Beyond Intelligence: Life in a Relational World
Jon McAlice and Craig Holdrege
From In Context #53 (Spring, 2025) | View Article as PDF
This article grew out of our ongoing project concerned with the question of “intelligence in nature.” It has become ever more apparent to us that before any potentially meaningful concept of “intelligence” in plants and animals can be formed, we need to be clear about the fundamental habits of thought and assumptions that underlie how the idea of intelligence is framed in modern biology and, importantly, develop understanding that does justice to the relational nature of life. Our work in these two directions provides the focus of this article.
Imagine that walking on a winter afternoon you catch sight of an icicle. It is hanging from a small ledge on a bare face of rock jutting out of the hillside in the forest. The icicle is long and slender, and sparkles in the sunlight. The way it sparkles lets it stand out from its surroundings. Yet it is the surroundings that allow it to stand out the way it does. The specificity of its appearance is heightened by its being where it is, when it is, and by your coming upon it in that place and in that moment. As you draw closer, you notice things about the icicle and its immediate surroundings you had not noticed before. There is a dark sheet of vertical ice on the rock wall just to the right of the icicle and a pool of ice below and to the left. The small jutting ledge where the water left the face of the rock is where the icicle had formed. The more closely you examine the icicle, the less mindful you become of its surroundings. The array of impressions from which it stood out and came to your attention now recedes into the background. The icicle becomes the focus of your attention. As you become increasingly caught up in its details and the questions they awaken, you lose track of the context within which it existed. The icicle becomes an isolated phenomenon.
The isolating tendency of the inquiring mind poses a constant challenge for our attempts to come to a living understanding of the natural world. Once we have isolated something we find it difficult to grasp it as an integral part of larger whole. We find that we are able to see the part in the whole but no longer experience a whole in the part. In this process, it is easy to forget that not only is our awareness of the part preceded by our experience of a whole, but also that our awareness of the part tends to blind us to the presence of the whole. We have developed a remarkable acuity for delving into the parts. Often the wholeness within which they become intelligible remains elusive.
When we turn our attention to plants, we can sense how the question of context — the wholeness in which we encounter plants — takes on a greater significance. A plant is rooted in the earth and as the roots extend into the soil the plant grows together with the earth. The organs of the above ground plant extend upwards into the light, the air, the warmth. The plant is surrounded by other plants and visited by insects, birds, and other animals. It is difficult to fix a clear boundary between any living organism and its environment. The recognition of this existential unity between organism and environment led physiologist J.S. Haldane to articulate what we might consider a fundamental law for an understanding of the living:
The individual organism, like the individual cell in a complex organism, belongs to a wider organic whole, apart from which much of its life is unintelligible. (Haldane 1923, p. 94)
As the sunlit rock wall is for the icicle, let this insight be the background against which we consider the following.
On the Nature of Boundaries
In a well-known paper published in 1974, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel observed that “philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different” (Nagel 1974, p. 435). This appears to hold true also for the community of botanists, ecologists, and writers working to popularize an understanding of plants that ascribes to them qualities of intelligence and sentience comparable to, although different from, our own. There is something incomprehensible about plants. The more you come to know them, the more intriguing this becomes. Although this is also true of animals, when an animal becomes aware of us, they respond to our presence in ways we perceive. The reciprocity of perception, awareness, and response experienced with animals gives us a felt closeness with them that does not come naturally with plants. I am aware that the squirrel sitting on the branch of the oak tree is watching me. What the oak is doing is a mystery.
Plants are mysterious, in a gentle sort of way. They invite us to ponder qualities of being that appear resonant with the highest aspirations of humanity: beauty, innocence, generosity. In pondering the nature of human sight, the German poet and scientist J.W. von Goethe intuited that “if the eye were not sunlike, how could we perceive the sun?” (Goethe 1995 p.164). Similarly, if something in us were not plant-like, we would never be able to know the nature of plants.
Plants exist in a living relatedness with what we commonly term their environments. The intimate, interwoven nature of these relations challenges our notions of what we usually think of as boundaries. When we approach plants with a thinking schooled on a concept of boundaries that separate one thing from another, it blinds us to the essential nature of the way plants are in the world. In his Life of Plants, philosopher Emanuele Coccia writes “[p]lant life is life as complete exposure, in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment” (Coccia 2019, p. 5). Is it possible to develop a science of plant life that takes the recognition of the innate immediacy of these relationships as its starting point?).
