To imitate plants. A conversation with Stefano Mancuso

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It was a summer day in Florence. It was very hot, and around lunchtime there weren’t many tourists on the downtown streets. In the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi there was silence: the great slide by the German artist Carsten Höller had something anomalous in that space, but it was captivating, almost irresistible. I got on it, partly because it was the ritual that everyone had to do in those days within the fateful system of contemporary, partly because it subtly frightened me. The strangest thing, however, was not the fact that everyone could slip into a transparent tube to descend in speed from one of the oldest Florentine palaces. The strangest thing was that, in that torrid and unreal silence, before launching myself down the slope an attendant, appeared from who knows where, handed me a bean plant to hold it in my hand. Because inside Höller’s structure that little vegetable being would have perceived my s tate of euphoria or worry during the slide and, in some way, this reaction of my psyche would have influenced the subsequent development of the plant. It was 2018, and this was my first indirect meeting with Stefano Mancuso, the botanist who gave life with the artist to The Florence Experiment, a project that combined a gigantic contemporary artwork with research on plant neurobiology. After the descent, in fact, the seedling was delivered to a team of scientists who analyzed the photosynthetic parameters and the molecules emitted as a reaction to the descent, comparing the results with those of other bean plants brought down on their own, and yet of others which, on the other hand, had not even faced the descent.

Starting from that event, which had great media coverage, Mancuso has become increasingly known to the general public and in 2019, on the occasion of the XXII International Triennial, the scientist brought his project The Nation of Plants to Milan, with the staging of a real parliament for plant species. On the day of the Broken Nature opening – that was the name of the project curated by Paola Antonelli for the Milan Triennale – I spoke for the first time with Mancuso, who was already a star in the field. «There is a reality on this planet – he told me on that occasion – that we do not know and which represents the entirety of life, because we animals, not just humans, but the animals and us, all together, represent 0.03% by mass of all that is alive. Plants alone account for 85%».

A very clear concept, which was also the restarting point when, in a world that was experiencing the exit from the global pandemic, we again found ourselves talking, this time, in accordance with the days we were living, with the mediation of a videoconference via Zoom. Me standing in front of the laptop at the Venice Mestre station, he sitting with a white wall behind him – in a laboratory, I imagined, or in a university department. And among the many other things towards which I tried to head the conversation, between a Trenitalia announcement and a connection drop, we inevitably found ourselves talking about ethics, which when you think of botany is not exactly the first concept that comes to mind. Instead, maybe it should.

«It is clear – he told me – that it is difficult to apply ethical categories to the natural world, which normally doesn’t give a damn about everything we mean by the word “ethics”. However, if we want to bring ourselves back into these categories, there are aspects of what we humans are interested in, in terms of ethics, which are present in plants to the maximum. The first is respect for the environment, which is becoming a crucial issue for us, because our survival is at stake. Plants, precisely because of their evolution, precisely because they cannot move from where they were born, possess what we would call absolute respect for the environment. A plant will never spoil the environment in which it lives, because it cannot move and it won’t be able to go and find another environment; just as it won’t ever consume more resources than those that the environment can provide it with. And behold, these are already two great characteristics that if we humans were able in some way to make ours, we would have made a great step forward, from the point of view of ethical evolution. And then there is the absolute value to plants for the community of other living beings, with whom they share the same environment of which they are all respectful».

As I reread these words now, in a hotel room, while in the outside world we are talking about the return of war in Europe and of a new crisis that seems to have taken the place of that of the pandemic, I feel a sense of estrangement: talking about “ethical evolution” seems almost impossible. If I apply the two terms to the history of the Industrial Revolution – the key event of the last three hundred years of human history – or even only, reducing the field, to the widespread diffusion of technology in every action of our life, led by the giants of global tech, it seems to me that they are completely irreconcilable. But it is probable that, at this moment, I am just thinking about the idea of evolution in limited, self-referential, unnecessarily anthropocentric terms.

