Evolution according to plants: cooperation as keystone in vegetal studies

Résumé

In vegetal studies, cooperation is a plant’s well-known ability. Pieces of evidence show that botanical species can connect with other organisms to achieve their physiological objectives (Mancuso & Viola 2015). In this paper, we aim to investigate two different aspects of these interindividual and interspecies ties. In the first section, we will focus specifically on the vegetal agency (Gilroy & Trewavas 2022), supporting the idea of its strong orientation to cooperation. Therefore, we will place our research alongside cooperative evolution models rather than competitive ones (Margulis 1999). From this perspective, symbiosis plays a fundamental role in explaining plant life and permits a focus shift from individuality to networks of cooperation and interaction. Following this interpretative line, we will analyse some fundamental aspects of vegetal agency, particularly the capacity to interpret and create significant signs, which are essential for communication and organisation (Witzany 2008), two critical factors of cooperation. In the second section, we will apply this perspective to analyse the multifaceted dimensions of human-plant interaction. We will discuss how this interaction unfolds in different contexts and with varying degrees of awareness (Myers 2015; Gibson 2018). For instance, plants’ morphology – or phenotypic plasticity (Trewavas 2015) – reflects plants’ biography and history of comparticipation with humans, as Mathews (2021) pointed out. Then, we will explore some ethical consequences of plant-human cooperative entanglements in the third section of our paper, since it is crucial to consider the moral implications of human-plant interactions and the ethical responsibilities that follow (Kohn 2020). Indeed, we will argue that plants’ cooperation-oriented agency could be the starting point for an ethical shift in humans’ approach to vegetal life.