Careful consideration of the nature of the boundaries apparent in the plant world shows them to be distinctly different from those we know of from the world of solid things. The scent of a valerian plant extends far beyond the plant’s visual, tactile boundaries. As a plant takes root in the soil, the soil adjacent to the root is transformed. Root and soil form a unity which becomes to a certain degree inseparable as long as the plant is alive. The plant “reaches out” into the soil, and where root and soil merge a new life context appears rich with fungal, bacterial, and other microbial life. The boundaries apparent in the plant world display nothing that implies a separation of one thing from another. Instead, in what we can think of as boundaries particular to living plants, we invariably encounter heightened activity, an increased abundance of life. Understanding plants from the plant’s perspective requires a transformation of our notion of boundary. Rather than seeing them as points or planes of separation, we will have to learn to see them as fields of reciprocal activity, as the dynamic interweaving of various expressions of life. From this perspective what we conceive of as a boundary in the context of the living world shows itself to be a specific expression of connectedness.
The seeming lack of discernment for the nature of such differences in the current discussions concerning plant intelligence have caused us concern. Ascribing aspects of animal or even human sentience to plants leads us to be less attentive to the specific “intelligence” or wisdom apparent in plant existence. The exercise of human intellectual intelligence rests on the inner experience of being separate from the world we perceive. Nothing in what we observe in plant life suggests that we would be justified in ascribing a similar “experience” of separateness to plants. In fact, their way of being in the world reflects qualities of connectedness that humans strive to achieve, albeit in our specifically human ways. Although we are completely in agreement with the researchers’ intention of elevating our opinion of plants, we question whether the correct approach is to bring them down to our level.
Limits of Definition
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a plant is “a living thing that grows in the earth, in water, or on other plants, usually has a stem, leaves, roots, and flowers, and produces seeds.” Britannica Online is somewhat more comprehensive:
Any multicellular eukaryotic life-form characterized by (1) photosynthetic nutrition (a characteristic possessed by all plants except some parasitic plants and underground orchids), in which chemical energy is produced from water, minerals, and carbon dioxide with the aid of pigments and the radiant energy of the sun, (2) essentially unlimited growth at localized regions, (3) cells that contain cellulose in their walls and are therefore to some extent rigid, (4) the absence of organs or locomotion resulting in a more or less stationary existence, (5) the absence of nervous systems and (6) life histories that show an alteration of haploid and diploid generations with the dominance of one over the other being taxonomically significant.
Trying to gain an understanding of plants based on definitions such as these is like trying to experience a Mark Rothko painting defined as “a series of roughly quadratic fields painted with a variety of pigments on a stretched rectangular canvas background.” Neither a detailed analysis of the pigments nor the exact geometry of the color-fields can be of much help in bringing us closer to the experience of the painting. Even the statement that Rothko “tried to make his paintings into experiences of tragedy and ecstasy, as the basic conditions of existence” does little to prepare us for the experience of the painting itself.
Great paintings have a presence all their own. So do plants.
Knowing the definition of a plant does not help us experience the presence of the plant in the world. Just as the voice of the painting is “more” than the sum of space, color, light, and darkness, the presence of the plant goes beyond the aspects we highlight in a definition. It is the plant itself that brings about the constellation of factors we can define. The plant remains to some extent undefinable.
Yet the current fascination with the question of plant intelligence seems to have less to do with plants than with how we define them. Without getting ourselves embroiled in the ongoing debate concerning the functions of definitions in scientific research, let it suffice to say that the way we define something colors the way we see it and determines to a great extent the questions we can ask of it. In his autobiography, philosopher François Jacob spoke of the challenge this poses:
The living world is one of complexity, the result of innumerable interactions among organisms, cells, molecules. In analyzing a problem, the biologist is constrained to focus on a fragment of reality, on a piece of the universe which he arbitrarily isolates to define certain of its parameters. In biology, any study thus begins with the choice of a “system.” On this choice depend the experimenter’s freedom to maneuver, the nature of the questions he is free to ask, and even, often, the type of answer he can obtain. (Jacob 1995, p.234)
J. S. Haldane pointed out something similar when, in characterizing scientific study, he asks:
Are we attempting to define the reality which lies behind our more or less confused experience? To a certain extent we are; but when we consider the matter further, we can see that our attempt is a limited one, since in every science we start with certain axioms which we do not discuss or question. (Haldane 1931, p. 4)
While expanding the definition of plants to include intelligence opens the possibility of new experimental approaches, it does so within an unquestioned mechanistic, Darwinian framework.
