🍄 >2000 new species described in 2017 🍄 90% of plant species estimated to have mycorrhizal root associations 🍄 Only 56 species have @IUCN conservation status evaluated
Children who play on playgrounds that incorporate natural elements like logs and flowers tend to be more active than those who play on traditional playgrounds with metal and brightly colored equipment, according to a recent UT study.
Plants in the workspace can have a remarkable impact on employee well-being, both from the biological impact of their presence and the psychological benefit being involved in decision making can have.
Biophilia - "Literally meaning ‘a love of life or living things’, it is a hypothesis that humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis
Psychology and the Ecological Crisis - talk by Brigitte Egger, ecologist (Dr.sc.nat.ETH):
Facing the ecological crisis, radical change is crucial. Hence we must put the psyche at centre stage––for that the outer ecological crisis has its roots and solutions in the way we think and act, that is, the inner human psyche. Join us for this unique event to explore the science of psychecology, an attempt to adapt the knowledge of the mind to the most pressing problem of today.
Facilitated by Brigitte Egger, ecologist (Dr.sc.nat.ETH) and a Jungian training and supervising analyst at ISAP, with a private practice in Zürich. Brigitte explores the psychic and symbolic dimensions of collective issues and works at introducing this dimension into practical environment protection, thus building up the field of psychecology. She is interested in creativity at large and in lively ways to communicate depth psychological insights.
Like ontological plurality, the dispersal of intelligence into a multiplicity of minds, distributed across the sentient extension of plants, is not an assured escape route from metaphysical and capitalist domination. In our “knowledge economies,” intelligence is the commodity that produces and reproduces itself with the excess of surplus-value, over and above what is strictly required for its self-reproduction. Why would plant intelligence be any different?
Capitalism and metaphysics coax knowledges out, extract, attribute value to, and traffic in them. The surplus over the knowing and the known is the capacity to know, a potentiality prior to its actualization. Doesn’t the surge of interest in plant intelligence zero in (and capitalize) on this capacity of plants, which it then converts into the principles of vegetal robotics, environment sensing, or biochemical signaling? There is nothing inherently wrong with learning these things from plants in a cross-species or cross-kingdoms pedagogy that is not limited to capitalism.
The troublesome bit is the form such learning and its objective outcomes assume: a commodity. Of course, nothing and no one is ensured against the far-reaching power of commodification, insinuating itself into the previously noneconomic domains of life (in the discourse of economics: “externalities”). If, however, plant intelligence is also under the spell of the commodity form, then we cannot assert that it maintains and fosters an innately redemptive potential in the midst of the current capitalist-metaphysical onslaught.
It is for this reason that I much prefer plant-thinking, an expression I coined with the inspiration of Plotinus’s phutiké noesis (“vegetal mind”), to plant intelligence. In a nutshell, intelligence is instrumental; thinking is not. Intelligence is meant to solve problems and achieve determinate goals; thinking problematizes things and makes them indeterminate. Intelligence is the triumphant, algorithmically verifiable application of the mind to matter (or to the environment), forced to do the mind’s bidding. Thinking happens when the instrumental approach fails; it is a positive sign of failure, of disquiet, of an unending albeit finite search.
Abstract: The term planetary health, popularized in the 1980s and 1990s, was born out of necessity; although the term was used by many diverse groups, it was consistently used to underscore that human health is coupled to the health of natural systems within the Earth’s biosphere. The interrelated challenges of climate change, massive biodiversity losses, environmental degradation, grotesque socioeconomic inequalities, conflicts, and a crisis of non-communicable diseases are, mildly stated, daunting. Despite ‘doomsday’ scenarios, there is plenty of room for hope and optimism in planetary health. All over planet Earth, humans are making efforts at the macro, meso and micro scales to promote the health of civilization with the ingredients of hope—agency and pathway thinking; we propose that planetary health requires a greater commitment to understanding hope at the personal and collective levels. Prioritizing hope as an asset in planetary health necessitates deeper knowledge and discourse concerning the barriers to hope and the ways in which hope and the utopian impulse are corrupted; in particular, it requires examining the ways in which hope is leveraged by advantaged groups and political actors to maintain the status quo, or even promote retrograde visions completely at odds with planetary health. Viewing the Earth as a superorganism, with humans as the collective ‘nervous system’, may help with an understanding of the ways in which experience and emotions lead to behavioral responses that may, or may not be, in the best interest of planetary health. We argue that the success of planetary health solutions is predicated on a more sophisticated understanding of the psychology of prevention and intervention at all scales.
My number 1 recommendation for improved mental health and ecologically & ethically sound behaviour, is "surround yourself with lifeforms that exist at radically different timescales". Plants & Animals perceive time very differently and act differently. It is worth listening deeply.
