When We Stopped Listening to Plants

Field Notes from the Anthropocene, Vol. I

The first essay in a five-year series tracing plant kinship, ecological crisis, and the futures we’re weaving.

There is an old maple outside my window whose leaves are dropping early this September, stressed by months of drought here in Vermont. The white birch beside it holds on longer, its yellow coins flickering against paperlike bark. Both trees seem restless, their usual autumn rhythm disrupted by weather that feels increasingly unmoored from the seasons I learned to read as a child.

I wonder when we stopped listening to plants as teachers—and started asking machines to be our gods.

Root Memory

This wondering has roots in my grandmother’s kitchen pantry—shelves lined with glass jars of canned vegetables and preserves, a museum of her conversations with soil and season.

It deepened during my years as an herbalist, learning plant medicine from elder women whose hands moved through gardens with the fluency of prayer. It grew urgent in the Peruvian Amazon, where I watched curanderos receive guidance from plant teachers in ways that made my own culture’s relationship with the natural world seem profoundly impoverished.

It sharpened into alarm when I moved to rural Vermont during COVID and found myself scrolling for connection, confessing my loneliness to algorithms while calendula volunteers from last year’s planting whispered unheard outside my door.

We are living through a peculiar historical moment: the same species that once received guidance from sacred plants and dream-spoke with corn now confesses its deepest fears to artificial intelligence.

I know this intimately. Born in 1983, I remember rotary phones and the soothing silence of waiting. Now I find myself reaching for my device when I feel uncertain, asking screens for wisdom I once sought in the garden, books, and other humans. We have traded plant communion for digital divination, seasonal rhythms for algorithmic feeds, root wisdom for cloud storage.

The Irony of Noise

The irony cuts deep: I run an herbal business called PlantLust Botanicals, yet find myself entangled with algorithms—contributing what feels like noise to an already deafening digital room, trying to translate intimacy into metrics.

Technology promises connection but delivers only mirrors: surfaces that reflect our existing selves back to us without the friction of genuine encounter.

Plants, by contrast, always surprise.

This year I crossed a red flour corn with teosinte seeds gifted by Roxanne Swentzell from Flowering Tree Permaculture in the Santa Clara Pueblo. The offspring astonished me: some stalks bearing five ears clustered together like jeweled offerings, others producing single ears larger than any corn I’ve grown, each kernel a different color.

The corn taught me what algorithms cannot—how to mix and adapt, how to be surprised by what emerges from intentional crossing.

The Parent We Never Named

Plants made us possible. Not metaphorically, but literally.

They exhaled the oxygen that fills our lungs, stabilized the soils that feed us, provided the fibers that clothe us. They invented photosynthesis—the original alchemy that turns sunlight into sugar, air into substance. They are the quiet magicians of every ecosystem, the infrastructure of every breath.

Yet in our economic systems, plants remain invisible laborers—much like the care work provided by women. We count their bodies as timber, their seeds as commodities, their medicines as intellectual property to be patented. We measure forests by board-feet rather than by the conversations happening in their root networks. We have perfected the art of forgetting who feeds us.

This forgetting has consequences that ripple through every aspect of how we organize life on Earth. When plants become resources rather than relatives, we lose more than biodiversity. We lose a way of being that understands reciprocity, seasonality, and the patient intelligence of growth.

The Two Crises

Our forgetting of plant kinship shows up most clearly in how we respond to the crises of our time. I think of these crises in two categories, each requiring different kinds of attention and repair.

Eruption crises

Sudden, dramatic, with clear authorship—the oil spill, the chemical explosion, the factory fire. Disasters with villains we can name, courts we can sue, cleanup protocols we can implement. They make headlines because they fit our narrative appetite for heroes and villains, problems and solutions.

Erosion crises

Slower, more systemic, with diffuse responsibility—climate change, biodiversity loss, microplastics in our bloodstreams, endocrine disruptors reshaping fertility itself. These crises have no single author, no clear end. They emerge from the accumulated weight of a million small choices—the compound interest of extraction.

Both kinds of crisis grow from the same root: the treatment of the living world as a collection of resources rather than a community of relatives.

