Recognizing The Right Of Plants To Evolve

cnredd · #1 (**permalink**) 10-26-2012, 03:54 PM

Mommy make the stupidity stop!!!!...

Quote:

If proposals calling for rights for animals are on the table, why not rights for other living things? Plants, for instance.

After all, plants can sometimes exhibit humanlike behavior. And we're not just talking about the butterwort-flytrap hybrid in The Little Shop of Horrors. Some plants respond well to music. Some "smell" other plants. Still others seem to shrink away when touched.

Plants display remedial types of memory and possess "anoetic consciousness" — the ability of an organism to sense and to react to stimulation — writes Daniel Chamovitz in his 2012 book, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses.

And, according to recent reports from a research team led by Australian biologist Monica Gagliano, some plants (such as chili peppers) may be able to "hear" other plants (such as sweet fennel). "We know that plants recognize what is growing next to them," Gagliano says in the University of Western Australia's University News. "There is chemical communication between them. Plants can warn other plants of a predator by releasing a chemical, and the warned plants can release chemicals to make themselves unpalatable to the predator."

She says, "I think we might realize that plants are more sensitive than we think."

Sensitive enough to deserve rights? Some people think so.

...The Right To Evolve

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund argues that greenery does have interests — and rights. The Pennsylvania-based nonprofit works with communities around the world to "craft and adopt new laws that change the status of natural communities and ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities."

Establishing a legal system in which natural communities and ecosystems have an inalienable right to exist and flourish, says Mari Margil of CELDF, "places the highest societal value on those natural systems and communities."

Under such a rights-based system of law, Margil says, "a river may be recognized as having the right to flow, fish and other species in a river may be recognized as having the right to exist and evolve, and the flora and fauna that depend on a river may be recognized as having the right to thrive. This legal framework seeks to protect the natural ecological balance of that habitat."

In the past few years there has been a flurry of international interest in a plant rights movement. The New York Times reported in 2008 that Ecuador became the first country to provide constitutional rights to plants, granting nature "the right to the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes." That same year, a Swiss ethics panel advocated protecting plants' "reproductive ability."

Speaking recently in Hawaii, the Dalai Lama said that every living thing, including a tree or a plant, has the right to survive.

rivrrat · #2 (**permalink**) 10-26-2012, 03:58 PM

Erm... so we would all die from starvation, eh?

cnredd · #3 (**permalink**) 10-26-2012, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rivrrat

Erm... so we would all die from starvation, eh?

The irony is that people that think like this are mentally vegetables...

rivrrat · #4 (**permalink**) 10-26-2012, 06:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cnredd

The irony is that people that think like this are mentally vegetables...

I wonder if they also want to arrest bears for killing salmon.

sky dancer · #5 (**permalink**) 10-26-2012, 06:24 PM

May all sentient beings have happiness and it's causes.

Segep · #6 (**permalink**) 10-27-2012, 02:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cnredd

The irony is that people that think like this are mentally vegetables...

Laugh now, but in the coming years environmentalism and protecting what's left of our planet will be the overriding context in which we all will necessarily have to live.

Unless we find a practical way to colonize and terraform other planets before then, which doesn't seem likely.

SwissMan · #7 (**permalink**) 10-27-2012, 11:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Segep

Laugh now, but in the coming years environmentalism and protecting what's left of our planet will be the overriding context in which we all will necessarily have to live.

Unless we find a practical way to colonize and terraform other planets before then, which doesn't seem likely.

you forget about Human Ingenuity,if it isn't fettered by selfserving Politicians and Charlatans!

SwissMan · #8 (**permalink**) 10-27-2012, 11:33 AM

Guess we'll live from Air and Sunshine then,anchor ourselves into the Soil with our Toes,and suck up Water and healthy Minerals up by Osmosis!
Sure glad I haven't got half a Lifetime left,when I look at the Insanities proposed!
But I sure will kill my self laughing,observing the Mess,wherever I am,even if it is in The Other Place!

HAHAHA OH WOW - YouTube

SwissMan · #9 (**permalink**) 10-27-2012, 11:35 AM

Coyote · #10 (**permalink**) 10-28-2012, 07:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Segep

Laugh now, but in the coming years environmentalism and protecting what's left of our planet will be the overriding context in which we all will necessarily have to live.

Unless we find a practical way to colonize and terraform other planets before then, which doesn't seem likely.

Ya...but....what will we eat? Soylent Green?

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