The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0907791875 ISBN 13: 9780907791874

Publisher: Synergetic Press, 2021

Synopsis

Explorations of plant consciousness and human interactions with the natural world.

From apples to ayahuasca, coffee to kurrajong, passionflower to peyote, plants are conscious beings. How they interact with each other, with  humanity and with the world at large has long been studied by researchers, scientists and spiritual teachers and seekers. The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence brings together works from all these disciplines and more in a collection of essays that highlights what we know and what we intuit about botanical life.

The Mind of Plants, featuring a foreword by Dennis McKenna, is a collection of short essays, narratives and poetry on plants and their interaction with humans. Contributors include Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the New York Times’ best seller Braiding Sweetgrass,  Jeremy Narby, John Kinsella, Luis Eduardo Luna, Megan Kaminski and dozens more. The book’s editors, John C. Ryan, Patrícia Vieira and Monica Gagliano – each of whom also contributed works to the collection – weave together essays, personal reflections and poems paired with intricate illustrations by José María Pout.

Recent scientific research in the field of plant cognition highlights the capacity of botanical life to discern between options and learn from prior experiences or, in other words, to think. The Mind of Plants includes texts that interpret this concept broadly. As Mckenna writes in his foreword, “What the reader will find here, expressed in poetry and prose, are stories that are infused with cherished memories and inspired celebrations of unique relationships with a group of organisms that are alien and unlike us in every way, yet touch human lives in myriad ways.”

About this title

About the Authors

John Charles Ryan is Adjunct Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia, and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia. His interests include Aboriginal Australian and Southeast Asian literature, ecocriticism, ecopoetics, critical plant studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change (2022, Brill) and coauthor of Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2021, Routledge). He has recently served as a Writer-in-Residence at Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia.

Patrícia Vieira is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, at Georgetown University. Her fields of expertise are Latin American and Iberian Literatures and Cultures, Portuguese and Brazilian Cinema, Utopian Studies and the Environmental Humanities. Her most recent monograph is States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture (SUNY UP, 20018) and her most recent co-edited book is Portuguese Literature and the Environment (Lexington, 2019). She has published numerous articles in her fields of expertize, as well as op-eds in The New York Times, the LA Review of Books and The European, among others.

Monica Gagliano is a Research Associate Professor in evolutionary ecology. A former fellow of the Australian Research Council, she is Research Associate Professor (adjunct) at the University of Western Australia and a Member of the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of Sydney. She is currently based at Southern Cross University where she directs the BI Lab–Biological Intelligence Lab as part of the Diverse Intelligences Initiative of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Her work has extended the concept of cognition (including perception, learning processes, memory) in plants. Her latest book is Thus Spoke the Plant (North Atlantic Books, 2018).

Edition details

• Publisher: Synergetic Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0907791875
• ISBN 13: 9780907791874
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528
• Editor: Ryan John C., Vieira Patrícia, Gagliano Monica