From Spinach-Sent Emails to 'WALL-E': Where Plants and Technology Intersect
This article is part of a series, in collaboration with the Civic Paths working group at the University of Southern California.
When pondering the relationship between plants and technology, the first thought for many will be of solar panels: a "biomimetic" engineering feat that imitates the process of photosynthesis in plants in order to convert the sun’s light into energy.
Others might think of Velcro, which was famously inspired by the way in which certain vegetal burrs attach themselves, with tiny hook-like structures, to the fur of passing animals (or to the fabrics of passing coat-wearing humans).
Still others might land on the double meaning of the word "plant" itself, which can designate not only a plant in the vegetal sense, but also an industrial or nuclear power plant.
My mind, however, goes straight to the 2008 Disney Pixar film "WALL-E." The film tells the story of a waste collection robot, eponymously named, who roams the devastated terrain of planet Earth while the rest of humankind, descended into obesity and listlessness, lives out a mundane existence aboard a spacecraft orbiting far from their once-resplendent home.
After having spent countless years picking through the long-abandoned remains of humankind’s hyper-consumerist terrestrial existence, WALL-E stumbles upon a living plant seedling. This humble plantlet, which WALL-E houses in a shabby boot and stores alongside a sizeable collection of trinkets and tchotchkes retrieved from the anthropogenic rubble, turns out to have a significance that belies its small size. It essentially signals that conditions on Earth have improved sufficiently as to be able to sustain human life once again.
The discovery kickstarts a series of events that see WALL-E and the sleek, futuristic EVE — a probe sent from the starliner to scour the landscape for vegetal life — working together to return the estranged colony of humans to planet Earth. Upon arriving "home," the humans recolonize the space and cultivate a lush, verdant landscape where a grey, ruined wasteland once stood. In the end credits, we watch humans working alongside their robot allies to clean up the space, rebuild cities and put new infrastructures in place. The final scene shows WALL-E and EVE shading themselves beneath a mighty tree. As the camera pans downwards, we can see that it has grown from the seedling that they first saved together.
To my view, "WALL-E" offers a privileged insight into the way that we view the relationship between plants and technology in the age of the Anthropocene. In the film, it is beyond all doubt that the plant symbolizes the possibility of the dying Earth’s regeneration and re-cultivation. However, it is only by way of human ingenuity (metonymized by the ship’s human captain, who overrides the AI piloting system to launch the starliner back to Earth, as well as — potentially — the boot that houses the seedling for much of the movie) and technological intervention (WALL-E and EVE) that the plant is allowed to live up to its true, world-saving potential. In other words, were it not for the innovations and intuitions of the human actants in conjunction with the technologies that they have developed, the plantlet would never have been able to flourish into the vibrant, Edenic paradise that we see in the end credits.
Almost paradoxically, then, a green utopia in this framing reveals itself to be dependent upon the presence of both humans and technology in order to be conceived as such.
As we find ourselves hurtling ever faster towards ecological catastrophe and a potential Sixth Mass Extinction Event, the plant’s portrayal in "WALL-E" as simultaneously an environmental savior (which suggests a lively, autonomous agency all its own) and as a tool for furthering human progress (which suggests, conversely, that such agency is only valid inasmuch as it can be manipulated for human gain) strikes me as paradigmatic of an approach to vegetal life in literature and media that has undergone something of a shift in recent years.
A green utopia ... reveals itself to be dependent upon the presence of both humans and technology.
In other words, the plant did not always occupy such an optimistic space in the sci-fi imaginary, nor in the collective consciousness writ large. Looking back to the turn of the twentieth century, adventure stories pertaining the genre of the so-called "botanical gothic" such as Fred M. White’s "The Purple Terror" (1899) and Phil Robinson’s "The Man-Eating Tree" (1881) delighted and horrified readers in both Britain and North America with tall tales of man-eating plants that lurked in the dense jungles of the colonial periphery. Such narratives capitalized upon the unknowability of a plant’s inner world in order to activate readers’ fears of the threats and unruliness of foreign environments, as well as the human and nonhuman subjects that inhabited them, during the Age of Imperialism.
Man-eating plant stories also played into a certain anxiety in the post-Darwinian era regarding the predatorial capacities of vegetal life. In the aftermath of evolutionary theory, there was some concern that nonhuman creatures such as plants might be able to develop new, violent hunting abilities at a speed that could topple humankind from its topmost position in the food chain — and this concern was imaginatively borne out time and again in botanical gothic fictions of vampiric orchids, strangling vines and hypnosis-inducing rootlets.
Later in the twentieth century, Cold War-era science fictions in the Anglophone tradition such as John Wyndham’s "The Day of the Triffids" (1951), Jack Finney’s "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers" (1955) and Brian Aldiss’ "Hothouse" (1974) advanced a fictionalized cast of monstrous, super-reproductive plants that usurped naturalized assumptions of human mastery over environment and formed easy metaphorical stand-ins for political or ideological enemies. Even today, the shadow of the "monstrous plant" persists to a certain extent; one can see it in such characters as the vegetal Demagorgon in the Netflix show "Stranger Things" (2016-), as well as the carnivorous Audrey II in "Little Shop of Horrors," which recently started a new run off New York’s Broadway.
