Western science dismissed plant communication by measuring plants against animal capacities

Evidence

In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other. They’d stand in their own council and craft a plan. But scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed. Science pretends to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak. The potentials for plants were seen purely through the lens of animal capacity. Until quite recently no one seriously explored the possibility that plants might “speak” to one another. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 76

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the polyad’s braiding of Indigenous knowledge with Western botany and to listening/observation-as-method; also resonates with the Soundscape course’s attention to who counts as a voice. — connects to: Modern Western science reduces all quality to measurable quantity; Western botany frames plants as objects while Indigenous science treats them as subjects — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 150; Nature’s agency need not be expressed through reason and speech — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 515 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Identifies the epistemic bias of measuring all capacities against an animal baseline — a core concept for the reader’s critique of Western knowledge systems.

Broader Connections

• Western botany frames plants as objects while Indigenous science treats them as subjects #expands (0.85) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 150
• Plants communicate knowledge through embodied action rather than verbal language #qualifies (0.82) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 450
• Nature’s agency need not be expressed through reason and speech #qualifies (0.80) — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 515
• Modern Western science reduces all quality to measurable quantity #expands (0.78)
• Plants exchange warnings through distributed chemical signals without any central brain #exemplifies (0.75) — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 162