Arquivo da tag: Veganismo

Botanist Stefano Mancuso: ‘You can anaesthetise all plants. This is extremely fascinating’ (The Guardian)

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theguardian.com

An advocate of plant intelligence, the Italian author discusses the complex ways in which plants communicate, whether they are conscious, and what his findings mean for vegans

Killian Fox

April 15, 2023

Born in Calabria in 1965, Stefano Mancuso is a pioneer in the plant neurobiology movement, which seeks to understand “how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion”. Michael Pollan in the New Yorker described him as “the poet-philosopher of the movement, determined to win for plants the recognition they deserve”. Mancuso teaches at the University of Florence, his alma mater, where he runs the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology. He has written five bestselling books on plants.

What’s at the root of your love of plants?
I began to be interested in plants at university. One of my tasks during my doctorate was to understand how a root growing in the soil was able to move around an obstacle. My idea was to film this movement, but I saw something different: the root was changing direction well before touching the obstacle. It was able to sense the obstacle and to find a more convenient direction. That was my first eureka moment, where I started to imagine that plants were intelligent organisms.

You refer to your field as plant neurobiology. Is this a provocation?
At the beginning, it was not at all. I started to think that almost all the claims I was hearing about the brain were valid also in plants. The neuron is not a miracle cell, it’s a normal cell that is able to produce an electrical signal. In plants, almost every cell is able to do that. The main difference between animals and plants, in my opinion, is that animals concentrate specific functions inside organs. In the case of plants, they diffuse everything through the whole body, including intelligence. So it was not a provocation at the beginning, but there was a big resistance among my colleagues to use this kind of terminology, and so after it became a provocation.

What were you hoping to achieve with your new book, Tree Stories?
What I’d like to popularise is, first, the many abilities of plants that we normally are unable to feel and understand, because they are so different from us. Second, when you tell a story about life on this planet, not talking about plants, which make up 87% of life, is a nonsense.

You argue passionately in favour of filling cities with trees. Why is this so important?
We are producing 75% of our CO₂ in cities, and the best way to remove that CO₂ is by using trees. The closer the tree is to the source of carbon emissions, the better they are at absorbing it. According to our studies, we could put around 200bn trees in our urban areas. To do that, we really need to imagine a new kind of city, completely covered by plants, without any border between nature and city.

You have a fascinating chapter about a tree stump being kept alive for decades by its neighbouring trees. What can humans learn from tree communities?
Plants are so incredibly cooperative with one another because cooperation is the most efficient way to grant the survival of species. Not understanding the strength of the community is one of [humanity’s] main errors. There was a very clever evolutionary biologist at the beginning of the last century, Peter Kropotkin, who said that when there are fewer resources, and the environment is changing, then cooperation is vastly more efficient [than competition]. This is an important teaching for us today, because we are entering a period of reduction of resources and the environment is changing because of global warming.

To what degree can plants communicate with one another? If you have a spectrum with rocks at one end and humans at the other, where do plants sit?
I would say very close to humans. Communication means you are able to emit a message and there is something able to receive it, and in this sense plants are great communicators. If you are unable to move, if you are rooted, it’s of paramount importance for you to communicate a lot. We experienced this during lockdown, when we were stuck at home and there was an incredible increase in traffic on the internet. Plants are obliged to communicate a lot, and they use different systems. The most important is through volatiles, or chemicals that are emitted in the atmosphere and received by other plants. It’s an extremely sophisticated form of communication, a kind of vocabulary. Every single molecule means something, and they mix very different molecules to send a specific message.

The idea that plants are intelligent is controversial enough, but you’ve gone one step further by claiming that plants are to some degree conscious…
It’s incredibly difficult to talk about consciousness, first because we actually don’t know what consciousness is, even in our case. But there is an approach to talking about it as a real biological feature: consciousness is something that we all have, except when we are sleeping very deeply or when we are under anaesthesia. My approach to studying consciousness in plants was similar. I started by seeing if they were sensitive to anaesthetics and found that you can anaesthetise all plants by using the same anaesthetics that work in humans. This is extremely fascinating. We were thinking that consciousness was something related to the brain, but I think that both consciousness and intelligence are more embodied, relating to the entire body.

So you can put a plant to sleep?
We are working to see if it’s possible to say that. It’s an incredibly difficult task, but we think that, before the end of this year, we will be able to demonstrate it.

