Plants Are All Chemists

The title of this blog comes from the title of Chapter 7 in Stephen Harrod Buhner’s fascinating book, The Lost Language of Plants (Chelsea Green: 2002). It is a book that decries modern science as a bankrupt epistemology, but also gets most of its facts precisely from the information botanical science has accumulated, so any reading of this book has to keep that paradox in mind. Nonetheless, the assemblage of astonishing facts about plants and what they do to protect themselves as well as other organisms (including humans) is truly mind-changing. This alone should give us pause in our modern tendency to consider all organisms aside from ourselves as simple unconscious mechanisms that we can exploit, without regard for the intelligence they display or the ecology in which they are embedded. This is Buhner’s plea in this book: the universe is nota machine, as much science makes it out to be. It is a vast, interconnected whole that is alive with intelligence and meaning. As he puts it, “We are, by species history and genetic tendency, encoded for recognition of the aliveness of the world and an emotional bonding with it” (p. 70). That is to say, we have a natural emotional affiliation with other life, and that emotional connection, for most of us moderns, is the “lost language” Buhner refers to in his title. It is a language that was routinely recognized by earlier “primitive” cultures, but which we, attuned only to the scientific paradigm that focuses primarily on mechanical bits of the dead “ball of rock in space” we inhabit, no longer respond to.

            Whether or not one agrees with the older epistemology that Buhner tries to revivify—that a) “there is a central underlying unifying force in the universe that is sacred;” that b) “all matter is made from this substance;” that c) “therefore all things possess a soul, a sacred intelligence;” and that d) “because human beings are generated out of this same substance, it is possible for human beings to communicate with the soul or intelligence in plants and all other matter and for those intelligences to communicate with human beings” (37-8)—one can still marvel at the evidence of plant intelligences that he assembles, and worry about the negative effects of our naïve production of pharmaceutical weapons (e.g. antibiotics) that seem to be threatening the gains we thought to have won in our battle against disease. With regard to the latter, it has become common these days to recognize that overuse of antibiotics (especially in feed for the farm animals and farmed fish we consume) has increased genetic resistance in the bacteria we thought to have conquered. What’s remarkable in Buhner’s telling of it, is the intelligence that bacteria display in how they produce resistance. First, they “encode several different kinds of plasmids, each with resistance information” and which are easily exchanged with other bacteria. Then they also have transposons, movable segments of DNA that can rearrange the genetic structure of organisms, and that can be released in free form into the environment for other bacteria to use. Moreover, it even seems, according to Stuart Levy (The Antibiotic Paradox, 1992), that “bacteria strategically anticipate confrontation of other drugs when they resist one” by preparing themselves to become more virulent by sharing their information among “a vast array of interacting constituents of an integrated microbial world” (123). In short, these microscopic, fundamental life-forms are ubiquitous, clever, cooperative, and vastly more intelligent and responsive than we ever gave them credit for. And the result is increasingly-resistant strains of tuberculosis and other diseases that can no longer be controlled with our war-based approach. That’s also because vast residues of antibiotics have been poured into our water and soil from hospital waste and factory and fish farms, and these residues last for years to kill the valuable soil bacteria our lives depend on. For Buhner, humans need to recognize a basic and irreducible fact: 

“Bacteria are not germs, but the germinators—and fabric—of all life on Earth. In declaring war on them, we declared war on the underlying living structure of the planet…on ourselves.” (134).  

Like bacteria, plants—our literal progenitors on this planet—possess an astonishing array

of chemical strategies to protect themselves and promote their species. Everyone knows that plants produce the oxygen without which we could not breathe, and consume the CO₂that we need to dispose of. But their root systems also transport water from deep underground and make it available to surrounding plants, and literally create life-giving rain. In fact, at one point, Buhner claims that though, scientifically, plants have no “brain” or nervous system (hence, we assume, cannot be our equals), their root systems function virtually as well as our ‘more advanced’ brains. Thus, when plant seeds begin to germinate, they create a kind of sterile womb outside them in which their offspring can thrive: 

“As soon as germination begins, the new plant starts releasing compounds through its tiny root system to essentially make a sterile zone around the emerging rootlet. This action protects the seed from harmful organisms and makes space in the soil for its growth. Solidago altissima(a species of goldenrod) and Erigeron annus(white-top fleabane), for example, release combinations of six to ten different matricaria and lachnophyllum esters (ME and LE) to reduce the growth of plants nearby and so make room for themselves in the soil” (148). 

