“They Have a Lot to Say:” Enchantment and Ethics in Plant-Human Communication

What are we to make of accounts of paranormal communication between human beings and plants? In this essay, I read firsthand accounts of such communications, which are common, even in cultural contexts that have no traditional framework to explain or account for them. The content of these accounts is diverse but consistent: most often, these experiences (re)establish plants as subjects of moral status and human ethical concern. 

I use the word “paranormal” to describe a variety of firsthand accounts of plant-human communication that seem to defy scientific models not only of plant cognition, but also of human sensory perception. In this case, I am interested in accounts of plant-human communication that occur outside of a traditional framework that allows for such communication, like an Indigenous, folk, or religious cultural background. In this sense, what makes an account of plant-human communication “paranormal” is not the content of the experience, but the status (or lack thereof) of the experience in the culture of the experiencer. 

To provide an example: in his 2010 book Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, Bron Taylor recorded several interviews with frontline environmental activists whose firsthand experience with the intelligence of plants has motivated their commitments to environmental activism. The following account came a group of activists defending a redwood forest in Northern California: 

“…suddenly, this cold, icy breeze came through the camp, washed over our knees, and we heard a long rolling moan, and every one stopped talking— then afterward— we said—'did you hear that? That was no breeze.’ I didn’t try to give it a name. There’s lot of old energies, old pain, there, that I can’t name. Their memory is fucking old. And lots of the spirits that have dwelled there a long time— they have a lot to say.” (96)

In his 2013 book Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Michael Marder notes that the modern dismissal of spirit from the physical world and the standard scientific treatment of plants “have a common root in the reductively rationalized approach to reality, which has culminated in what Max Weber has called the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ where the unquestioned priority of science goes hand in hand with a delegitimization of empirically unverifiable notions.” (18) “Unverifiable” as they may be, accounts of paranormal communication with plants suggest a radical contiguity between enchantment—to borrow Weber’s term—and ethics.