The More You Know about Plants, the More You Feel a Part of the World | Big Think

The More You Know about Plants, the More You Feel a Part of the World

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Plants are such a familiar part of our landscape that we easily take them for granted. And our proclivity for ascribing human characteristics to non-human things — a helpful way to understand the world — often has us comparing the similarities between plants and animals. Both need water oxygen, and nutrients to grow, for example, and a host of loose metaphors are found: plants are said to be able to see, feel pain, and even speak to one another. But what really distinguishes plants, says career biologist Hope Jahren, is how different they are from human beings. "The more you study plants," she says, "the more different and deep ways you see they are not like us. ... Any human activity you can point to, you will see something very different in plants."

Whether plants are like or unlike humans is more than a point of fact. Because plants are so different than us on a granular level, they are a source of spiritual connection — plants allow us to transcend our worldly existence. The almost religious devotion that writers like Emerson and Thoreau offered plants is deep cultural evidence: what separates plants from us makes them more essential, not less, to how we experience life. And the more we know about the world, the more we feel at home in it.

As an educator, Jahren has seen the transformative effects of plants first-hand. When students work with plants, they are engaging all of their senses, which is known to increase the rate at which new information is retained by the brain. At a time when technical innovations in education are driving students toward the screen — computers, tablets, and smartphones — we shouldn't forget the very real benefits of physically engaging with the world of information.

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HOPE JAHREN:

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist who has been pursuing independent research in paleobiology since 1996, when she completed her PhD at UC Berkeley and began teaching and researching first at the Georgia Institute of Technology and then at Johns Hopkins University. She is the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and is one of four scientists, and the only woman, to have been awarded both of the Young Investigator Medals given in the Earth Sciences. Currently, she is a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where in 2008 she built the Isotope Geobiology Laboratories, with support from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health.

During her career, Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hope Jahren: I think plants present an opportunity for people to look closely at something and get invested in something that's truly very much outside of themselves. Plants are not like us and the more you study plants the more different and deep ways you see that they are not like us. All the important things that we do from how we move around to how we reproduce to how we react to the sun. Any human activity you could point to you/re going to see something very different in plants. And the more you know about how plants function and the more you watch them function and test their functioning the more deeply you understand how different they are. I think that's useful because I think people have a need to transcend themselves. And I know that when I get bogged down in the dysfunctionalities of how people treat each other and conflicts between men and women and money problems and science and all this kind of thing that I can take some comfort and joy in transcending what seemed like very small scale human noise and look at the differences in a life form that's been successfully occupying the planet for 400 million years.

So, quite frankly I get a lot of joy and comfort and happiness from considering these things. I mean I think that's the main reason to do science is that it feeds the soul.....

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