Plant Rights, Screaming Vegetation, and a "Biocentric" Worldview

Several years ago now, I was appearing on a national network interview program and found myself discussing capital punishment with a woman who, during a commercial break, indicated that she had recently seen a combine going through a wheat field. She was horrified. The wheat was being cut down by thousands of stalks a second. She felt grief for the wheat, she revealed.

No one person on the panel knew what to do with that off-hand statement. I think it is safe to say that none of us had ever grieved over the intentional harvesting of vegetation.

Now, ethicist Wesley J. Smith indicates that an ethics panel in Switzerland has decided that "the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong." Writing in the current edition of The Weekly Standard, Smith explains that the idea of "plant rights" is now a matter of serious consideration among the Swiss.

The background to the current panel is a constitutional clause adopted years ago in Switzerland that demands Swiss citizens to recognize "the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." Until just recently, no one seems to have expected that this would lead to a plants rights movement.

As Smith explains, the Swiss panel came up with a radical conclusion based in a radical worldview:

A "clear majority" of the panel adopted what it called a "biocentric" moral view, meaning that "living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive." Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim "absolute ownership" over plants and, moreover, that "individual plants have an inherent worth." This means that "we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily."

Smith rightly points to this kind of logic as "a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns."

The very idea of "plants rights" indicates a loss of cultural sanity. Until now, this cultural confusion has been most evident in the animal rights movement -- a movement that presents some legitimate ethical concerns but pushes its ideology beyond sanity. The failure to distinguish between human beings and the larger animal world is a hallmark of a post-Christian culture. The extension of this ideology to vegetation is a frightening sign of mass delusion.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

So, now Swiss ethicists are working up protocols on "plant dignity" and determining scenarios that might qualify as a violation of "plant rights." The Swiss panel's report, "The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants," is a wake-up call. The adoption of a "biocentric" worldview is a leap into irrationality. Good arguments can be made for responsible agricultural practices that honor God by demonstrating care for creation. But the ideology of "plant rights" and the suggestion of something like an inherent "right to life" for vegetation is beyond all reason.

The most tragic dimension of all this is that a culture increasingly ready to euthanize the old, infanticize the young, and adamant about a "right" to abort unborn human beings, will now contend for the inherent dignity of plants. Can any culture recover from this?

From wiki:

“The notion that plants are capable of feeling emotions was first recorded in 1848, when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German professor, suggested the idea in his book Nanna. He believed that plants are capable of emotions, just like humans or animals, and that one could promote healthy growth by showering plants with talk, attention, and affection.[1]

One of the first to research the concept was the Indian scientist Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, who began to conduct experiments on plants in the year 1900. He found that every plant and every part of a plant appeared to have a sensitive nervous system and responded to shock by a spasm just as an animal muscle does. One visitor to his laboratory, the vegetarian playwright George Bernard Shaw, was intensely disturbed upon witnessing a demonstration in which a cabbage had violent convulsions as it boiled to death.[citation needed] Bose found that the effect of manures, drugs, and poisons could be determined within minutes, providing plant control with a new precision. In addition, Bose found that plants grew more quickly amidst pleasant music and more slowly amidst loud noise or harsh sounds. He also claimed that plants can “feel pain, understand affection etc.,” from the analysis of the nature of variation of the cell membrane potential of plants, under different circumstances. According to him, a plant treated with care and affection gives out a different vibration compared to a plant subjected to torture. In conclusion, he said: “Do not these records tell us of some property of matter common and persistent? That there is no abrupt break, but a uniform and continuous march of law?”[citation needed]
Bose in his laboratory
Bose in his laboratory

Bose’s experiments stopped at this conclusion, but Cleve Backster, an American scientist, conducted research that led him to believe that plants can communicate with other lifeforms. Backster’s interest in the subject began in February 1966, when Backster wondered if he could measure the rate at which water rises from a philodendron’s root area into its leaves. Because a polygraph or ‘lie detector’ can measure electrical resistance, and water would alter the resistance of the leaf, he decided that this was the correct instrument to use. After attaching a polygraph to one of the plant’s leaves, Backster claimed that, to his immense surprise, “the tracing began to show a pattern typical of the response you get when you subject a human to emotional stimulation of short duration”.

Led by curiosity, Backster went in search of other reactions, and decided to burn a leaf of the plant. Apparently, while he was musing upon this, there was a dramatic upward sweep in the tracing pattern. He had not moved or even touched the plant. Backster was certain that he had somehow inspired fear in the plant with his decision to burn it. He came to the resolution that, if he was correct, plants can not only feel things, but can also, in effect, read people’s minds.

In the United Kingdom, the Bognor Regis Electronic Development Corporation of Sussex conducted a similar experiment. The Corporation found that their secretaries were much too busy to care for their plants, and, following the death of several of the plants through lack of water, they attached some electrodes to the plant. They reportedly discovered that the plants emitted sounds that came out through loudspeakers as mournful cries when they were in need of watering.

In 1975, three scientists (K.A. Horowitz, D.C. Lewis, and E.L. Gasteiger) published an article in Science with their results when repeating Backster’s investigation of plant response to the killing of brine shrimp in boiling water. In this investigation, the researchers took into consideration control factors such as grounding the plants to reduce electrical interference and rinsing the plants to remove dust particles. Three of five pipettes contained brine shrimp while the remaining two only had water. These acted as a control because the pipettes were delivered to the boiling water at random. In addition, this investigation used a total of 60 brine shrimp deliveries to boiling water while Backster’s investigation had 13. While this experiment did show a few positive correlations, they did not occur at a rate great enough to be considered statistically viable. These experimental conditions were more rigorous from a traditional scientific paradigm and did not produce the same results, however Backster himself criticized them for misunderstanding certain fundamentals of primary perception (e.g. the time spent rinsing the plants affected their relationship to the experimenters).

More recently, the television show MythBusters performed an experiment aiming to either verify or disprove the concept. The tests were done by connecting plants to a polygraph’s galvanometer, and then employing both actual and imagined harm upon the plants, or upon others in the plant’s vicinity. The galvanometer showed some readings which surprised the researchers initially (showing some kind of reaction about one third of the time). Later experiments, which used an EEG for greater accuracy, failed to detect anything unusual. When the presenters used a machine that dropped eggs randomly into boiling water, the plant had no reaction whatsoever. The show concluded that the theory was bogus.”

Made for a great Stevie Wonder album though.

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