But perhaps more impressive is the fact that plants, far from being passive ‘food’ for anything that wants to eat them, are astonishingly active in protecting themselves on this level as well. No, they can’t run away as an animal can, but they can “generate hundreds of compounds that they use to protect themselves from being overconsumed by insects and animals” (157). Nor do they just kill off anything that eats them; they seem to be wise enough to tolerate some foraging by animals (about 18%) before they let fly with their big guns. That’s because plants are constantly getting and testing information from their surroundings to determine what protective measures to employ and in what quantities. For example, when “being overeaten by aphids or caterpillars, some plants quickly combine and release a mixture of imino acids and sulfur amino acids” that, when combined, powerfully deter the feeding—this at concentrations of as low as one part per million (159). Nor is this just an automatic response: in Russia, clover is normally not threatened by snails, and so does notproduce “cyanogenic compounds”; but in Britain, where snails thrive in the warm wet climate, the same clover doesproduce such deterrents. 

            Another example is the use by plants of chemicals that affect animal reproduction. The most dramatic instance of this is another clover, Trifolium subterraneum, that is grazed on by sheep in Australia. If the sheep are foraging too heavily, this clover “produces estrogenic compounds that affect sheep reproductive cycles and cause up to a 70% reduction in ewe fertility” (161). It would seem to be very effective: fewer lambs, less foraging. Even more impressive, lima beans are often infested with spider mites. When this happens, the lima bean plant can release “a blend of volatile oils (terpenoids) that attracts a predatory mite that feeds on spider mites!” Nor is this an automatic response either, because there are different species of spider mites, so the plant must analyze, from the mite saliva, exactly which mite species is feeding on it, and then produce a blend that will attract onlythe right predator for that mite! And more, “the plants also tell other, uninfested lima beans what is happening. Those receiving the communication also begin to release the chemical that calls the predatory mites” (162).  

            Nor is it just themselves that plants help with their chemistry. The chemicals they produce also help much of what surrounds them, including animals and humans. The action occurs in complex natural systems—not domestic vegetable fields devoted to only cultivated plants—and “limits the emergence of disease and insect epidemics” and the resistance of predators. This means, according to Buhner, that 

“Out-of-control infestations are alwaysthe result of reducing what appears to be wild chaos in natural systems, of engaging in farming of monocultures, genetic uniformity in plant communities, heavy pesticide or pharmaceutical use, or environmental stress from things such as suburban building or logging” (183). 

In short, since wildness in any plant ecosystem equates to variety and health, it is in places where humans introduce the monolithic control of human agriculture that we find big outbreaks of disease. What’s more, whereas human control means the use of all-out chemical warfare against what it defines as “pests,” natural systems take a more holistic approach. Budworm infestations among spruce forests are an example. It might be surprising that a few spruce trees do notdefend themselves against budworms with terpene chemistry. But this is not because they can’t; these few trees are intentionally refraining from defense because, in the long run, this restraint makes sure that the larger community, the forest, sustains itself because resistance in budworms does not develop as it would if all-out war were instituted. As Buhner puts it, “Plant communities literally set aside plants for the insects to consume so as to not force genetic rearrangement and the development of resistance” (189). 

            And then there are the uses other organisms make of the chemistries developed by plants. Honeybees, for example, collect a resinous substance from aspen, willow, birch and poplar trees to make propolis—a substance they create from 50% tree resins, 10 % pollen, 30% wax, and 10% terpenoid essential oils. They then spread this remarkable substance on the interior of their hives to protect it from infection. Why? Because it is strongly antibacterial, antiviral, antibiotic and antiseptic, among other qualities. Oshais another plant ‘medicine,’ this one used by bears. A plains Indian name for Ligusticum porterii, osha means ‘Bear Medicine,’ and is antibiotic, antiviral, antiparasitical, and antihelminthic (active against intestinal worms).  The bears use it in early spring, after their hibernation: they dig the osha root, eat some, and chew some to mix it with saliva into a paste. They then spray and rub this paste on their fur, and thus cleanse the body of winter parasites that may have gathered. The part they eat helps clean their intestines of parasites there. I heard Buhner on the radio recently saying that he has used osha on himself as well and considers it one of his plant ‘helpers’. This figures, because humans have been using this and other plants as medicine for thousands of years: “written records over the past 6,000 years have recorded the regular use of more than 80,000 different plants as medicines” (202). 

