speakers

Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in a Human World

Plants move. A lot. Their world is about soil, water, and sun, but also about luring insects for pollination or avoiding being eaten by caterpillars. Moreover, plants live within a human world full of cities and technologies. Being able to move helps plants in their survival activities when interacting with these surroundings. And plant movement, like other plant behaviors, is way more complex than one would expect. Here, I am going to talk about such a complexity of plant movement. I will show several studies of plant behavior but will pay special attention to the study of the
movement of common beans. Building upon the relevance of movement to our understanding of plant behavior, I will propose a different way to understand plants that goes beyond life and adventures towards the notion of plants as minded beings. I will explore what ‘minded’ may mean in this context and its implications for our
interactions with our ecosystems in the Anthropocene.

Vicente Raja (PhD in Philosophy and the Life Sciences, University of Cincinnati,
2018) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy (Western University, Canada), where he acts as coordinator of The EMRG Lab (http://www.emrglab.org). He is also a member of the MINT Lab (University of
Murcia, Spain).

His philosophical work focuses on providing an ecological understanding of the relationships between brain activity and behavior in the context of embodied cognitive science. To do so, he gathers theoretical resources from ecological psychology, pragmatism, and phenomenology. His empirical work uses methodological resources from dynamical systems theory and the sciences of complexity to characterize, at different scales, both animal (human) and plant
movements.