In any conceptual framework, terms must be defined in ways that give them their proper place within the framework. Expanding the definition of plant to include intelligence has required re-defining intelligence to include what is now being spoken of as plant behavior. As we have pointed out earlier, this has resulted in a definition of intelligence that incorporates almost any form of lawful change such as the warming of a rock in the sunlight (Holdrege & McAlice 2024). The more general and abstract a definition becomes, the less able it is to guide us in understanding particular differences.
Although the most vocal within the plant intelligence research community would like us to believe that ascribing intelligence to plants represents a paradigmatic shift in how we understand plants, this is hardly the case. It amounts to little more than what philosopher Thomas Kuhn characterized as the further articulation and specification of the paradigm biology has suffered under for the last century and a half (Kuhn 1970). It is a paradigm rooted in the desire to make the world conform to the idiosyncratic nature of human intelligence. In fact, the assumptions and presuppositions at the foundation of what Kuhn would term “normal science” place obstacles in the path of understanding the nature of the living. The notion of plant intelligence grounded in a Darwinian understanding of the dynamics of the organic world only exacerbates the problem.
Assumptions: Survival and Competition as Primary
Much of the current research into plant intelligence rests on the work of Charles Darwin. The publication of his On the Origin of the Species in 1859 changed the way we understand the natural world. What was for naturalist Alexander von Humboldt an organically balanced whole became a collection of discrete organisms engaged in an ongoing struggle for existence. Concepts like competition and fitness entered the life scientist’s vocabulary and thus the foundation was laid for current approaches to understanding plants. Researchers approach the question of plant intelligence as something that can be measured relative to adaptive “behaviors” that make plants more competitively successful and increase their Darwinian fitness.
Others have written extensively on the shortcomings and logical challenges of Darwin’s work. We have no intention of doing so here. We would, however, suggest that when plants are approached solely through a Darwinian lens, something essential to being a plant is lost. At best, Darwin’s theory highlights for us one aspect of the natural world. At worst, it creates in us a kind of tunnel vision that blinds us to qualities of interrelatedness and reciprocity apparent throughout the lifeworld. Recognition of these is essential for an understanding of how plants are in the world.
Take, for example, the relationship between coyote tobacco, Nicotiana attenuata, and the Carolina sphinx moth, Manduca sexta, a species of hawkmoth found throughout the United States. In March 2018, staff writer Elizabeth Pennisi published a piece in Science titled “Nature’s strategies: A plant that stands and fights.” In it she summarizes a selection of findings from long-term field and lab studies of coyote tobacco plants conducted under the guidance of Dr. Ian Baldwin. The field studies were conducted on a plot owned by Brigham Young University in Utah, and in lab studies at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. Pennisi wrote:
Unlike those of us on legs, plants can't run away from what they don't like — yet they show remarkable resilience when under attack. Consider how the wild tobacco plant (Nicotiana attenuata), a meter-high native of North America, protects itself from hungry insects. The plant senses the amino acid compounds in a caterpillar's saliva and responds with an alarm signal — a hydraulic or electrical pulse through its stems and leaves. Within minutes, the plant's cells rev up their production of nicotine, a poison that interferes with an animal's muscle function. When attacked, a single wild tobacco leaf can pack in a half a cigarette carton's worth of nicotine. But some caterpillars, such as hawkmoths, have evolved a way to pass that poison through their gut instead of absorbing it, forcing wild tobacco to unearth new countermeasures. The plant produces compounds that inhibit digestion and make the caterpillar sluggish, as well as abrasives that wear down the attacker's mouthparts. At the same time, the plant calls in help by emitting a scent that attracts ground-dwelling bugs and other caterpillar eaters and then puts up chemical signposts to guide those predators to their already sluggish prey. Finally, a plant under siege redirects its resources, putting off flowering and growth until the caterpillars are gone. Amazingly, all of this is orchestrated not by a centralized brain, but by decision-making cells scattered throughout the plant. (Pennisi 2018, p. 985)
