14 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 state 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.
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