One of the things that struck me about Robin Wall Kimmerer's perspective when I was reading Braiding Sweetgrass was the way the ethical obligation to life she discussed contrasted with the colonizer's culture.
It is increasingly popular to find it inherently unethical and exploitative to kill animals for food or to farm them for animal products, and instead eat and wear "plant-based" things. This is an impulse toward ethical treatment of non-human living things.
But this way of seeing animals as "lives" and behaving accordingly, depends on seeing plants as non-lives. Asking whether we have ethical obligations toward plants is so absurd, it's dismissed as trolling.
I've known many people who farmed or hunted animals who had a great reverence for their lives. Some people would think that this is not genuine and that it is never morally acceptable to take a life for your own use.
Kimmerer discusses Indigenous use of animals. But when a tree needs to be cut down or a plant uprooted, there is the same vivid awareness that a life is being taken, that the plant's life is A Life.
Now I'm troubled by the dismissal of plants as providing total freedom from guilt and moral responsibility among many people and organizations who see animal life as deeply sacred. Plant based products are cruelty-free alternatives to animal products and plant-based diets mean nothing had to die for your meal.
I understand not wanting to support cruel industries or being uncomfortable with eating animals, but the more I learn about plants, the less I believe that all animals have something all plants lack, that means we have moral obligations toward animals and not toward plants.
Plants are incredibly unlike us, but they respond to their environments, they communicate with other plants, and they engage in behaviors. Objection to potential plant intelligence and sentience (ability to feel) is more cultural than scientific; we are just only beginning to scratch the surface of the inner world of plants. What if we have to respect plants as life? What does respect mean then, if we have to explore the idea that it doesn't necessarily contradict taking life?
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