Before looking more closely at the assumptions underlying such narratives, let us simply be clear what she says:
• Plants are sessile, therefore can not flee when in danger
• Because of this limitation, they must find other ways to protect themselves
• They have sensory capacities
• When they sense something harmful, they can respond, in this case, with an internal alarm signal
• Various parts of the plant respond to the alarm signal by increasing the plant’s production of nicotine and transporting it to the leaves being attacked
• Hawkmoth caterpillars are not affected by nicotine so the plants must find other ways of protecting themselves
• The plants implement a new strategy: when under attack by the hawkmoth caterpillars, the plants inhibit certain growth and maturation processes
• These stimulus-specific responses are orchestrated by decentralized decision-making cells
Anyone familiar with the highly differentiated, complex, interdependent, or reciprocal relationships present in any ecological setting will recognize the oversimplifications running through Pennisi’s depiction. Simplistic explanations are the bane of popular science. By giving us the illusion of knowledge they distract us from the truly interesting questions. By neglecting to mention that hawkmoths are the primary pollinators of coyote tobacco, for instance, Pennisi simplifies the relationship between them to one of self-protection and aggression.
A female Carolina sphinx moth (Manduca sexta), a species of hawkmoth found throughout the US.
While such popularized accounts exaggerate the picture of plants and animals as “Darwinian organisms,” current research is in fact based on the fundamental assumption that all organisms are driven by the need to survive and propagate in an antagonistically competitive context. As André Kessler — a leading researcher in the field of chemical ecology of plants and whose PhD many years ago in Baldwin’s lab focused on coyote tobacco — writes in a recent article, “all life can be considered to have the same goal of successfully reproducing” (Kessler and Mueller 2024). Once you assume this goal, the interactions between a plant species and the insects that feed on it, for example, lead inevitably to an “evolutionary arms race between plants and herbivorous insects” and this adversarial relation becomes “one of the driving forces of the chemical diversity in the plant kingdom” (Kessler 2006). In the end, the plant’s ability to continually adapt and succeed in the arms race constitutes its “intelligence.”
This assumption of a drive to survive includes within it the assumption that each animal and plant is a discrete entity existing among other discrete entities. Organisms are considered fundamentally separate from each other and as such only concerned with maintaining their own existence as a species. This is one of the paradoxes of a Darwinian ecology. The concepts of separateness and interrelatedness are, when thought concretely, mutually exclusive. The assumption of separation as primary leads to the search for mechanisms that can bridge the separation, for example the neuro-sensory systems present in animals. Only recently have researchers begun to ascribe sensory capacities to plants. If plants are understood as being in, but not of, their environments and are able to adjust their metabolic activity in response to changes in the latter, one logical assumption is that they are able to receive and process sensory input. The view of the plant as a discrete entity leads to the conclusion that, if a correlation between shifts in metabolic activity and changes in the environment is observed, the plant must have the capacity to receive and process stimuli. The plant can develop “strategies” to survive and bridge the gap between it and the hostile world. This is one of the main ways of framing “plant intelligence” today.
What is perhaps most troubling when one reads suggestive and seemingly compelling depictions of a plant under attack and its strategies to defend itself is that highly complex ecological relations are framed only in terms of one limited perspective that is chock-full of assumptions. Baldwin and his colleagues have carried out a vast amount of work studying the intricacies of coyote tobacco’s chemical ecology. (For a list of his many publications see: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=MVeVpj UAAAAJ.) Popularizing and simplifying summaries such as Pennisi’s do not do justice to what they have discovered. They have spent thousands of hours in the field observing both wild and cultivated populations of coyote tobacco. Their lab work is elaborate and designed to test hypotheses they have developed based on their field observations.
