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Product Description
From the Publisher
In Conversation with Peter Tompkins
Introduction
Short of Aphrodite, there is nothing lovelier on this planet than a flower, nor more essential than a plant. The true matrix of human life is the greensward covering mother earth. Without green plants we would neither breathe nor eat. On the under surface of every leaf a million movable lips are engaged in devouring carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen. All together, 25 million square miles of leaf surface are daily engaged in this miracle of photosynthesis, producing oxygen and food for man and beast.
Of the 375 billion tons of food we consume each year the bulk comes from plants, which synthesize it out of air and soil with the help of sunlight. The remainder comes from animal products, which in turn are derived from plants. All the food, drink, intoxicants, drugs and medicines that keep man alive and, if properly used, radiantly healthy are ours through the sweetness of photosynthesis. Sugar produces all our starches, fats, oils, waxes, cellulose.
From crib to coffin, man relies on cellulose as the basis for his shelter, clothing, fuel, fibers, basketry, cordage, musical instruments, and the paper on which he scribbles his philosophy. The abundance of plants profitably used by man is indicated by nearly six hundred pages in Uphof’s Dictionary of Economic Plants. Agriculture-as the economists agree-is the basis for a nation’s wealth.
Instinctively aware of the aesthetic vibrations of plants, which are spiritually satisfying, human beings are happiest and most comfortable when living with flora. At birth, marriage, death, blossoms are prerequisites, as they are at mealtime or festivities. We give plants and flowers as tokens of love, of friendship, or homage, and of thanks for hospitality. Our houses are adorned with gardens, our cities with parks, and our nations with national preserves. The first thing a woman does to make a room livable is to place a plant in it or a vase of fresh cut flowers.
Most men, if pressed, might describe paradise, whether in heaven or on earth, as a garden filled with luxuriant orchids, uncut, frequented by a nymph or two.
Aristotle’s dogma that plants have souls but no sensation lasted through the Middle Ages and into the eighteenth century, when Carl von Linne, grandfather of modern botany, declared that plants differ from animals and humans only in their lack of movement, a conceit which was shot down by the great nineteenth-century botanist Charles Darwin, who proved that every tendril has its power of independent movement. As Darwin put it, plants “acquire and display this power only when it is of some advantage to them.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century a gifted Viennese biologist with the Gallic name of Raoul France put forth the idea, shocking to contemporary natural philosophers, that plants move their bodies as freely, easily, and gracefully as the most skilled animal or human,
and that the only reason we don’t appreciate the fact is that plants do so at a much slower pace than humans.
The roots of plants, said Francé, burrow inquiringly into the earth, the buds and twigs swing in definite circles, the leaves and blossoms bend and shiver with change, the tendrils circle questingly and reach out with ghostly arms to feel their surroundings. Man, said Francé, merely thinks plants motionless and feelingless because he will not take the time to watch them.
Poets and philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, who took the trouble to watch plants, discovered that they grow in opposite directions, partly burrowing into the ground as if attacked by gravity, party shooting up into the air as if pulled by some form of antigravity, or levity.
It has taken the startling discoveries of several scientific minds in the 1960s to bring the-plant world sharply back to the attention of mankind. Even so there are skeptics who find it hard to believe that plants may at last he the bridesmaids at a marriage of physics and metaphysics.
Evidence now supports the vision of the poet and the philosopher that plants are living, breathing, communicating creatures, endowed with personality and the attributes of Soul. It is only we, in our blindness, who have insisted on considering them automata. Most extraordinary, it now appears that plants may be ready, willing, and able to cooperate with humanity in the Herculean job of turning this planet back into a garden from the squalor and corruption of what England’s pioneer ecologist William Cobbett would have called a “wen.”
Publisher : Rupa (1 January 2004)
Language : English
Paperback : 416 pages
ISBN-10 : 8129104938
ISBN-13 : 978-8129104939
Item Weight : 360 g
Dimensions : 21.59 x 13.97 x 2.35 cm
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