While the trope of the villainous man-eating plant has waned in popularity somewhat over the years, its endurance suggests that a certain wariness has long permeated our imaginative encounters with plant life. This wariness can, perhaps, be traced to the plant’s distinctly alien mode of being in the world, along with its association with biological decay and death. After all, plants could not be more different from we humans in terms of their movements, temporality, communicative behaviors and growth — and yet, when we die, it is to the plants that we will hand over our bodies as they meld with and take over our decaying materialities. Perhaps this uneasy awareness has prompted us to hold them at something of a remove.
In the more contemporary science fiction that has been produced in the context of the Anthropocene, however, including much Solarpunk and climate fiction, the relationship with plants is often cast in more hopeful terms. To my view at least, plants have begun to be construed less as monstrous villains and contaminative threats and more as vectors for symbiosis and the construction of cautiously optimistic multispecies environmental futures. This is the case in Sue Burke’s 2018 "Semiosis," for example, along with the aforementioned "WALL-E." With the fragility of the biosphere becoming increasingly clear, and the effects of a volatile climate already starting to play out on a global stage, it would appear that the science fiction imaginary has leaned increasingly towards a reframing of plants not as aliens, monsters, or antagonists to be fought and eliminated, but rather as an ally with which to cooperate. It is as if plants have transformed from a harbinger of humankind’s demise, into an integral mode of preventing it.
Emerging alongside this propensity for treating plant life not as a problem, but as part of a solution, has been a vast uptick in science and engineering developments that either take inspiration from, or make direct use of, plant life.
While the notion of a clear-cut boundary between Nature and culture (which would place plants on one side of a binary and man-made machines on the other) has been thoroughly criticized by the likes of Timothy Morton and others, there has long lingered a sentiment that plants, as living, yet sessile, brainless and passive beings, exist on a fundamentally different plane to the techno-scientific realm occupied by non-living manmade robotics and machinery. One imagines there to be an unbridgeable gulf between them: organic versus artificial, ecological versus cybernetic, natural versus industrial.
This binaristic thinking has been disrupted, however, by a slew of recent developments in plant biology that has enabled scientists to study how plants acquire, process and share information as part of a distributed, intelligent network. Such discoveries have provided researchers with the opportunity to develop a whole host of new technological applications that are based on these vegetal systems.
Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, for example, write in "Brilliant Green" in 2015:
For some time now, there’s been talk of plant-inspired robots, a real generation of plantoids destined soon to follow human-inspired robots (the so-called androids) ... Plans are also under way for the construction of plant-based networks, with the capacity to use plants as ecological switchboards and make available on the Internet in real time the parameters that are continuously monitored by the roots and leaves … we’ll be able to get advance warnings of an approaching toxic cloud, information about the quality of our air and soil, news of impending earthquakes and avalanches. And now in the works is the design of phytocomputers — computers that use new algorithms based on the capacities and calculating systems of plants.Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, "Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence"
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Research projects such as the 2018 “Data Garden” initiative by the Grow Your Own Cloud collective have responded to the issue of so-called “data warming”: that is, the tremendous amount of energy that is required to sustain the current appetite for downloading and processing computational data by way of channels such as 5G and AI. “Data Garden” imagines a cleaner future for data storage by proposing a way to store data within plant DNA, which can be subsequently decoded using genetic sequencing technologies. Such a “clean data technology” would effectively absorb CO2, rather that emitting it. These sorts of initiatives afford data storage a sense of materiality that is often overlooked in the present moment. After all, industrial data centers are generally kept out of sight in remote locations, and terms such as “the cloud” connote a sort of airy immateriality that is far removed from the carbon-spewing reality of large-scale data storage and processing.
Meanwhile, in 2021 scientists at MIT capitalized upon the plant’s capacity to sense changing environmental conditions and managed to engineer spinach plants that can detect the presence of explosive materials by registering nitroaromatics in the soil. The plants then relay this information back to the lab via email, creating a sort of technologically facilitated dialogue between plant and human life.
Elsewhere, we have seen robots controlled by plants’ electrochemical signaling outputs and machines that manipulate the Venus flytrap’s prey-catching mechanism to grasp fragile objects without damaging them. Some have contemplated whether such plant-roboticist developments could even help us rethink smart homes, with houseplants being used as an interface to monitor air quality and level of natural light and prompt them to be altered accordingly.