«Plants – Mancuso explained to me – do have a very different evolution, which in a certain sense responds to different principles than those of animals. Symbiosis, living together, community or – as I like to call it in honor of Kropotkin (Pëtr A. Kropotkin, Russian anarchist philosopher and naturalist who lived between 1842 and 1921, Ed.’s Note) – mutual support, is present in the highest degree in the plant world, so much so that in a wood the plants, all united underground through the roots, also keep the stumps alive: which means that a cut plant is kept alive by neighboring plants. Why do they do it? You can’t use ethical categories, they don’t do it because they are good: the plant keeps the stump alive because it is convenient for it. With that plant that is now a stump, the neighboring plants have coexisted for perhaps two hundred years. Now that it has been cut, if they let it die, who will come in its place? A bad neighbor for a plant can cause much greater problems than those that can happen to us in an apartment building».

The crucial point is the diversity of the idea of evolution, the perspective in which it arises. As if we were talking about self-fulfilling prophecies, or thought codes alien to each other. Here, perhaps also due to an inveterate passion for science fiction (a passion full of respect and awareness of the way in which a subgenre of modern culture has been able to say things that, in a certain historical period, could hardly have been said, except in that precise way), I have the feeling that when I try to compare the two universes, the human or animal one and the vegetable one, the outcome is often a conversation between beings from different worlds, each fundamentally alien to the other. This almost always results in incommunicability, if we are lucky enough, or, if we are not, in misunderstandings that can have devastating effects. But if I am writing these words now, I am doing it to try to overturn this damned perspective, from which I cannot but start being – just like Mancuso – a human that, as such, I am also free to question. At times, thank goodness, doing it forcefully.

«Those behaviors that we call utilitarian – added the professor – are anything but utilitarian, on the contrary. The question is the perspective that one has: if someone has the perspective of the single individual, it may be that some behaviors have a very strong utilitarian value, but if you have the perspective of the species, in our case we would say of humankind, then the useful behaviors are always the same, and they are undoubtedly the ones put into practice by plants». Ok. Plants have understood everything, the old (and sometimes very dangerous) common sense whispers to me at this point, but, my dear scientist, we cannot put humans and plants on the same intellectual level, so to speak. Or maybe yes…

«Neurobiology in plants – replied Mancuso – studies the cognitive abilities of plants, subsequently it applies to them a whole series of scientific practices hitherto unexploited. No one had ever wondered if plants can learn, if they have memory, if they can communicate, if they are able – and to what extent – to perceive the environment… Plant neurobiology is nothing more than a scientific discipline that looks at plants as cognitive beings. And when you start adopting this point of view, scenarios totally change. You can see the world from a really different perspective». Somehow we came back to the Florentine bean plant, which while rushing with me in a kind of contemporary art carousel, in its own way was itself thinking, feeling, somatising, sharing. I am reminded of concepts going from the emotional intelligence of Daniel Goleman’s bestsellers and reaching the complex philosophical reasoning of Donna Haraway on hybridization, also passing through some suggestions of transhumanism. But probably the key point is precisely the word “intelligence” and the ways in which we decide to understand it (or not to understand it, or even to synthesize it).

«If we say that intelligence is the ability to solve problems, as I think we should define it – concluded Stefano Mancuso – it is clear that intelligence is precisely a capacity of life, like reproduction. Just as it is not possible to imagine a life that does not reproduce itself, in the same way it is not possible to imagine a life that is not intelligent. Moreover, it is evident that degrees and differences between intelligences exist, but that’s another story. The lowest common denominator that unites us all is that we all are intelligent». Here (perhaps) lies what united me and the seedling; this is (perhaps) the common ground on which to build a dialogue with the aliens of Close Encounters of the third kind. And, when we think of plants, the concept of closeness is evident. And it is likely that one of the challenges of our time will be that of turning it into a more aware idea of proximity.