For instance, in 2007, they observed a massive increase in the number of caterpillars of a different sphinx moth (Manduca quinquemaculata). The majority of the coyote tobacco plants at the test site in Utah were heavily damaged by their feeding. Danny Kessler spent the season observing the plants closely (Kessler et al. 2010). He noticed that many of the most heavily damaged plants produced more flowers that opened at dawn rather than at dusk. Typically, coyote tobacco is a night-blooming plant. Its primary pollinators are sphinx moths, and they are nocturnal. The flowers that opened in the morning were visited not by moths, but by hummingbirds. Further observation showed that the morning flowers were less aromatic than those opening at dusk, the petals did not open as wide, and the sugar content of the nectar was reduced.
Coyote tobacco plant flowers that uncharacteristically opened in the morning were visited by hummingbirds.
Photo credit: Danny Kessler
By manipulating the plants mechanically in the field and genetically in the laboratory, Baldwin’s team was able to isolate the metabolites involved in the shift, identify signaling pathways, and silence the genes involved. Transgenic plants were introduced into the field populations and the results suggested that the shift from dusk-flowering to dawn-flowering was related to the extent of feeding by the caterpillars. Baldwin’s team felt justified in interpreting this as a defense mechanism chosen by the plants to protect themselves from overfeeding by a specific herbivore (Kellmann 2010).
You can see that the more researchers delve into the phenomena, and create more phenomena experimentally, an increasingly complex and intriguing picture develops. To be sure, it is possible to continue to view every single interaction through the lens of survival and competition. Yet, this is not a necessity. There is no compelling reason to accept the current habitual assumptions and view everything on their basis. We therefore ask: What if we bracket the assumptions described above? What if we view the boundaries between organisms not as borders between antagonists but, as we stated earlier, as fields of reciprocal activity? What kind of picture might then emerge?
In Search of Coyote Tobacco
(Nicotiana attenuata)
Before Baldwin began studying the plant in the early 1990s, there was very little published about coyote tobacco. It is rarely mentioned in any of the studies of the sagebrush ecosystem of western North America and, if it is mentioned, only peripherally. Its place in the ecology of the region comes to light bit by bit in Baldwin’s papers, although we have yet to come across any in-depth study of the plant’s ecology. Most of Baldwin’s work has been conducted with plants cultivated on a field test site in Utah and/or genetically modified in his lab in Jena, Germany. These are cultivated populations that have been bred and/or genetically modified to test specific hypotheses regarding the plant’s chemical responses to changes in its environment.
A coyote tobacco plant (Nicotiana attenuata) at a field site in Utah.
From an ecological perspective, coyote tobacco is, however, a pioneer plant and rarely occurs as a stable population. It is one of the first plants to appear after a fire or other disturbance. It appears in the first growing season following the disturbance and, with some exceptions, its presence is ephemeral. It usually disappears after three or four growing seasons. Like most pioneer plants, coyote tobacco is an annual. At the end of each season, it produces a multitude of tiny seeds. Some will germinate the following spring; others may lie dormant in the earth for many years as an ever present seed bank. Following a fire, the seeds germinate, and a crop of wild tobacco will appear. In any given location, the plants will stay awhile, then disappear again, possibly to reappear in the future.
Pioneer plants develop when a stable ecosystem is disturbed. In the case of coyote tobacco, seeds from the soil seed bank germinate, for example, in the aftermath of a fire. Fire smoke can stimulate rapid germination (Baldwin et al. 1994). Soil chemistry also changes during and after a fire. The shifts in soil chemistry — the increased presence of specific chemical compounds, subtle shifts in the relation of soil to water — allow seeds that have lain dormant for years to germinate.
In 1927, the American author Mary Austin wrote of coyote tobacco’s native habitat:
In all that country one is seldom removed from a suggestion of the sea, though there is nothing harder to come by than water for any purpose. The contours are all billowy; rank on rank of hills rise out of the plain like gray-backed breakers; the sagebrush gives them a sea shimmer (Austin 1927, p. 188/189).
The sagebrush “ocean” once extended from the southern parts of western Canadian provinces down to northern Mexico and from the eastern Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains in the west to the western Dakotas down to western New Mexico in the east. Before the European settlement it is estimated that it covered roughly 500,000 square miles of varied terrain. Today it covers about half that area, and it is estimated that one million acres a year are lost to development, overgrazing, fire, and invasive species. A recent US Geological Survey study estimated that only 13.6% of the remaining acreage can be considered ecologically intact; 350 different endemic species are considered threatened (Doherty et al. 2022).
