Communicating with Plants

The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 book that was developed into a 1979 documentary film, reports on a flurry of parapsychological research involving attempts to communicate with plants using electrodes, lie detectors, and psychic powers. The book highlights the work of Cleve Backster, an American researcher who claimed he could demonstrate that plants could read people’s minds and that measurements of his plants’ emotional responses to the randomized death of brine shrimp revealed empathetic connections “even on the lower levels of life.” Although this research appears risible in retrospect, Backster’s work expresses attempts to conceptualize plant subjectivity and plant agency against the backdrop of the emergent environmental movement. While it might be overly charitable to credit these experiments in plant communication with inspiring contemporary research into the ways plants share information with one another and with other species, Backster’s outlandish investigations suggest enduring object lessons for human beings in general and for the environmental humanities field in particular regarding the ways that plants continue to baffle us, to enchant us, and even, in their own weird way, to speak to us.