As we learn more about the sophistication and sensitivity of plants, should we think twice about eating them?
It’s an interesting question. Many vegan people have written to me asking this. First, I think it’s ethical to eat plants because we are animals, and as animals we can only survive by eating other living organisms – this is a law that we cannot break. Second, it’s much more ethical to eat a plant than, for example, beef, because to produce a kilo of beef, you need to kill one tonne of plants, so it’s much better to eat directly a kilo of plants. The third point is that it’s very difficult for us to imagine being a plant, because for us being eaten is an ancestral nightmare, whereas plants evolved to be eaten, it’s part of the cycle. A fruit is an organ that is produced to be eaten by an animal.

So fruit is probably the most ethical thing you can eat, more so than, say, kale?
Maybe fruit is the most ethical, but you need to defecate on the ground afterwards, because otherwise you are breaking the cycle.

Plant-based diets crucial to saving global wildlife, says report (The Guardian)

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theguardian.com

Damian Carrington, Wed 3 Feb 2021 14.30 GMT Last modified on Thu 4 Feb 2021 05.08 GMT

More than 80% of global farmland is used to raise animals, which provide only 18% of calories eaten. Photograph: Alamy

The global food system is the biggest driver of destruction of the natural world, and a shift to predominantly plant-based diets is crucial in halting the damage, according to a report.

Agriculture is the main threat to 86% of the 28,000 species known to be at risk of extinction, the report by the Chatham House thinktank said. Without change, the loss of biodiversity will continue to accelerate and threaten the world’s ability to sustain humanity, it said.

The root cause is a vicious circle of cheap food, the report said, where low costs drive bigger demand for food and more waste, with more competition then driving costs even lower through more clearing of natural land and use of polluting fertilisers and pesticides.

The report, supported by the UN environment programme (Unep), focused on three solutions. First is a shift to plant-based diets because cattle, sheep and other livestock have the biggest impact on the environment.

More than 80% of global farmland is used to raise animals, which provide only 18% of calories eaten. Reversing the rising trend of meat consumption removes the pressure to clear new land and further damage wildlife. It also frees up existing land for the second solution, restoring native ecosystems to increase biodiversity.

The availability of land also underpins the third solution, the report said, which is farming in a less intensive and damaging way but accepting lower yields. Organic yields are on average about 75% of those of conventional intensive farming, it said.

Fixing the global food system would also tackle the climate crisis, the report said. The food system causes about 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions, with more than half coming from animals. Changes to food production could also tackle the ill health suffered by 3 billion people, who either have too little to eat or are overweight or obese, and which costs trillions of dollars a year in healthcare.

“Politicians are still saying ‘my job is to make food cheaper for you’, no matter how toxic it is from a planetary or human health perspective,” said Prof Tim Benton, at Chatham House. “We must stop arguing that we have to subsidise the food system in the name of the poor and instead deal with the poor by bringing them out of poverty.”

Benton said the impact of the food system on climate and health was becoming widely accepted but that biodiversity was too often seen as a “nice to have”.

Susan Gardner, director of Unep’s ecosystems division, said the current food system was a “double-edged sword” providing cheap food but failing to take into account the hidden costs to our health and to the natural world. “Reforming the way we produce and consume food is an urgent priority,” she said.

Jane Goodall, the renowned conservationist, said the intensive farming of billions of animals seriously damaged the environment and inhumane crowded conditions risked new pandemic diseases crossing into people: “It should be phased out as soon as possible.”

On Tuesday, a landmark review by Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta concluded the world was being put at extreme risk by the failure of economics to take account of the rapid depletion of biodiversity.

The Chatham House report said the world had lost half its natural ecosystems and that the average population size of wild animals had fallen by 68% since 1970. In contrast, farmed animals, mainly cows and pigs, now account for 60% of all mammals by weight, with humans making up 36% and animals just 4%.

In reforming the global food system, “the convergence of global food consumption around predominantly plant-based diets is the most crucial element”, the report said. For example, it said, a switch from beef to beans by the US population would free up fields equivalent to 42% of US cropland for other uses such as rewilding or more nature-friendly farming.

In another example, the report said if the permanent pasture around the world that was once forest was returned to its native state, it would store 72bn tonnes of carbon – roughly equivalent to seven years of global emissions from fossil fuels. Benton said the report was not advocating that all people should become vegan, but should follow healthy diets that are as a result much lower in meat.

The year ahead offers a potentially unique opportunity to redesign the global food system, the Benton said, with major UN summits on biodiversity and climate, as well as the world’s first UN Food Systems Summit and an international Nutrition for Growth summit. The large sums being spent by governments as nations recover from the Covid-19 pandemic also provide opportunities for “policymaking that affords equal priority to public and planetary health”, the report said.

Philip Lymbery, at Compassion in World Farming, said: “The future of farming must be nature-friendly and regenerative, and our diets must become more plant-based, healthy and sustainable. Without ending factory farming, we are in danger of having no future at all.”