I’ve lived intimately with plants for a long time, and yet I feel I hardly know them! I’m astonished by my own and other people’s lack of curiosity about their complex and productive lives.  Yet there is an explanation.

As mammals, we are wired to respond to movement and sound.  Activity or noise compel us to pay attention.  We do not respond with a casual turn of the head.  Rather, we response with a compulsive need to understand what’s happening.  Sound and motion messages force us to consider primal questions: I hear or see something moving -- can I eat it?  Or will it eat me? Movement and noise thrust our brains into a mode of readiness.  We have no choice.  We respond by instinct.  Shall I fight?  Or should I flee?

Now let’s consider the opposite situation.  How do we react if we hear no sound or see no movement?  What happens when we are confronted with beings that are silent and motionless? Well, since they don’t dart, since they don’t squeal, they exert no pull on our attention.  While our eyes immediately catch and follow the movements of nesting birds, the hedge that shelters the birds’ nest is just background.  Like drapes that frame a window, we see shrubs simply as decoration and unimportant to what takes place.

Michael Pollen, author of several popular books on plants and food, says that vegetables and fruits suffer from “the silence of the yams.”  That is, since vegetables have few sales agents to advertise for them, we easily overlook them.  Moving the story from the grocery store to the natural world, the entire plant kingdom suffer from a similar deficit.  Since plant don’t call out to us, many of us don’t recognize them as important.  

We live in an advertising culture adept at manipulating our mammalian instincts. We are encouraged to track noisy, frantic activity.  Since plants don’t move (and consequently produce no threat response), we can live a lifetime surrounded by the plant kingdom and never really see it.