My Philodendron’s Favorite Music is Beethoven
Considerations of Plant Sentience in Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33043/q599x7c22Abstract
It is necessary to look at how things we may consider ‘below us’ have sentience, and in turn a developed consciousness, on their own in order to take away the notion that one species is above the other; each one shares the world and influences the development of the other. Through plants, we can further understand our minds and how the environment around us fosters sentience. In this essay I argue that plant life, specifically through examining mushroom forests and extreme reactions from other plant types, contains a level of sentience, consciousness, and intelligence previously ignored. “Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom” written by Anna Tsing develops the basic information about the lives of mushrooms and their interactions with habitats within the essay, while “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness” informs the argument of sentience within beings other than humans. Through looking at studies of plant interactions with each other, their environment, and humans in The Island of Missing Trees’s chapters “Roots,” “Branches,” and “Rings” and in three episodes of the television show “Scavengers Reign,” in addition to scientific research about the subject, I argue that different species of plants are sentient beings and deserve the same respective level of attentiveness. This attentiveness can change how plants are seen and characterized in the everyday, academia, and media.
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References
Calvo, Paco and Natalie Lawrence. Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence. W.W. Norton & Company, March 2013.
Dooren, Thom Van, et al. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities, Duke University Press, vol. 8 issue 1, May 2016, pp. 1-23.
Nani, A., et al. “Sentience With or Without Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, Imprint Academic, January 2021, pp. 60-79.
O’Neill, Stephen. “Arborealities, or Making Trees Matter in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Oxford Academic, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad040.
Raja, Vincent and Miguel Segundo-Ortin. “Plant Sentience: Empirical and Theoretical Issues –
Editorial Introduction.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, Imprint Academic, vol. 28 issue 1-2, March 2021.
Segundo-Ortin, Miguel and Paco Calvo. “Consciousness and cognition in plants.” WIREs Cognitive Science, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, vol. 13 issue 2, September 2021.
Shafak, Elif. The Island of Missing Trees. Penguin Books Ltd., August 2021. Ocean PDF. https://oceanofpdf.com/genres/historical/pdf-epub-the-island-of-missing-trees-download-24876839098/. PDF download.
Tsing, Anna. “Arts of Inclusion, or, How to Love a Mushroom.” Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinction, edited by Monique Rooney, Australian Humanities Review, May 2011.
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