We expect forests to absorb the carbon our economy releases, wetlands to buffer the floods our developments create, plants to evolve resistance to the poisons we invent. We have made them both victims and saviors, asking them to clean up messes they never made.

This is the logic of an abusive relationship: harm, then demand healing from the harmed.

The New Gods in Our Pockets

Into this landscape of ecological crisis and spiritual disconnection has arrived artificial intelligence, promising to solve everything we’ve broken.

Climate models that predict the future. Agricultural algorithms that optimize yields. Medical AI that diagnoses faster than any human healer. The seduction is real: finally, a form of intelligence powerful enough to match the complexity of the problems we’ve created.

But I wonder about the ritual dimensions of this turn toward artificial intelligence.

We commune with our phones the way our ancestors communed with spirits. We ask Siri and Alexa questions we once asked dreams. We scroll through feeds looking for signs and omens—algorithmic prophecies about what might happen next.

This is fundamentally different from the kind of guidance I receive in my garden.

When I harvest clary sage or notice which plants thrive in drought while others struggle, I’m receiving information that exists independent of my preferences. The plants have their own agenda, their own wisdom, their own investment in accuracy. There is reciprocity in the exchange—I tend them, they feed and heal me, we both adapt to changing conditions.

When I ask my phone for directions, there is no reciprocity. The algorithm has no investment in my wellbeing beyond keeping me engaged. It can tell me how to get somewhere but cannot teach me how to belong.

The intelligence we commune with shapes the intelligence we become.

If we learn to think like plants—patiently, seasonally, in relationship with soil and water and light—we develop different capacities than if we learn to think like algorithms—quickly, optimally, in relationship with data and metrics and code.

Plants think in rhizomes: underground networks where information flows multidirectionally, where boundaries between self and system are fluid.Algorithms think in trees: hierarchical structures where information flows from root to branch, where boundaries between categories are binary and clear.

Both have their place. The question is which form becomes dominant in how we organize society, how we make decisions, and how we understand what it means to be intelligent.

What We’re Weaving

This essay begins a series that will explore these questions more deeply: What would it mean to remember plants as parents rather than resources? How might we heal both eruption and erosion crises by practicing kinship with the living world ?What kinds of artificial intelligence might emerge if we programmed machines to think more like mycorrhizal networks and less like corporate hierarchies?

These are not idle questions. They shape how we design cities, how we educate children, and how we respond to ecological crises. They determine whether we build technologies that amplify care or extract it, whether we create economies that regenerate life or continue to consume it.

I don’t have answers. But I have attention, and I have willingness to listen to teachers who think in chlorophyll and time. I have hands that remember how to touch soil, and eyes learning to read the languages plants write in leaf and root and flower.

The Lesson Outside My Window

The maple outside my window has shed more leaves overnight, carpeting the ground in amber and rust. I can see new growth emerging from where I pruned the lavender—purple spikes reaching toward shorter days, a reminder that even in decline, there is reaching.

The tree reminds me that healing is not the absence of wounding but the presence of responsiveness. That intelligence is not the speed of processing but the quality of attention.

These lessons feel urgent now, in a world that confuses information with wisdom, connection with communion, optimization with love. They feel like the medicine we need: not another app to solve our problems, but another way of being present to the problems we’re always already embedded within.

Rudolf Steiner warned of what he called Ahrimanic forces—the seductive pull toward disembodied intelligence, toward solutions that promise to lift us out of the messy, uncertain, mortal work of being human.

Perhaps our addiction to artificial intelligence is just the latest expression of that ancient temptation—to escape the body, the earth, the slow curriculum of seasonal time.

The plants are still teaching, if we remember how to listen. The question is whether we’ll learn in time.

Author’s Note

This essay marks the beginning of my doctoral research at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA)—a five-year inquiry into art, philosophy, and the intelligence of the living world. My work will explore plant kinship, ecological aesthetics, and the intersection of technology and consciousness through writing, image, and practice.

If these questions resonate with you, I invite you to share your own stories of plant teachers, crisis wisdom, and the forms of intelligence that sustain you.