Monica Gagliano: Regenerating the human spirit (ep331)
How might viewing the Earth as an embodiment of imagination invite us to conceptualize or feel our ecological crises in different ways? And what does it mean to be more imaginative with our scientific inquiries—while also remaining a humility to recognize the limitations of this particular lens?
In this episode, we welcome Monica Gagliano, a Research Associate Professor in evolutionary ecology at Southern Cross University where she directs the Biological Intelligence (BI) Lab as part of the Diverse Intelligences Initiative of the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
Her work has extended the concept of cognition (including perception, learning processes, memory) in plants. By re-kindling a sense of wonder for this beautiful place we call home, she is helping to create a fresh imaginative ecology of mind that can inspire the emergence of truly innovative solutions to human relations with the world we co-inhabit. Her latest book is Thus Spoke the Plant.
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Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Allergic by Lil Idli
“I don’t think we are here to know. And that, I think, is the problem. Not knowing creates an open space wherein solutions can actually arrive.”
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Monica Gagliano: There is a kind of science that is one that we have decided is the mainstream, the status quo, whatever we want to call it. And that kind of science portrays itself as very dry and unimaginative. I say "portrays" because I know, from the inside, that that is also not true.
Whether scientists are aware or not, imagination is an essential ingredient.
You cannot explore something that doesn't exist yet or that you don't know about yet unless you can imagine it possible. What I did with my work is just making that link a little bit more explicit. Instead of pretending that I'm not using my imagination, I actually embraced it.
When science becomes unimaginative, it is not science anymore. Science is an art form. And like every other art form, it demands imagination and creativity be applied. If it is not there, then we're not really exploring anything. We're not looking for learning or even wisdom. We're just repeating what we already have, which doesn't do anything.
A lot of science done in the major institutions are often of this second kind. It's safe because we kind of already know it's going to work. And we do need to do our report, fulfill our duty to grants, and all of that stuff. So we end up producing science that is safe, that is a slight variation of what we did last year. It works for the system and it supports careers... But it doesn't mean that it's actually doing anything real to advance knowledge. It is not in service of the bigger picture and a bigger whole.
In the morning, I often sit outside, do my meditation practice, and have my breakfast in the sun. And I feel very grateful that I have the life I have—for the honor of being paid to be as imaginative as I can so that I can do the best science that I can. Not doing so would feel like I'm ripping off of the opportunity that the scientist has been given and also ripping off the society which is supporting these aspects of our culture, that is not necessarily going to deliver anything immediately.
Science is not about a product to be sold. It is just for the pure sake of exploring. When we do it that way, that's when we may find something magical and amazing that we didn't know of before.
Imagination is always there, but somehow, we have given it a bad reputation, so we pretend it's not there. For me, the best way has been to, instead of trying to get out of it, get into it as much as possible.
Kamea Chayne: Basically, within a lot of the science that is practiced, especially through research institutions, they're more so going for expected outcomes, or they might have an idea of what is probably going to happen, like, "let's test it out to see if it happens", rather than being open-ended to what they can discover.
Monica Gagliano: Yes, and actually, "expected outcomes" is often something you have to fill in in a grant application. And the open-ended is what we call blue sky science. It's very difficult to get funded for that, because it literally means, "I've got this crazy idea. It could work, but possibly not. And we are not going to know unless we try."
In this sense, I've been very lucky because I've been able to do exactly that.
Kamea Chayne: So it's not necessarily that there isn't curiosity and imagination there, it's just that there's an institutional bias in terms of how research grants are being given out, which affects the types of research being done and the types of conclusions and findings that we receive.
You also say that for you, "The idea of imagination brings up this feeling of [being] unruly and out of control." At the same time, you say that imagination is being embodied by nature and Earth.
This reminds me of a recent conversation I shared with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, where he mentions that Earth is unframeable, untamable, and too unruly to be systemic.
I wonder if this might resonate with you and if you could elaborate more on how you view Earth as an embodiment of imagination—and how that might invite us to conceptualize or feel our ecological crises in different ways.
Monica Gagliano: You just need to look outside, or anywhere, really, and you will see the answer.
