Beeches, spruce, and oaks all respond as soon as some creature starts nibbling on them. When a caterpillar takes a hearty bite out of a leaf, the tissue around the site of the damage changes. The leaf tissue sends out electrical signals, just as human tissue does when it is hurt. What’s more, when plants are injured or stressed, they produce a chemical—ethylene—that works as an anesthetic on animals.
Plants have all the senses animals have: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. Plants can also tell time, remember, and know their kin. Trees in a forest convey warnings of insect attacks, and also deliver carbon, nitrogen, and water to other trees in need. Plants evolved over 400 million years ago, eons before humans ever walked on the earth. If plants are aware, why couldn’t they feel pain?
Yet finding out that plants respond to pain would have wide-ranging moral implications for human behavior, including land development, farming, vegetarianism, and more. If plants feel pain, then do we owe them moral consideration? We live in a world where we must eat other organisms.
We may never determine with certainty whether plants feel pain or whether their perception of injury is sufficiently like that of animals to be called by the same word. But if we consider plants sensitive and intelligent beings, we are obliged to treat them with some degree of respect. That means protecting their habitats from destruction and avoiding practices such as genetic manipulation, growing plants in monocultures, and training them in pollarding.
Descartes was widely vilified for his justification of practices like animal vivisection. His views on consciousness allowed him to rationalize away the barks and yelps of living dogs as they were cut open for experiments. So, he dismissed their screams and howls as mere reflexes, as meaningless physiological noise. Could it be remotely possible that we are now making the same mistake with plants? If plants are conscious, then, yes, they should feel pain. If you don’t feel pain, you ignore danger and you don’t survive.
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Thorns on a honeylocust deter large animals, such as mastodons, from damaging the tree. Pain is adaptive. Why would a tree defend itself if it didn’t suffer?
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When aphids attack leaves, it elicits an electric signal in plants that goes from leaf to leaf to signal it to start protecting itself. |
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Climate Change is Lengthening Pollen Season |
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For the past few years, I have gone through spring and summer in a perpetual state of being ‘stuffed up’. Out of control sneezing and a constantly runny nose make me go through vast quantities of Kleenex. What I and many others are suffering through is allergy season, and it’s getting worse. More than 50 million Americans suffer from various pollen allergies, according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, and perhaps surprisingly, the numbers might be highest and the symptoms the worst in urban areas.
New research says not only is the amount of pollen growing every allergy season, but the season is actually getting longer and starting earlier. This has been the trend since 1990 and is happening because of something that seems to be dictating a lot of changes to our planet, climate change.
The combination of warming air and higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has caused North American pollen season to start three weeks earlier and to have about 20 percent more pollen. It’s almost like plants are saying ‘well, conditions are favorable so I will put out a lot of pollen to reproduce more.’ They make these decisions to allocate more energy to reproduction. So, they grow larger flowers, which produce more pollen. Plants also tend to shift their flowering to start earlier in the year. The greatest pollen increases come from trees, as opposed to grasses and weeds such as ragweed.
Allergies are not just a case of the sniffles; they can have serious effects on public health, including asthma and other respiratory conditions. Studies show that students do less well in school during peak pollen season. When our lungs and respiratory tract are already inflamed, that tends to make us more vulnerable to other types of respiratory viruses like the common cold. This is an ominous finding in the time of the coronavirus pandemic.
The outlook is not a happy one. As the temperature continues to go up due to human caused climate change, we can expect the situation to get worse. Meanwhile, climate change has taken on personal importance to me, causing misery during peak pollen season.
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People often mistakenly blame the goldenrod flower for allergies. Since its pollen is dispersed by animals its heavy, sticky pollen does not become airborne. Most late summer and fall pollen allergies are probably caused by ragweed.
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The Store Cold Ziti Salad with Tomato and Peppers |
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Ingredients
1 lb ziti pasta
¼ cup milk
½ red onion
2 tomatoes
6 sweet pickles
2 small green peppers
1 large shallot
½ cup sour cream
1 ½ cup mayonnaise
2 packets G. Washington
brown bouillon powder
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon pickle juice
½ tsp black pepper
1 cup fresh dill chopped
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Instructions
Cook ziti according to package directions, rinse in cold water. Place ziti in bowl, add milk and toss. Chop onion, tomatoes, pickles and peppers into ¼ inch cubes. Reserve some of each for garnish. Mince shallot.
Beat sour cream, mayonnaise with bouillon powder and pepper. Pour over ziti. Add shallots, tomatoes, pickles, green pepper, vinegar and pickle juice. Mix well. Garnish with fresh dill and reserved vegetables.
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Thanks for Reading
and Happy Planting!
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Faith
Faith Appelquist
President & Founder
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