Coccia argued that our biological classifications are not grounded in science. Sergei Aleshin / ShutterstockĪfter our first cup of coffee, we were soon deep into our main topic: trees and plants in general.

Is that a sign of consciousness? asks author Peter Wohlleben. VENUS RISING: After Venus flytraps, in an experiment, were given an anesthetic, which prevented them from snapping their traps shut, they “woke up” and went back to catching flies. Although he is from Italy and now teaches in France and writes in French, he also speaks fluent German because at one time he studied and worked in Freiburg. A small bearded man, Coccia turned up in a blue suit and blue checkered tie, completely inappropriate attire for the outdoors, even though we had agreed that we would take a walk in the forest together. For some time now, I have not been comfortable with viewing humans as the crown of creation, separating animals into higher and lower life-forms, and treating plants as something on the side, definitively banished to a lower level.Īnd so I found the conversation with Coccia most refreshing when he visited our Forest Academy. It distorts our view of nature and makes all the other species around us seem more primitive and somehow unfinished. Ranking the natural world and scoring species according to their importance or their superiority seemed to me outdated. I had been giving a great deal of thought to this myself.

It upends our view of the living world, putting plants at the top of the hierarchy with humans down at the bottom. The German title of Coccia’s book translates as “The Roots of the World,” and the book really does cover this.

In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der Welt (published in English as The Life of Plants).

The secret wisdom of nature