I'll give an example of something that happened to me just two days ago. We just got a new hive. The bees were very happy, and the hive was very full. So we knew that they were going to swarm possibly in the next few days. And they did. We heard this real, loud buzz, and we thought, "Here we go." We ran outside, and the sky was covered in bees. They were all moving together towards a tree. We were so fascinated, and we got really close. And my housemate even stretched out and put his hand in the bee mass.
But what we didn't do was to listen deeply enough to realize that the bees might not want to be disturbed then. And we got only a couple of stings, but considering what they could have done if they really wanted to teach us a proper lesson then to not disturb us... they really only gave us like a little slap on the hand.
The bees have their own agency, and they're going to do what they need to do. They're going to let us know if we're trying to constrain and control something that is not meant for us to control.
In this case, we really wanted them to go into a box so that we could have a new beehive. Instead, the bees were like, "No, that's not what we have in mind. And we're going to let you know that." In that sense, there is this unruliness.
Here is the human wanting a certain outcome, and here is an amazing group of bees saying that that's not the outcome that they want.
In fact, I felt so humbled, because of course, when a bee stings you, they die. And the fact that some bees in this mass of bees decided to come and give us a lesson, knowing that that was the end but that they were doing the right thing for their collective, exerting that power of wildness—what that meant in that situation was, "I am prepared to sacrifice myself for maintaining the wildness of myself,” where the self represents the collective, too, not only the individual.
Kamea Chayne: It definitely instills a deep sense of humility. Oftentimes, we try to conceptualize and make sense of the world in particular ways... And with the institutional bias of science, we might try to predict certain outcomes. But this human-centric conclusion ignores that the world has its own agency and that it has different beings which interact. There's so much that we do not know and that is beyond our control, too.
And the most dominant forms of knowledge that are shaping our understandings of how we can address our ecological crises and the fever of our Earth that is climate change have been informed and shaped mostly by the field of science.
So we hear this rhetoric of, "I believe in science," as a way of expressing recognition of the ills of our planet—and as a way of supporting actions to be taken. But even scientists note the lack of a holistic view within, and the anthropocentric nature of, mainstream science.
I worry a little bit about an unquestioned faith in science—not in a conspiratorial climate change denial way but in a way that recognizes that this is about so much more than just greenhouse gas emissions. There's a concern that failing to see the limitations of this lens might prevent us from tuning in to other ways of knowing that could be critical to actually guiding us towards healing...
Monica Gagliano: I can't agree more.
As a scientist, I think science is an incredible way to explore the world. But as a scientist, I can also say that this is not the only way to explore and meet the world.
I don't think that we are here to know. And that, I think, is the problem. Because to know means you have already resolved certain things—as if you can finish, close these things.
But to allow and acknowledge the not knowing creates an open space wherein solutions can actually arrive. If you already know, then you already also know the solution. So if it turns out that you don't know the solution, you've already closed the door on anything to enter.
And the current situation with the world, and the elephant in the room, of course, is that it's not about the virus, but about a planet in total change. Whether this change is going to support us as humanity or not is a question that should be pondered. I totally believe, and it is just a belief, that we actually have all of the technical solutions that we could possibly need to resolve this problem. That is not actually getting at the core of the issue.
When you get a fever, it is because you contracted something. There is an issue underlying the fever, so you don't just try to fix the fever—you go to the source.
What we need to do for the planet, and then everything else will follow out of that, is to regenerate the human spirit.
And the regeneration here needs to be of the human, not of the land. The land also needs regeneration, of course. But we need to first regenerate the human spirit—to the point where humans realize, again, what the place of our species is in the context of the whole. And that process doesn't involve losing our individuality—it's like the bees. You can be an individual bee, but you belong to a collective. And the collective must come first.
In this case, the collective is the collective of all the species and all the beings and even the planet itself. When the human spirit is regenerated towards that again, I think the choices that we make are not going to be dictated by what the science says. What we'll need to do will be so obvious to us, we will just be all be doing it.
I'm excited because I think that this is probably, again, as a scientist, the biggest experiment that we could ever do. Can we actually regenerate the human spirit, and see how the rest will follow? That's where I'm directing my work next, and it feels timely—not even urgent, but just a sense that that's what we need to do.
Kamea Chayne: It sounds like you're embodying imagination as well, letting how you feel and whatever needs to emerge guide you.