The main sagebrush regions are high, semi-arid deserts. The plants are scrubby, the soil generally poor and rainfall limited. Temperatures vary widely. Sagebrush — there are a number of species— dominates the wide, open landscape. It is a woody perennial, grows slowly, and overtime its branches intertwine forming protected spaces where other species thrive. The bushes often spread sparsely across the landscape interspersed with perennial grasses (when intact) and wildflowers. Each of these in turn are accompanied by a specific group of insects and birds. It has been estimated that, under the best conditions (no overgrazing, no invasive species) it takes between 60 and 110 years for the sagebrush to return to a healthy, stable state following a fire (Grant- Hoffman & Plank 2021).
Following a fire, this rejuvenation process begins with a number of native annual forbs, one of which is coyote tobacco. The seeds it produces are tiny, smaller even than poppy seeds. They germinate quickly and, in the early stages of growth, leaf out close to the ground forming a rosette. The soil beneath these leaves tends to remain cooler and somewhat moister than otherwise.
The harsh boundary between the sky between the sky and the earth that is left following a fire is softened. The plants appear as islands of life amidst the blackened debris of the fire. Like other members of the genus Nicotiana, both leaves and stem of the coyote tobacco are somewhat hairy and sticky. The plant not only produces nicotine but an array of other secondary metabolites. In fact, it is this characteristic that has proven so productive for Baldwin’s research. The presence of these secondary metabolites is what gives plants their characteristic scents and tastes as well as specific medicinal properties.
For instance, nicotine, an alkaloid produced in the roots and stored in the foliage of coyote tobacco, is fatal to most insects and poisonous for vertebrates. Benzyl acetone, on the other hand, is produced by the flowers and attracts the Carolina sphinx moth (Manduca sexta), one of coyote tobacco’s prime pollinators.
When the seeds of coyote tobacco germinate after a fire and the plants grow, they create micro-environments in the barren landscape. These become home to various insects and later small rodents. Out of the rosette with its large ovate leaves, the stem then grows upward with smaller, more slender leaves. The first flowers appear at the top of the stem, which can be a meter high. As the season progresses, flowering branches grow from the axillary buds at the base of the original leaves. The plant will continue flowering throughout the growing season.
The first flowers open at dusk and remain open through the night. They are slender, white, tubular flowers with five petals that open like a collar. The base of the flower is enclosed by five sepals. The flowers emit a strong, sweet scent due in part to the presence of benzyl acetone in the corolla. And in this scarred landscape, sphinx moths appear. The relation of coyote tobacco and sphinx moth provides an example of what Charles Darwin described as a perfect adaptation of flowers and pollinators. Sphinx moths have a long slender tube (proboscis) that can be eight centimeters long and unrolls out of the mouth when a moth approaches a flower, enabling it to sip the nectar at the base of the flower while hovering at flower’s rim.
A sphinx moth does not, however, simply sip the nectar and in doing so pollinate the flower. It also lays its eggs on the leaves of the plant. Caterpillars hatch within a day or two and start feeding on the plant. Seen from the point of view of the sphinx moth, the coyote tobacco provides nourishment for the adult moths, a place to lay eggs, and food for their caterpillars.
The caterpillars of sphinx moths (called tobacco hornworms) can feed voraciously on wild populations of coyote tobacco. The caterpillars have a high tolerance for nicotine, which makes the plant’s leaves unpalatable for most other insects and animals. When fed upon, the plant responds to chemical compounds in caterpillar saliva by producing a group of volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) that in the absence of caterpillar saliva are not produced. The VOCs are released into the air around the plant, creating an environment that attracts other insects. Some of these may feed on the eggs and young caterpillars (Schuman et al. 2012).
As this is happening, coyote tobacco continues to flower, sphinx moths continue to sip nectar and lay eggs. Days and nights pass. Life returns slowly to the burn scar. Wild tobacco is a pioneer in a restorative process, or perhaps more aptly, its presence helps initiate the reestablishment of the life in a specific area. The plant’s chemistry mediates and participates in this process. Think of of the shift in flowering times. One could easily say that by flowering in the morning, coyote tobacco invites the hummingbirds to participate too. You get an impression of the manifold and intricate connections.
