What about plants?

[ryansmithxvx]

I highly recommend this article from Gary Francione's blog. It's a few months old, but I just came across it:

A Frequently Asked Question: What About Plants

Comments

[savagefreedom]

I really find myself disagreeing with this article as a whole, at least in his assertion that we should hold no moral obligations toward trees, or in general, anything we deem to be non-sentient. I think we should hold moral obligations to pretty much everything that we have the power adn especially desire to commodify and destroy. Especially, as no_daybutoday said, since the survival of trees is in our best interest. Francione did mention that we should use resources wisely, but the rest of the language he uses is pretty much concurrent with the mindset of the people who DO wantonly destroy trees, with the exception of the moral obligation to the creatures that live in and around the trees. Plenty of people, plenty today even, do not even regard cows as sentient, as incredible as that may seem. They are a commodity to many, "cattle," just like a great number of insects are put under the blanket term "pests" and thus deemed worthy of extermination. I also just don't feel his argument about what makes something sentient is the best way of going about it. He suggests that sentience is wholly determined by whether or not something is able to "escape." Plants have never needed to escape, they have thrived quite well despite things like wildfires and larger-scale natural disasters. They have only recently began facing such a major assault against their existence, by mankind and its assertion that there is no good reason to be morally obligated to trees.

I'm not saying trees will one day evolve to be able to uproot and run away, because I don't believe "escape" is the sole signifier of sentience, though it is certainly prevalent in other creatures. Other creatures that have more immenent threat from predators. And I'm not saying that cutting down a tree is the same as killing a deer, but I don't think that difference is cause to abandon the notion of at least some level of moral obligation towards non-animal beings.