Plants exhibit complex sensory systems: how colonial botany obscured ecological intelligence and what it reveals about non-human agency
Original framing: “The secret sensory life of plants: researchers are discovering how they see, hear, feel – and even remember” — The Conversation - Global
Indigenous traditions worldwide have long recognized plant sentience as part of reciprocal ecological relationships. The Amazonian concept of 'plant teachers' and the Māori principle of 'kaitiakitanga' (guardianship) frame plants as active participants in ecosystems, not passive objects. Western science's 'discovery' of plant sensory abilities reflects a colonial erasure of this knowledge, where Indigenous epistemologies were dismissed as superstition. Reintegrating these perspectives could transform agricultural and conservation practices.
The 'discovery' of plant sensory abilities is not a scientific breakthrough but a reckoning with colonial erasure, where Western science is only now catching up to millennia of Indigenous ecological wisdom.
The narrative's framing obscures the complicity of industrial agriculture and biotechnology in severing these relationships, while reinforcing human exceptionalism by treating plant agency as a novelty rather than a norm. Cross-culturally, plants are kin—whether as 'plant teachers' in the Amazon, sacred entities in Hindu traditions, or guardians in Māori cosmology—yet Western science has historically dismissed these perspectives as unscientific. The solution lies in decolonizing botanical research, integrating Indigenous knowledge into policy, and granting legal personhood to ecosystems to challenge extractive capitalism. This synthesis demands a paradigm shift: from seeing plants as resources to recognizing them as co-creators of life, with humanity as one participant among many in a sentient Earth.