The Plants Are Watching

The Cultural History of Plant Sentience

This paper explores the enduring human fascination with the idea that plants possess consciousness, memory, or the ability to act as moral witnesses. The author traces this impulse back to 1966, when CIA specialist Cleve Backster famously claimed that plants could read human thoughts and register emotional trauma via polygraph tests. While Backster’s work was widely dismissed by the scientific community as pseudoscience, it resonated deeply with the environmental movements of the time, establishing a cultural archetype of the plant as a sentient, communicative entity.

From Witness to Villain

Wilk identifies two primary, conflicting ways humans have historically anthropomorphized plants. First, in the mid-twentieth century, plants were often cast as passive witnesses—mystical entities that could be interrogated to solve human crimes. This trope relied on the hope that technology could bridge the interspecies communication gap. Conversely, the earlier genre of 'botanical gothic' literature portrayed plants as malevolent, vengeful forces. The author argues that these stories were not truly about plants, but rather reflected colonial anxieties, where the 'foreign' natural world was feared as a potential insurgent against imperial expansion.

The Anthropocene as a Self-Inflicted Mystery

In the current era of the Anthropocene, the author suggests that our narratives about nature have shifted again. Using Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Death in Her Hands as a case study, Wilk argues that we are no longer looking for an external villain in nature. Instead, we have collapsed the roles of murderer, victim, and detective into one. We project our fears of planetary destruction onto the environment, creating a 'mystery' to avoid facing the reality that the violence of the Anthropocene is a self-inflicted process. The plants are not watching us to judge our crimes; we are watching them to avoid looking at ourselves.