Guided by Plant Voices - Issue 84: Outbreak

Plants are intelligent beings with profound wisdom to impart--if only we know how to listen. And Monica Gagliano knows how to listen. The evolutionary ecologist has done groundbreaking experiments suggesting plants have the capacity to learn, remember, and make choices. Gagliano, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia, talks to plants. Plants summon her with instructions on how to live and work. Some of Gagliano's conversations happened in prophetic dreams, which led her to study with a shaman in Peru while tripping on psychoactive plants. Along with forest scientists like Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, Gagliano raises profound scientific and philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence and the possibility of "vegetal consciousness." But what's unusual about Gagliano is her willingness to talk about her experiences with shamans and traditional healers, along with her use of psychedelics. For someone who'd already received fierce pushback from other scientists, it was hardly a safe career move to reveal her personal experiences in otherworldly realms. Gagliano considers her explorations in non-Western ways of seeing the world to be part of her scientific work.