MIT’s “cyborg botanist” Harpreet Sareen succinctly explains the reasoning behind this recent confluence of plants and technology:
When we create interactive devices, there are two primary components: 'sensing' in the broadest sense of what the user wants to do, and responding/displaying an output as a feedback. Usually, we create artificial electronics to carry out such functions for us, but plants inherently have such capabilities. They can sense and they can display — they are already an interface. What’s more, plants are self-powered, self-regenerating, and self-fabricating organisms. In short, plants might be the best kind of 'electronics' we have.MIT Media Lab
If plants were once covertly feared as dangerously unknowable, even alien organic creatures that might spring at any moment from docile passivity into murderous, monstrous liveliness, then I suspect that these developments in cyborg botany effectively work to demystify, or even to domesticate, vegetal life. Plants in this framing are recast as robot-like interfaces that can be hacked and manipulated in order to provide solutions to human-created problems, from climate change, unsustainable data storage practices and military defense strategies, to issues as mundane as the air quality in our living rooms.
Of course, we might read this as a positive shift. It could be argued that such initiatives recognize the long-overlooked yet astonishingly complex sensing and communicative capabilities of plant life, without falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing. It might equally be argued that a great many of these phyto-computational, biomimetic and plantoid initiatives stand to benefit the plants themselves by creating better conditions for environmental monitoring and the development of greener technologies (the emailing spinach plant, for example, might one day be able to alert scientists about poor soil quality or an insect infestation in order to improve growing conditions — although, as of now, it has only been trained to detect explosives).
However, I cannot shake the feeling that these research projects are simply another way of projecting an array of human hopes, fears and desires onto vegetal life.
Of course, we have already seen this in countless permutations over the centuries — from the narratives of man-eating plants and Cold War-era plant horror mentioned above, to commodified plants as indicators of imperial power and wealth in the times of the so-called “orchidelirium” and “tulipmania,” to the tired overuse of flora as symbols and stand-ins for human cultural traits in poetry and literature. After all, are these plant-robot research projects really about understanding the nuances and mysteries of vegetal life while cultivating a sense of respect for the plant’s otherness — or are they more akin to a Western brand of techno-utopianist posturing that is predominantly concerned with elevating the mastery and ingenuity of humankind?
In "Braiding Sweetgrass," the Indigenous scholar and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer argues for a reciprocal relationship with plants as teachers and as kin. For Kimmerer, we should enter into mutual, respectful exchanges with plants; they give us gifts freely, she explains, and we are obliged to reciprocate in turn. While cyborg botanical developments take plant life seriously in its complexity, I get the sense that any future benefit to the plant itself comes as something of an afterthought. The plants in these projects are treated not as teachers, but as tools; not as kin, but as commodities. The real protagonists, as always, are us: the human thinkers, the innovators, those who can expose the mysteries of nature and instrumentalize it for our own ends.
In establishing this line of communication between the vegetal and the technological, I would argue that we have not so much found a way to acknowledge and enter into reciprocal relationality with the otherworldly, unknowable liveliness of the plant; instead, we have found a way to further commodify and estrange it from us. It has become a tool, a machine, something that exists only as a correlative to humankind.
Which leads me back, finally, to "WALL-E." Yes, in this sci-fi rendering, the plant is the savior of humankind instead of its antagonist. Yes, it is by way of the co-operation between human, plant and machine that a more livable and just future is produced. But to uncritically pin such utopian notions of human progression onto the technologically facilitated manipulation of a plant seedling; is it really any different to producing the plant as a dystopian, villainous character determined to cause the demise of humankind?
After all, we do not take the plant seriously in either outcome; at no point do we consider the plant an active, sensing, independent entity with a lifeworld and pulsating agency all its own. At no point do we consider the plant as anything other than a stepping-stone in humankind’s onward journey, be it headed towards devastation or survival.
By way of signing off, then, I ask you to join me in a thought experiment. If the human colony in "WALL-E" had never returned to Earth, might the plants have remade the ruined planet in an altogether different image? And is it worth considering what that might have looked like?
Sources
Ackerman, Evan. “This Plant is Driving Its Own Robot.” Spectrum, 4 Dec 2018, https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/this-plant-is-driving-its-own-robot. Accessed 25 Feb 2023.
Conover, Emily. “A robot arm toting a Venus flytrap can grab delicate objects.” Science News, 25 Jan 2021, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/robot-arm-venus-flytrap-can-grab-delicate-objects. Accessed 26 Feb 2023.
de Ferrer, Marthe. “Scientists Have Taught Spinach to Send Emails and It Could Warn Us About Climate Change.” Euro News, 18 Mar 2021, https://www.euronews.com/living/2021/02/01/scientists-have-taught-spinach-to-send-emails-and-it-could-warn-us-about-climate-change. Accessed 26 Feb 2023.
Flynn, Matthew. “The ‘Plant-Robot Hybrids’ That Could Be the Next Gadget in Your Home.” Boss Magazine, n.d. https://thebossmagazine.com/plant-robot-hybrid-elowan/. Accessed 26 Feb 2023.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants." Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Island Press, 2015.
Sareen, Harpreet. “Elowan: A plant-robot hybrid.” MIT Media Lab, n.d. https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/elowan-a-plant-robot-hybrid/press-kit/. Accessed 17 Feb 2023.
