How does the race to make algae do tasks for us undermine the ability of those algae to perform their metabolic tasks?
My colleagues and I have a new article out looking at the limits of enclosed ecosystems (lab controlled algae breeding for energy/food/oil, etc). Algae live in consortia and need communities of different organisms to flourish.
How can we design our bioreactors to be more interspecies ecosystems rather than sterile systems, in order to reduce the energy use and inputs for algal photobioreactor (PBR) systems?
Our article discusses this exciting new frontier.
Sergio Mugnai, Natalia Derossi & Yogi Hendlin (2023) Algae communication, conspecific and interspecific: the concepts of phycosphere and algal-bacteria consortia in a photobioreactor (PBR), Plant Signaling & Behavior, 18:1, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15592324.2022.2148371
In her editorial about my ‘Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates’ article in Environmental Values, Elke Pirgmaier writes
‘Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates’ by Yogi H. Hendlin addresses the question how to raise the status of plants as worthy of care and protection. There is agree- ment amongst plant biologists that plants are intelligent. They have an ability to sense and respond to signals in their environment, via airborne chemical aromatics and root systems, and they have certain basic capacities of memory. They are thus not deterministic machines, but sensitive beings capable of intentional cooperation and coordination. Yet, disagreement arises as to how to interpret such findings and what they imply for ethics.
The relatively recent field of ‘plant neurobiology’ draws analogies between human/animal intelligence with those of plants, by adopting a language that suggests that plants have ‘brains’ and ‘neurons’ and ‘consciousness’. Hendlin argues that adopting an approach of portraying plants as ‘similar to us’, is misguided because it taps into value hierarchies which subordinate plants to animals that we aim to transcend in the project of decolonising scientific methodologies. He calls us to stop such ‘ontological violence’ against plants, and rather to honour them on their own terms. He advocates pluralism – epistemically, ontologically and ethically – and an ethics of different, not lesser. ‘Comparing plants to humans or animals undervalues the true marvels of plant behaviour on their own merits, which fails to value the evolutionary abilities they perform that animals and humans cannot. […] Respect for other beings, it turns out, has less to do with them, and more to do with us’ (Hendlin 2022: 264).
I’m happy that a paper I first drafted in 2015 made it to the light of day in Environmental Values this week: “Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates.” This paper grew out of an Austrian Science Foundation grant I had as a postdoc in Vienna in 2015 which I presented at the International Society of Environmental Ethics in Kiel, Germany, and finally during the corona lockdown I had time to finish it. Paco Calvo generously offered comments before I submitted it.
The thrust of the paper is that plant neurobiology aims to borrow the nomenclature of animal (including human) biology in order to boost the moral standing of plants. By showing analogs between animal and plant hormones and processes (analogs to brains in the root subapex, as Darwin originally postulated), plants can be treated as moral patients. However, this approach fails to acknowledge the difference of plants, and value that difference. In attempting to use animal biology language for plants, however well intentioned by plant neurobiologists, speaking in the master’s language fails to do plants justice, and reaffirms the human- and animal-centric moral evaluative position. Instead, I offer a (non-utilitarian) pluralistic account of value that allows recognition of plant intelligence without requiring that intelligence to measure up against mammal intelligence.
Here’s the abstract: Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of ‘plant neurobiology’ describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics.
My Erasmus University Rotterdam colleague Alessandra Arcuri and I are organizing a day-long workshop on the most used pesticide in the world: glyphosate. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp, Monsanto’s flagship herbicide, has been linked with cancer by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2015.
With such a provocative title as “Pet Ownership Protects Us Against Allergies,” UCSF’s Dr. Homer Boushey makes the claim that children brought up with pets inherit some of their protective microbes that mitigate against developing allergies.
While certainly the science on exposing human children and adult humans to other forms of life soundly concludes that microorganism transfer is on the whole necessary for healthy (mind and body) development, owning life for the instrumental good of health is quite a quixotic mission. Destroying the planet and then importing charismatic genetically-altered (through breeding now, later through genetic engineering) cute critters that bypass our evolutionary instincts for fear by mirroring the oversized eyes of babies and other exaggerated features, is like getting silicon peck implants instead of actually doing manual labor to help society. It puts a natural symbiotic process into the realm of money–the financialization of nature. This devalues nature as such, and sees pets in terms of their use value for boosting infant immune systems. Such a logic is hopelessly backwards. Instead, we should be concentrating our energies on rewilding our cities, returning our suburbs to parks where humans can go, and letting our wild areas get a breather from human interference for at least a few generations. Then, living everyday with healthy dirt, animals and plants, we will receive the bounty of beneficial microbes we need to stay healthy and avoid sickness. Proper farming and permaculture principles, and creating new definitions of hygiene which are integrated with healthy ecosystems, achieves to a much greater degree the goods Dr. Boushey might wish to confer on our ailing feeble-minded culture, while also solving most of our other problems along with it.
Furthermore, it’s high time humans question ownership. Ownership of other bodies for our own benefit–bringing these bodies out to use and cuddle or parade, is just another misbegotten form of biopower. Where are those Foucaultians who apply biopower to pets? How do we think humans got the beneficial microbes we needed before there was even possible ownership of pets? Perhaps we need to rethink our antiseptic western civilization, our throwaway economy, and slavery of life to realize that continuous contact with the more-than-human word is the only way we will regenerate ourselves and nature.
Here’s a new short article I co-authored with plant philosopher Michael Marder that appears on a Los Angeles Review of Books channel: Communication with the Radicle Other
It explores the linkages between certain naturalized notions of communication we have inherited and the multifarious and complex (but often overlooked or undervalued) methods in which plants communicate with each other and between species.
Yogi Hale Hendlin 
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