And as you share, "As a scientist trying to know plants better, you're expected to think, but for you, you're often guided by how you feel."
This reminds me of Indigenous scientist and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass. I know you've also been hugely influenced by indigenous knowledge and recognize that it should complement and work with scientific knowledge.
Can you share more about the differences and the links you see between these forms of knowledges, and how you work to build or bridge these two in your work, as you try to become more intimate in how you relate with and understand plants?
Monica Gagliano: They are two bodies of knowing. And really, they are two lenses looking at the same thing, in slightly different ways. In that sense, I don't think they are incompatible. If anything, we need all of the bits of knowledge that we have to move forward. Whether it's science, Indigenous knowing, or the arts and music, whatever it is that we have, let's bring it all to the table.
But some of these bodies of knowledge, like science, need to find their own regeneration. In the case of science, compared to my experience of Indigenous understandings of the world, science is still quite obsessed with the idea that we are observing the world in objective ways and that we can know the world by separating ourselves from it, looking at it as if it were an object.
But objectifying the world is very dangerous. And this is at the core of the problem that we are facing in Western society in particular, where everything is being objectified, everything can be solved, everything can be bought.
The truth is nothing can be bought. There is no money you could pay for a plant, nor should you sell your time. And yet everyone is being bought. Your time is the only special thing that you have, and eventually, your life will be over, and you've sold away your time. What kind of crazy thing is that? That emerges from a very techno-scientific perspective of objectifying, quantifying, dividing. Everything is in these little parcels or quantities. It makes us feel, I guess, safe.
Yet we've come to times like these, where that kind of approach to the world doesn't work. And we suddenly feel very vulnerable, totally out of control, but we are trying to pretend everything is under control.
We forget the fact that actually, we never had nor were we ever meant to have any control.
Looking to Indigenous perspectives—again, I don't want to appropriate the word as it represents so much diversity—fundamentally, my understanding is that it's about relating and relationships. And it's more about not knowing than knowing anything. Only in the not knowing can you really know the other, whatever the other is—a human being, an animal, a plant or even something or someone that is in a different reality.
From that perspective, the world is rich and full of relationships, and you don't go into it having your own expectations of what they should be. Then, you might have a chance to actually know. And through the process of relating, because you are made by those relationships, too, you get a chance to know who you are.
Science denies this relational approach to life in all its forms by objectifying life. That's a tragedy, and we're seeing that right now.
Kamea Chayne: This conversation is giving me many flashbacks to past episodes, but particularly the one with Dr. Suzanne Simard, where we talked about scientific objectivity and about how people may critique her research on mother trees and forest intelligence as anthropomorphizing, which means making other beings seem human—typically viewed as a negative thing.
But as you also inquire imaginatively about the intelligence and capacity for memory for plants, it makes me wonder whether the idea of anthropomorphizing is itself anthropocentric—and that being able to recognize intelligence and feeling and memory in its vastly diverse forms that we may not even understand is actually an invitation to "omnimorphize" our consciousness and perspectives.
Monica Gagliano: Suzanne and I met a few years ago now. When we did, it just felt like this coming together of two sisters. We had a lot in common, because we were both looking at things from a similar perspective. And yes, absolutely, I faced the same issue of being labeled as anthropomorphizing, as adopting an animistic perspective. I still receive strange emails from some hardcore professors being quite rude and childish about everything. But that just highlights that we cannot cope with losing control. Once we feel threatened by change, we try to control even more. But the solution cannot be found there. It's found in acknowledging that we don't have control and asking what it is that we need to do, encounter, and experience now.
I really liked your description of the anthropocentric perspective. For me, it was always about what else can we be? We are the Anthropos, right? Like all other species, we have our own experience of life as the human form. We can attempt, and at times with certain practices, to even merge with other forms and have an expanded version of life and experience of life beyond the constraint of the human experience. But in general, most of us, most of the time, only have the human experience as the lens through which we look.
So what's wrong with anthropomorphizing, if it is understood for what it is? Anthropocentrism doesn't mean that we are special; it just means that this is the lens that we have.
Maybe anthropomorphizing is the best way for us to get closer to others, because that's the channel through which we can empathize and connect in the best way.
