Deforestation in the state of Rondônia in western Brazil. Photo: NASA
If you place plants above humans on the hierarchy of desirable beings (ha ha, try that topic at your next dinner party), or if you’re like the naturalist Sir David Attenborough, who recently called humans a “plague on Earth,” you’ll appreciate an essay by Michael Marder, a philosopher, on Al Jazeera’s web site that advocates for plant rights, not least as a possible brake on losses of biodiversity. Marder cites Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the right to have rights” along with scientists’ expanding knowledge of plant behavior and threads of thought from Hinduism and Jainism to build a case for the fundamental protections of plant life based on the “uniqueness of vegetal subjects.” It seems a conversation has already begun about plant rights, obliquely enough, in a 2008 report by the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology called “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” which Marder calls “an undeniable milestone.”
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