on earth. For example, the process of photosynthesis doesn't simply just offer humans with oxygen, the sole necessity and core for our breathing existence, but photosynthesis determines the climate in which we live in, the composition of the earth's atmosphere, and the water cycle. Hence, it goes beyond saying that plants are more than just green objects that exist amongst us, for we exist because of them, as Manetas eloquently states, it is conceivable to imagine a world without humans and animals, but it is impossible to imagine a world without plants. Plants have shaped the evolution and history of life, they are responsible for giving us life, but it isn't enough just to just appreciate them, as Manetas proposes that we need to become better acquainted with them.
What was particularly interesting about this chapter was the term ascribed to human disregard of plant life, this term being plant blindness. Plant blindness refers to the attitude where plants are not only discredited, but also unrecognized. Plant blindness can be attributed towards a few main reasons. Firstly, unlike with animals, humans tend to struggle to find similarities with plants, this leads to their inability to empathize with them, which consequently leads to the view that plants are insignificant and therefore not important enough to study or appreciate. The irony of this view is that if plants are insignificant because of their differences to humans, then 99% of the Earths biomass would be considered insignificant. Secondly, plant blindness can be attributed to a physiologic basis. This means that when receiving stimuli, the brain focuses on 3 main characteristics of an object, the movement, colour, and potential danger. However, because plants don't directly move, or exhibit perceptible danger, humans don't notice the plants in their surroundings as easily as they would notice animals.

Thirdly, plant blindness can be attributed to a social and educational basis, for example, in Biology, plants tend to be studied less than animals due to a lacking interest or knowledge. However, what is particularly ironic about the favoring of animals over plants in Biology is that the founders of modern Biology were in-fact inspired by plants. For example, Gregor Mendel, the father of classic genetics, based his laws of hereditary on his experiments on peas. I find this point particularly interesting because it demonstrates the structural complexity of plants, their similarity with human life, and their overall significance as living beings.

The second article I chose is written by Michael Marder and it poses the question 'Should Plants have Rights?'. Marder poses this question on the basis that if there is a Universal Declaration of Human Rights then there should also be a Universal Declaration of plant Rights. Marder argues that plants should also be given rights because, similarly to humans, they are complex organisms with behavioral and physical adaptations that have proven to demonstrate their potentiality and evolutionary intelligence based on survival. For example, plants have defense mechanisms that protects them from herbivore insects by releasing chemical toxins. However, plants are defenseless against humans and statistics reveal that 1 in 5 plants are on the brink of extinction. Marder further argues the philosophical reasons for granting plants with rights, by claiming that their existence alone grants them the right to have rights. They are subjects with schemes for growth and development, they possess worth, and they don't simply exist for humans and animals, especially when they existed before us.
Although many may argue that the prevalent abuses of human rights around the world demonstrates the impractical and frivolous nature of granting the extension of rights to nonhuman living beings. Yet, this shouldn't justify the mistreatment of other kinds of life, as Martin Luther King, Jr famously wrote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" and it is on this convincing note that Marder leaves us, although indirectly, with the answer to his posed question.

The above two texts have strongly informed the foundation of my renewed understanding of plants and the plant world, because the notion of plant blindness and plant rights has challenged me to re-visit my pre-conceived attitudes towards plants and to re-evaluate them. These notions also sparked some inspiration for the ideas that my living book will entail. I'm encouraged now to creatively represent plants in a re-imagined way, and to encourage viewers to also challenge their pre-conceived notions of plants as aesthetically pleasing green objects that exist amongst us, and instead to start viewing them as valuable living organisms that exist with us.