            To Buhner, this means that “plant chemistries, unlike pharmaceuticals, are released into the world for a reason” (225) and that reason is the health of the natural system. The mass use of pharmaceuticals, by contrast, is usually designed for profit, and often leads to such things as antibiotic resistance and even to increased occurrence of diseases like cancer. In one of his half-page notes, Buhner cites an interview with Dr. James Duke (“Herbal Voices Interview”, 207), formerly a botanist with the Department of Agriculture, and a pioneer in phytochemicals, to the effect that scientists have changed our foods for the worse:

Take the USDA, for example, they have bred out most of the cancer-preventing compounds in soy. So an average primitive soybean will prevent more cancer than a USDA soybean. This is because we Americans tend to go for bland foods and the primitive soybean has a more bitter taste, so the USDA bred out five different chemicals in soy, and bragged about it. They bragged about lowering the phytate content, the bowman-burk inhibitor content, and the protease inhibitors, the very things that prevent cancer (207).

This is definitely food for thought. The United States Department of Agriculture is charged with keeping our foods safe, and enhancing, not reducing their health-giving properties. And yet, in this case (and Duke worked at USDA and knows whereof he speaks), they seem to have sided with popular taste and industrial agriculture to make soybeans lesseffective against cancer, and then bragged about it. Something is rotten here. 

            That is really the burden of Buhner’s book. Native peoples have been using plant medicines for millennia because, Buhner implies, they knew how to listen to what the plants were saying (often via dreams). We moderns have been seduced by the successes (and they may well be short-term) of universe-as-machine science to both dismiss ancient remedies as rank superstition, and in many cases to outlaw them as dangerous. If Stephen Buhner and many of the people he cites, like James Duke, are right, we may have acted way too soon—dismissing the reasoning of our elders, the plants, without having sufficiently plumbed their meaning. Whether we can recover that ability to listen to plants before most of them—our natural forests and wild ecosystems—are plowed up and paved under, is yet to be determined. But the prognosis does not look good. 

Lawrence DiStasi

The Last Syllable of Recorded Time

What time is it? Most of us ask this question unthinkingly, several times a day. Time to eat. Time to sleep. Time to work, to watch the news, and so on. But we are reminded recurrently—as on New Year’s Eve, for example—that clock time differs depending on where you live on the planet. Revelers in Australia are already celebrating the New Year while we in America still have hours to go before the Times Square ball drops (and if you’re in California, the ball has already dropped at nine o’clock, but our TV channels kindly re-run the tape for us at midnight Pacific Time.) So even the dullest of us knows that time is different—but regularlydifferent—in different time zones; and that the “now” I am experiencing at this moment is the same as everyone’s “now” no matter what the clock says in different parts of the globe. 

            Now comes Carlo Rovelli, a physicist whose specialty is ‘loop quantum gravity,’ to disabuse us of even this simple notion. Time is not at all simple, Rovelli tells us in his new book The Order of Time, (Penguin: 2018), and in fact may not even exist. And there is no “now” that prevails throughout the universe. At one point he even says it plainly: “The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance” (140). 

            To summarize what Rovelli means is not easy, and I’m not sure I understand many of his arguments, beautifully phrased as they are. But here is what I can more or less comprehend. First, he gives us a brief lesson in the history of speculations about time. Aristotle was the first to ask himself ‘what is time?’ and he concluded that “time is the measurement of change.” Pretty good. We can all see the logic in that. But Newton disagreed, and reached the opposite conclusion. Regardless of objects and the changes in them and in our world, there is something called “true time,” said Newton. This is the time, perceived and measured by physicists with their instruments, that goes steadily on regardless of whether things are changing or not. All of Newton’s principles and theories (and our clocks) depend on this notion of time. But, of course, along came Einstein, and he upset Newton’s sensible notions once again when he introduced his notion of space and time as “fields.” As “fields,” space and time become space/time, “the fabric on which the rest of the world is drawn” (74) as Rovelli puts it. And what this means for time is that it is no longer independent, as Newton thought, but relativeand thus, together with space, interacting with the rest of the world. We all know of the example of a twin in space aging more slowly than his sibling on earth because of the differing speeds at which they travel. But very large objects also have a noticeable effect on this fabric of spacetime, which is why clocks run more slowly near large objects: their gravitational fields distort the very fabric of time. Rovelli points out, in this regard, that clocks (very accurate ones) even show time passing more rapidly high on mountaintops than at sea level, due to this effect.  