Ultimately, anthropomorphizing is the only way that we have to describe the feelings we experience in moments of relating. It's when we start thinking that that makes us special, and when we measure everyone against us as the golden standard, that we have a problem.
We need to understand that humans are one of the many species that are part of this thing that we call life, that we make in relation with all of these other species.
There is something naturally empowering, I think, in totally owning our humanity.
Kamea Chayne: So the human experience is just a fact of how we show up and experience the world. And maybe it's that we need to recognize its subjectivity. Human supremacy would be the problem, when we use our measurements to, for example, dictate what it means to be intelligent or what it means to have feeling, or what you need to have in order to be deemed as "good", or "developed", or "advanced" as we are.
Monica Gagliano: I've received so many emails from so many people, including academics, not just the general public, just basically thanking me, which is really weird in itself, for allowing them to validate what they already knew. It's almost like we got to a point where thinking of humans as the model has blocked our ability to recognize that that doesn't feel right. And people would not dare say that it doesn't feel right unless someone else says it.
It reminds me a little bit of the story of the emperor with no clothes, where the child comes up to ask the father why the emperor is wearing no clothes, when nobody else dared to say that—even though that is the truth. Everyone is just scared because they might chop your head off or you might end up in jail, or whatever. The child represents the innocence of the human which is not naïveté—in knowing and feeling life exactly as is presented before any conditioning.
It's incredible, and I think that the new work that is coming through science, not just mine, but from Suzanne and many others, and also not just through science, they are pushing a lot of boundaries. All of these represent the child in the story. There's been this big emperor going around for centuries now, telling us how to live, how we should feel, how life should feel like, and then there is the child that says that the emperor's got no clothes. And he's like, "Finally, somebody said it. Excellent. Now we can relax."
Kamea Chayne: I really love that analogy; it definitely resonates. And it shows that we have a lot of deconditioning and deprogramming to do so that it'll allow us to feel freer and more affirmed to see the world more clearly and be more imaginative.
And so for you, beyond being more imaginative in how you approach getting to know plants, I know you're also curious to see the broader picture to see the land, all the beings entailed, other agents, including various elements like fire and rain, that are constantly shaping and transforming landscapes.
Have you thought about the capacity for land to have memory, through a way of conceptualizing memory that may be different from how we feel, and therefore what healing the land's histories, traumas, and severed relationships with their caretakers may require?
Monica Gagliano: I have been thinking about that a lot, and I think that's where I'm moving to. The new vision that I have, which was given to me during a very intense retreat a couple of years ago, is named resonant Earth. It's "resonant" because it refers to the feeling that we know very well, when you meet someone and you get on well straight away, that emotional and psychological connection, where the other gets you. But also resonance, from a physics perspective, is when sound is amplified by the way in which sounds come together.
And it is "Earth" because I think this is a project that is going to involve the entire planet, which sounds very megalomaniac but there is no other way. We can't keep working on chunks. If we tackle the problem at its roots, and here going back to the human spirit, in other words, our humanity, it is absolutely possible for the regeneration to occur simultaneously across the entire world all at once. We don't need decades or centuries.
What I feel is my role at the moment is waiting—and I'm so bad at waiting because I'm so impatient—to receive instructions from the land, directly.
It's become very clear to me that I need to find a space that I can take care of in the long term. At the moment, I'm on a beautiful piece of land, but I'm renting and I'm not allowed to plant here. And sometimes these human rules, the rules of my landlords are very different from the way the land thinks.
I've been exploring and looking at this conflict between what the land would want and what it is asking of me to do or not to do.
There is land somewhere where I need to put my own roots down and become that caretaker so that I can observe, over a long period of time, the cycles, patterns and dynamics of the land. I want to be sitting and listening and responding to what I'm being called to do.
And can you imagine if I tried to write a grant saying all this? So I've been struggling to put it down on paper because I don't know how to formally speak of this, but it's actually a very clear vision. It's a very "unscientific" approach, and yet embedded in it, there is a lot of science because I can see that a lot of the things that I've done up to this point, including from a technological perspective, will come to play.
