"Bose is long dead, but plant physiology has become a well-respected scientific pursuit. There are now plenty of scientists who, over the decades, have given further weight to Bose’s theories that plants may not be as different from animals as previously thought. Elizabeth Haswell, assistant professor of biology at Washington University in Saint Louis, along with colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, recently wrote a review article about mechanosensitive channels in plants for the journal Structure. [..] In it, Haswell writes about how she has been experimenting on Arabidopsis plants to understand plants’ responses to gravity, and touch, and us. This fact alone is, admittedly, of little interest to the average person. But one wonders why Haswell’s rather scholarly article got picked up by press around the world. Why, in March of this year, The New York Times published a piece called “No Face, but Plants Like Life Too?” Why a big science news story last year was a BBC News report titled “Plants can think and remember.” Why, nearly 100 years since the publication of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose’s “Researches on irritability of plants,” plant physiology is news.
"Picture yourself hiking through the woods or walking across a lawn," Haswell told the press. "Now ask yourself: Do the bushes know that someone is brushing past them? Does the grass know that it is being crushed underfoot? Of course, plants don't think thoughts, but they do respond to being touched in a number of ways."[..]The plants are aware. Science says it's so. And if plants are aware, we begin to wonder, as Bose did so long ago, what we're supposed to do about it.
[..] As Bose showed, plants' reactions to unpleasant stimuli is very similar to our own. If we can call this pain, as Bose does, how can we accept the harm we cause when snipping a flower off a bush simply for decoration, or rolling around in the grass to play? Should we start eating only food that we can pluck from a tree without damaging the tree itself, or better still, that falls off the tree of its own accord? Food that is already dead? The whole prospect makes vegetarianism seem barbaric and not much different from meat-eating. But where do you stop? With protozoa? Bacteria?
Maybe we never should have started asking questions about our environment in the first place. But it’s too late now. Our relationship to the natural world is forever fraught. Are we stewards? Intruders? Does it matter? "
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let it always be known that i was who i am
cukursēne (saccharomyces) wrote on November 24th, 2011 at 10:47 pm
haha, veģetārieši, kas neēd gaļu "aiz cieņas pret dzīvību", TAKE THIS!