15 «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. Stefano Mancuso (Catanzaro, 1965), world-renowned scientist and professor at the University of Florence, actually directs the LINV - International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology. Founding member of the International Society for Plant Signaling & Behavior, he is full professor at the Georgofili Academy. In 2010 he was the first Italian scientist to be invited as a speaker in a TEDGlobal: the video of the conference, held in Oxford, has been viewed 1.3 million times on the TED website. In 2012 the Italian newspaper La Repubblica indicated him among the 20 Italians destined to change our lives, and in 2013 the New Yorker included him in the World Changers ranking. With his university start-up PNAT he patented Jellyfish Barge, the floating module for growing vegetables and flowers completely autonomous from the point of view of soil, water and energy, which won the International Award for innovative ideas and technologies for the agribusiness of UNIDO - United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Since 2016 he has been advisor to the Chilean government on innovation issues. With Deproducer he curated the theatrical/musical show Botanica. In 2013 he published the award-winning bestseller Brilliant Green. In 2018, his book Plant Revolution won the Galileo Award, the most prestigious prize for scientific non-fiction. The Incredible Journey of Plants, The Nation of Plants (winner of the Earth Prize in 2019) and The Plan(t) of the World have been translated into 27 languages.
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