A Relational World
We have tried to provide a glimpse into the life of coyote tobacco within the larger context of its environment — the relations that inform its existence and that it contributes to at the same time. All its characteristics can be viewed, and should be viewed, in terms of relations in a larger context. If we consider its leaves, we need to consider at least light, warmth, water, air, the creatures that feed on them or that they repel, or the changes in the micro-environment that leaves mediate. Coyote tobacco is an interactive being and its “boundaries” mediate relations with others.
Now imagine that we sketched the sagebrush ecosystem from the perspective of other organisms — sagebrush
itself, sagebrush grouse, sphinx moths, bunch grasses, black-chinned hummingbirds, or myriad other organisms. Each can reveal more concretely its special character, its specific way of being, which is at the same time a flexible and dynamic field of relations with other organisms and the broader environment. Our picture of life-as-relatedness becomes ever richer.
“Separation” is not a fundamental feature of the life world. In being itself, an organism is also a being with others. What we think of as its specific character is not something separate from all its interactions. To conceive of organisms in terms of identity that incorporates relatedness with what we normally think of as “outside” the organism is no doubt challenging. But this is what the study of organismic life can help us do: to learn to think fluidly without losing distinctness and specificity. As long as we remain within the paradigm of separate, competing organisms, the deeper reality of relatedness in organismic/ecological life, and what might be rightfully called intelligence or wisdom in nature, will slip from our grasp.
REFERENCES
Austin, Mary (1927). Lands of the Sun. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Online: https://archive.org/ details/landsofsun00aust/page/n9/mode/2up
Baldwin, I.T. et al. (1994). “Up in smoke: I. Smoke-derived germination cues for postfire annual, Nicotiana attenuata torr. Ex. Watson”. Journal of Chemical Ecology vol. 20, pp. 2345–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02033207
Coccia, Emanuele (2019). The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Medford: Polity Press.
Doherty, K. et al. (2022). “A sagebrush conservation design to proactively restore America’s sagebrush biome.” U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2022–1081, https://doi. org/10.3133/ofr20221081
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1995). Scientific Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Grant-Hoffman, Madeline N. & Heidi L. Plank (2021). “Practical Postfire Sagebrush Shrub Restoration Techniques.” Rangeland Ecology and Management, 74(1), 1-8, (4 January 2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rama.2020.10.007
Kuhn, Thomas (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haldane, J.S. (1923, 1973). Mechanism, Life, and Personality. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Haldane, J.S. (1931). The Philosophical Basis of Biology. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.
Jacob, Francois (1995). The Statue Within. Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
Holdrege, C. & J. McAlice (2024) “Are Plants Intelligent? An Initial Exploration.” In Context # 41, pp. 11-16.
Kessler, Andre (2006). “Plant – Insect Interactions in the Era of Consolidation of Biological Sciences.” In Chemical ecology: from gene to ecosystem. Marcell Dicke & Willem Takken (eds.). pp. 19 – 37. The Netherlands: Springer.
Kessler, A. & M. Mueller (2024). “Induced Resistance to herbivory and the intelligent plant.” Plant Signaling & Behavior. vol. 19, no. 1.
Kessler, Danny et al. (2010). “Changing Pollinators as a Means of Escaping Herbivores.” Current Biology vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 237 – 242. DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.071
Kellmann, Jan-Wolfhard (2010). “Changing flowering times protect tobacco plants against insect herbivory.” Max Plank Gesellschaft. https://www.mpg.de › 616998 › press Release20100114
Nagel, Thomas (1974). “What Is It Like to Be a Bat.” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, pp. 435-450.
Pennisi, Elizabeth (2018). “Nature’s strategies: a plant that stands and fights.” Science vol. 359, p. 985. https://doi.org/10.1126/ science.359.6379.985
Schuman, M.C. et al. (2012). “Herbivory-induced volatiles function as defenses increasing fitness of the native plant Nicotiana attenuata in nature.” Elife. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.00007