Conversations on Plant Sensing : Notes From the Field

Of course I was there to talk about plant feeling. Though I had no intention of engaging this molecular biologist in a conversation on vegetal emotions. That was a conversation I knew better to reserve for other contexts. I was there to learn the ways plants feel out their worlds; that is, how they sense, perceive and respond to their environments. Plant sensing is a widely studied phenomenon, and falls under the purview of mainstream plant science in molecular biology, biochemistry, plant physiology, and ecology. I contacted this researcher a couple of weeks earlier hoping I would learn how her lab was contributing to the field. This was the one in a series of exploratory visits to laboratories at institutions on the west coast of the US and Canada, and in Jena, Germany. I had been engaged in the literature on environmental sensing in plants and the chemical ecology of plant/insect interactions since I was a graduate student conducting research on plant development in a molecular biology lab in the late 1990s. I had recently returned to this literature as an anthropologist (Hustak and Myers, 2012). It was time to start talking with a wide range of practitioners to get a multidimensional view of the field. I wanted to hear them tell stories about the ways plants sense and make sense of their worlds. This was my first attempt to compose a field in which to explore what plant scientists made the phenomena of plant sensing mean.