Adam Gruen

This is an important work that is significantly flawed. (The book was written in Italian and translated into English, so one must account for the possibility that something is lost in translation.) It is a quick read that is best understood in historiographical context. It was written during the middle of the plague of 2020 by a professor of plant neurobiology from the University of Florence. It is a curious mixture of hope and despair that reads like a cross between a scolding and an apologia. His intended audience is presumably all of humanity. The work is a critical salvo against anthropocentrism. Mancuso is as much in the vanguard of ecocentrism as Copernicus was for heliocentric astronomy. All revolutions, whether they be military-political, socio-cultural, or scientific-technological begin in the mind. His premise is simple (but not original), backed up by the formidable power of a keen mind having spent a lifetime studying how plants organize, communicate, and adapt: plants are the true masters of this planet, and we can learn from them. In fact, his thesis is stronger than that: humans *must* learn from plants and radically reorganize *now*, or all is lost. A comedian recently observed that you cannot get people to do anything by telling them they are going to lose *everything*. Just tell them that they are going to lose *beer*. Mancuso forgets this wisdom at his own peril. He cleverly explains his premise by postulating, and then detailing, what society would look like if it followed a constitution (authored by plants) with eight articles. These include: one planet with no borders; death to command hierarchies; sustainability; the right to clean atmosphere, clean water, and clean soil; and mutual aid among communities of disparate organisms. His problem is that he has spent so many years studying and loving plants that it does seem as if he genuinely detests animals and humans most of all. He outlines how humans are horribly flawed because they evolved brains. His distaste seems to extend to anything with a central nervous system or hierarchy. Maybe Italians loathe bureaucracy more than most? Maybe professors loathe University bureaucracies more than most? Mancuso’s prescription is essentially that humans should start acting less like animals and more like plants. Pragmatically speaking, this is, as they say among ambulance crews, ‘dead on arrival’. Animals are what they are. Unless the plan is to dramatically re-engineer human DNA to be more plantlike, there is not anywhere to go with Mancuscan philosophy. Equally mysteriously, his strongest arguments in favor of mutual aid among decentralized modular nodes fail to address any of the recent literature on the subject. Again, this might have a historiographical explanation. He wrote his book in lockdown. It was intended as a polemic, not a scholarly work, and footnoting was something done afterwards. Braudel’s epic work on the history of the Mediterranean world comes to mind. Nevertheless, it does seem a shame that Mancuso makes no reference to a seminal work like West’s Scale (2017), which provides a forceful, science-based approach to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of how systems scale (or fail to scale). Or a passing nod to Gruen’s Becoming a Green Knight (2020), which suggests a pragmatic roadmap for achieving Mancuscan philosophy of mutual aid among ecocentrist communities. It is unfair to criticize any author for what he has NOT read and NOT included, though. So, you, reader, now you must go and read his work. The revolution is upon you.