Abstract
It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green: An Artistic Exploration of The Human Perception of Plants
In The Muppet Show, Kermit the Frog walks through the forest singing, “It’s not easy bein’ green [...]”. Kermit looks around when singing the “so many other ordinary things” part. He seems to empathise with the life of the surrounding plants: their greenness. How do we treat green beings? How might green beings think of themselves and their place in this world?
Over twenty years ago, biology educators coined the term “plant blindness” to describe people’s inability to recognise and even notice plants in their environment. They argued that plant blindness causes people to underestimate the aesthetic and ecological importance of plants, which are often viewed as inferior to, and certainly less interesting than, animals. This issue is still prevalent. Recently, other biologists and educators have pointed to the continuing need to replace outdated narratives that render plants as passive organisms, while integrating modern scientific discoveries on plant behaviours and sensory systems. They also have stated that if we are to develop solutions to the urgent environmental crisis, it is essential that we position plants at the centre of the sustainability debate, overcoming human insensitivity to plants. It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green seeks to do just that by challenging and restructuring how we engage with plants.
It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green aims to investigate artistic strategies on the plant blindness issue and promote sensorial and perceptual awareness of plants through artistic interventions. It ultimately aims to transform our perception of plants and thus the ways in which we engage with plant life. For these purposes, the project will conduct a series of artistic explorations that focus on three aspects of plant-human engagement: 1) Sensing plants – how humans sense plants, using multi-sensorial experiences; 2) Understanding “plantness” – how plants sense and respond to their human-centred environments and 3) Green conversations – how human societies and individuals perceive plants with respect to ethical and legal concerns. Part one, “sensing plants”, will study experts who have particular ways of sensing plants (e.g. through sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch). It will focus on participant observations of those experts and the ways in which they approach plants using time-based media and experiment with multi-sensorial settings. Part two, “understanding plantness”, will study plant sensory systems and reactions in conducting art-science experiments in plant laboratories, such as measuring plant stressors in urban environments and capturing plant bioacoustics. The study will explore the ability of plants to respond to their surroundings, encompassing artistic observation and media, and scientific knowledge and equipment. Part three, “green conversations”, will analyse the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology’s decision process regarding plant policy. Field research on the aftermath of the plant policy in the Swiss community will be undertaken at Switzerland’s various botanical and historical gardens. These research elements will lead to a series of reflective writings on the intersection of art and law, including fictional court case scripts and debate scripts. By combining the research outcomes from these three aspects, the PhD project will create a transformative environment concerning the human perception of plants linked to public urban spaces or devices, which will be further developed based on the research findings. This study is expected to provide diverse sensorial approaches to plant life and contributes to proposing an integrated discourse on the issue of our perception of plants.