Herein is the subtle wisdom of life:
The soft and weak overcomes the hard and strong.
- Tao Teh Ching, by Lao Tzu
There has been a wonderful program on Sunday nights on ABC Television in Australia called How to Grow a Planet, by BBC Scotland. Superficially it’s about plants and their evolution over millions of years, but embedded in it is a subversive theme about the relationship of humans to the rest of the world.
It goes something like this: “Plants deserve just recognition for their enormous impact on life on Earth. They have been at the centre of great evolutionary changes, including the evolution of mammals and our own species.”
One of the program’s amazing insights is that plants developed a way to tell animals when their fruit was ready to be consumed – fruit turned red when the seeds inside it were mature for dispersal. Scientists believe that primates evolved an ability to see colour as a result, giving them an advantage as ripe fruit also had more sugar and so more energy.
The insight is that humans have co-evolved with plants, and where we seem to control them the reality is more complex. People have spread certain plants across the globe – cereals like wheat and rye, fruit like bananas and tomatoes, flowers like roses – and this can be seen as an evolutionary triumph of those species. They have particular qualities we like and so we propagate and develop them.
It’s quite humbling to think that not only are we reliant on plants for the oxygen they breathe into the atmosphere and the nutrition and energy we get from eating them, but our bodies and minds and indeed whole civilisations have been shaped by them. The development of agriculture, namely the cultivation of wheat in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, was the crucial developmental step towards Western civilisation and what we have now.
Plants are intelligent. How to Grow a Planet has shown that they sense and communicate among themselves. I think this has radical implications. The 18th century Enlightenment enthroned Man as the centre and pinnacle of value, but recently there has been a growing realisation of the interconnectedness of all life. This entails a shift towards a moral system that does not privilege humans, but honours all species as part of a great web of life. Such an ecological approach has been embedded for thousands of years in the culture and spirituality of Indigenous people.
I believe that this shift can only come to full fruition experientially in people’s lives, not purely at an intellectual level. In Melbourne in the past decade there has been a flourishing of farmers’ markets, community gardens and organic food box schemes. People want a greater connection to their food and how and where it is grown, as well as to those who grow it. This is a reconnection, a re-establishment of meaning that was taken away by supermarkets and suburbia. In more mature phases, perhaps decades away, conscious ritual and a symbolic life emerge to express a new way of being.
In a way, cultural changes are another triumph for plants. Compared to the prevailing human spirit, with its emphasis on power and control, theirs is a soft and quiet energy. Some writers, aware of changes in the human psyche, have noted a movement towards a more nuanced, “feminine” view of life. David Tacey, in Edge of the Sacred (Daimon Verlag, 2009), describes the emerging paradigm as being “closer to nature and the elemental world, closer to the soul and the feminine, to intuition and feeling, to the values of the earth and the body”.
In the process of co-evolution, survival is at stake: that of plants and humans. As human population grows and we take ever more for our needs, as we pave over the soil for our ever-expanding cities, we are threatening the survival of other species as well as undermining our own long-term future. I believe that plants, and the earth in general, recognise this. If we can accept there is an intelligence at work in nature that is fundamentally kin to our own, then we need to listen to it and learn from it. If we share a common soul, then an injury to one is an injury to all.
I think people who garden are in a privileged position. Gardening is a ritual with profound meaning, whether a person recognises it or not. On one level a garden is there for beauty, for neatness and tidiness, for the vegetables or fruit trees we grow, for the relaxation it gives us. At a deeper level we are reproducing cycles of life in a dance with the plant world; plants and the earth are making us as much as we are making them.
