Zoocentrism is this disproportionate interest that humanity has for animals to the detriment of plant life.
If the animal fascinates us so much, it is because it has eyes, legs, and moves like us. He looks much more like our alter ego than a daisy or a fir tree. The famous ancient philosopher Aristotle also saw plants as inanimate beings. A reductive representation that will make its way durably into the beliefs and cumulative knowledge of the Western world.
Even today, in the French language, certain expressions fossilize this historical contempt. When the human vegetates, he is never far from the cerebral inertia from which the living and the rock merge. In the same way, being compared to a green plant is just as reductive. Plants, we find them so banal that we are much less indignant at the chainsaw massacres of which their biodiversity is the victim. Many activists are rightly offended by the threatened disappearance of polar bears, whales, rhinos, elephants or a tiny frog endemic to a swamp coveted by industry. However, few will rip their shirts off in front of the plant drama in these times of crisis.
Human zoocentrism is at the heart of this selective outrage. Here, the bigger and stronger the beast, the more it moves and challenges us. The world has always worshiped the elephant and trampled on the mouse, so my grandfather used to say.
As the Italian veganist Stefano Mancuso reminded us, it is also the same obsessive passion for animal life that explains that in the Bible, the patriarch Noah only opened his ark to animals when a huge cataclysm was playing out that was going to massacre all earthly life. Yet, on an Earth plagued by widespread extermination, if one were to think of saving life, putting seedlings, seeds and seedlings in the boat before dealing with large wildlife would have been the most logical choice. .
Without plants, we can save all the animals on Earth, but they will end up starving.
Animal life depends on chlorophyllous organisms which are the only ones able to manufacture food molecules from solar radiation, water, carbon dioxide and other ingredients found in the biosphere.
Our low regard for flora owes to a long wandering of Western philosophical thought on the subject. Even Theophrastus, considered the father of botany, fell into this reductive vision of flora. This scientist, who for his time had a fine knowledge of the plant world, did not hesitate to present plants as organisms devoid of character and activity. A vision that was in line with that of his master, Aristotle. In his famous Soul treatise, the famous ancient philosopher said that plants were endowed with the simple ability to grow and feed themselves. The animals therefore possessed the sensitivity in addition. At the top of its pyramid, the human remained the only species possessing a soul and a rationality. After all, he was the one doing the rankings.
In the school of Aristotle, plant life was a living scene, a world of insensitivity, absence of emotion and intelligence. Later in his life, Aristotle will adjust his thinking and make the plants, which he said devoid of meaning, pass from the status of inanimate beings to that of living beings carrying a very low level of soul. Fortunately, swimming against the tide of his time, Democritus saw plants as beings that were not so far from humans. He suggested seeing trees as upside-down humans, that is, creatures whose head, represented by the root system, is in the ground, and the body in the air. A very avant-garde look, because today more and more scientists see the root system of plants as being the equivalent of our nervous system.
In the world of plant scientists today, there are also researchers who sail against the consensus to ostensibly defend that plants have their own form of sentience and intelligence. For fifty years, this other way of seeing flora has been carried, among others, by a few headliners. We can cite Francis Hallé in France, Stefano Mancuso in Italy, Karle Niklas in the United States, Frantisek Baluska and Anthony Trewavas in Germany. It develops at high speed and brings results that destabilize the skeptics who still refuse that we can mix vegetation and intelligence in the same sentence.
Plants, which have had close to 500 million years of experimentation before humans came into their existence, have developed a form of intelligence that has nothing to do with ours. According to Mancuso, in addition to possessing equivalents of smell, taste, hearing, touch and sight, plants are endowed with about fifteen other senses whose equivalents are not found in humans. They are able to determine the humidity level in a field, the location of a water source, the atmospheric pressure, to perceive gravity, electromagnetic fields and a very high number of chemical gradients contained in the air. and the ground, etc.
In short, if we were to consider sensitivity today as a major criterion of intelligence, as Aristotle suggested, plants would be far above the animals that we are.
The human fascination for animal life should therefore not cause us to forget that chlorophyllous organisms are the foundation on which the biosphere was built. We must also welcome this very avant-garde initiative on the subject of the World Seed Reserve in Svalbard, Norway. This seed saving center, which started in 2008, is also called “Noah’s ark of plants”. Dug more than 120 m inside a mountain, this grain bank today preserves the genetics of more than a million species and varieties. An idea at odds with the zoocentric project embodied in Noah’s Ark.