I think maybe what I need to do to just create spaces where I can regenerate my own spirit, but also for others to come and feel safe and do the same as well, to be human again. And the land is the one that does the work. Being on the land, planting trees... we have a beautiful creek here, and I often go and listen with hydrophones to the creek and the water, and the sounds are so incredible. I can hear so much more. And here is where technology's actually extending the capacity of the human, which are underdeveloped because we haven't used them for a long time. Technology can help us redevelop this, so that maybe we can eventually let go of the technology itself and be able to hear.
And that happened the other day. There is a tree that I climb regularly and I sit on it. I don't think of anything. There are no major insights. But every time I come back into the house, I always feel much more at peace. But the other day, I had my hydrophones under the tree, and I was listening to the sounds of the trees while I was sitting on the top.
After a while, I decided to take my headphones off and put my ear against the tree. The sounds were so loud that I realized I actually don't really need headphones, that I'd done that so regularly that I knew what those sounds were.
The experience itself gave me the insight that if we spend enough time in the right environments, this regeneration can happen really fast. And that's what resonant Earth is going to do: regenerate the human, and then the human will feel naturally grateful and honored to regenerate whatever damage we have caused on the physical land and on all the other species.
Kamea Chayne: Everything is ultimately interconnected. It definitely makes sense that our healing is all tethered. What you described is also really relatable, because I also currently rent land and there are things that I want to do but can't. I also feel called to be able to take root in someplace and actually build a long-term relationship and listen and be called to do whatever the land may call me into.
This is probably also relatable for a lot of people, because so many, given the human rules, are deprived of the ability and access to build this relationship with the land and to experience those relational shifts deep inside of us—that can't be taught or just told. The time feels ripe for these different layers of transformations to take place. And hopefully, they'll support one another and we can reverse this pattern of self-destruction and trend towards regeneration at every single level.
And before we go into our fire round questions, I would love for you to share the greatest lessons that you've learned from working with plants and your inspiration to really view plants as teachers to honor.
Monica Gagliano: Recently, I was told, "Be permanently moved". What then followed was, "You do not live in your mind; you live in your heart.” So be permanently moved into your heart, and the mind will follow.
The mind is just the hands doing the things, and it's an amazing tool, but the heart is the one that is the feeling tool, the listening tool, and so on. Often, I find that when I speak of these things, I can't convey my feelings. That happens even between humans, right?
Anyway, being permanently moved was the message, and it's been taking a while and it's a work in progress, always.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Monica Gagliano: When I was still living in Italy—I must have been fifteen—this friend of mine said to me, "Monica, this book came out, and the way this person is describing their experience is exactly the same as the way you speak."
And what I used to say was that it looks to me like there are steps that I can see, and I just need to put my foot into those steps and then I can just follow. I don't really know what the steps are, and I don't really know where they're going, but it feels like that's where I need to put my next foot and the next foot. Every so often the steps disappear, like in a fog, but I know that there are more steps that I will be able to see a little further. So I just trust and put my foot forward.
The book that was describing something similar was The Celestine Prophecy. And in hindsight, there were a lot of things in that book that actually not only describe the way in which I operate, but that also paralleled my life. That book talked about energetic exchanges between plants and humans... And it's funny because that's where those steps led me to. Who knows, maybe that book was really important to me.
Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Monica Gagliano: I do a lot of meditation, and I do qigong every morning.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your greatest inspirations right now?
Monica Gagliano: It comes and goes, but usually, I feel a sense of openness, and I feel really inspired when I think of the future. I know this sounds strange, because a lot of people at the moment are feeling very anxious about the future, and I do, too.
But then there are those moments of great inspiration, where I know that this is the biggest initiation that we could have ever asked for, as a collective. I can see, within myself, that I'm going through the same initiation within my own personal life.
And initiations always come because you're ready. They are always there to test what you can do, not necessarily something beyond you. Especially with the plants, for example, I have learned that they would never give you, in ceremony, something beyond what you can actually take.
They always deliver exactly the right amount of medicine. Sometimes, you need very strong medicine.
Kamea Chayne: Monica, thank you so much for gracing us with your learnings and inspiring us to be freer and more affirmed to be more imaginative in how we try to understand the world—and therefore be guided towards our paths forward.
What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Monica Gagliano: I don't think wisdom says the last words. Wisdom probably says the first few words and then allows others to follow. I think I already shared the little bit of wisdom that I have, and so the last words are for everyone else.