            Rovelli then takes us into the strange world he studies, quantum mechanics, and tells us how it has, in turn, essentially demolished even the relativity of time Einstein discovered. In quantum mechanics, things get very strange indeed, and, according to Rovelli, so does time. The scale, of course, is beyond our imagining: it is called the Planck scale. For grains of time, Rovelli gives us the figure of 10^-44 seconds, or “a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second” (82). With such infinitesimal units, Rovelli speculates that “the notion of time is no longer valid” and “values of time t do not exist.” Thus, time at this level is not a continuous flow, and our notion of time loses its meaning. When added to the indeterminacy of everything at quantum levels (physicists call this “superposition”), spacetime gets so vague as to be cloudy, fluctuating. And here “even the distinction between present, past, and future becomes fluctuating, indeterminate,” just as with elementary particles. This means, according to Rovelli, that “an event may be both before and after another one” (88). If this doesn’t boggle your mind, you haven’t read that correctly. 

            What I like most about Rovelli is his writing ability and his sense of humor. Consider this little zinger, for example, where he is trying to emphasize his point that the ‘physical substratum’ that determines duration “is a quantum entity that does not have determined values until it interacts with something else” and then onlyfor that specific interaction; “they remain indeterminate for the rest of the universe” (90). It’s like many ‘things’ in the quantum universe: they do not take form as substances until they interact with an observer, until we look at them. In fact, they are better understood as “events” rather than “things.” And these “events” happen in what appears to be not the orderly, past-to-present fashion theorized by Newton or even Einstein, but in a kind of random order that is at best local. Hard to understand, but here is Rovelli’s metaphor to make this more humanly relevant: 

The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians (96). 

You gotta love a physicist, Italian himself, who writes like that. 

            One of Rovelli’s main ideas concerns what he calls “blurring:” this refers to the fact that we cannot see deep into matter, into what is going on at the quantum level, so our vision of the world is ‘blurred.’ Rovelli writes it this way: “the quantum indeterminacy of things produces a blurring,” even when we think we can measure everything. He goes on, 

Both the sources of blurring—quantum indeterminacy, and the fact that physical systems are composed of zillions of molecules—are at the heart of time. Temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. The blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the microscopic details of the world (140).

So while we “see” a universe which “began” with the Big Bang and its low entropy state (which in turn produces our sense that greater order [low entropy] leads to greater disorder [higher entropy], to past preceding present preceding future—hence our sense of the ineluctable order of time), Rovelli maintains that all of this may be “more down to us than to the universe itself.” In other words, the universe in time appears as it does because of who we are, not how the world is. Here is how he concludes this line of thought:

The low initial entropy of the universe might be due to the particular way in which we—the physical system that we are part of—interact with it. We are attuned to a very particular subset of aspects of the universe, and it is thisthat is oriented to time (147). 

This is significant because everything that we know of proceeds from the growth of entropy; from, that is, sources of low entropy like our sun which is constantly breaking down due to its nuclear burning, but whose breaking down, or entropy, gives us the light on which we and all organisms depend. And of course, the low entropy of the sun comes from “an entropic configuration that was even lower: the primordial cloud from which the solar system was formed” (160), and that low entropy comes from other sources back to the low initial entropy of the universe at the Big Bang. This is the “great story of the cosmos” says Rovelli, the story of time powered by the growth of entropy. And it is the particular story which we, as humans, have become sensitive to, and aware of. A great story, no doubt about it, a story of causality, memory, the history of the happenings of the world, in short, the world in time, but a very limited story, only one story out of many. In short, Rovelli says, our sense of time is peculiar to us and necessarily ignores the vast, timeless goings-on at microscopic levels of which we are mostly unaware. Citing St. Augustine, Rovelli summarizes it thus: “this is what time is: it is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and as anticipation” (182). 

            There is more in this fascinating and often beautiful book, but to do it justice requires a leisurely reading, and reflection, and probably re-reading. Reading it like this will change your view of time, at least in part, and perhaps make you reflect on how little we truly know about time and its last syllables and what exactly it is that we are recording. 

Lawrence DiStasi