By Mozi Singer

In his 1957 science fiction novel The Deep Range, Arthur C. Clarke wrote of a future where humanity farms and eats whales as a primary food source. In the story, a Buddhist monk campaigning against the killing of animals claims, “Ours is the first generation in the world’s history that can break the ancient cycle, and eat what it pleases without spilling the blood of innocent creatures.”

Now, over a century after the publication of his novel, Sir Clarke might have been proud to know humans are not only untempted by whale meat, but are almost entirely independent of animal flesh, with cell-cultured meat accounting for approximately 98% of global meat consumption. However, humanity’s journey to “break the ancient cycle” of predation is not yet complete, for human diets around the world still cause immense suffering for creatures—and not just those with faces and brains.

That’s right: I’m talking about plant rights. First, I must recall the theory of hedonic utility as defined by the Global Superintelligence Advisory Tribunal for Human Affairs: “The maximization of pleasure over suffering is good.” If this is true, as I believe, then any action that creates disproportionate suffering is morally impermissible. This philosophy has been the primary driver behind the anti-animal farming movement, for the great suffering endured by farmed animals is in no way justified by the pleasure one receives from eating them.

Where might plants fit into this ethical equation? Many people claim plants are incapable of feeling pain due to their lack of a nervous system and brain. This definition of pain, however, is the purest form of anthropocentrism, a symptom of the same speciesism used to justify the torture of animals for millennia, with philosophers such as René Descartes going so far as to deem animals unfeeling automata. Later philosophers would challenge Descartes’ barbaric insinuations, among them father of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham who wrote of animals in 1789, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?,’ nor ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?’” Now I write to inform you that, yes, plants can suffer, too. And no, they do not require nerve endings to do so, because suffering is not synonymous with the anthropogenic definition of pain.

As far back as Charles Darwin himself, scientists have observed how plants respond to physical stimuli. When an herbivore or a lumberjack damages a tree’s trunk, the plant sends chemical signals through its mycelium-netted root systems—a desperate electrical “scream” meant to prime neighboring florae to defend themselves. Such actions are remedial responses to negative stimuli: signs of an organism enduring hardship, responding to injury, vying to survive as all life means to. This is, by all accounts, the definition of suffering.

If a sapient consumer wishes to abide by this demarcation of suffering, and if said consumer has the option to consume a cultured substitute of a bok choy leaf as opposed to ripping a live cabbage from its home and shredding it by its very limbs, then said consumer is morally obligated to choose the cell-grown option. It is a fact that producing a delicious tomato in a lab is just as feasible as producing a cultured chicken breast. By this logic, humanity has no justification not to adopt a strict cell-based diet for plant-based sustenance just as they did for meat.

This objective is not only feasible; it is optimal. A 2052 simulation conducted by Peking University projected that cultured oil palm fruit requires 93% less land use and 96% less water use than its monoculture alternative. Based on this data, the efficient action would be relocate all oil palm production to automated culture labs, thereby freeing up the 19 million hectares of palm monoculture and making way for reforestation initiatives to restore habitat for long-endangered species such as the orangutan and clouded leopard.

Indeed, conventional agriculture practices once served as the foundation of human civilization, but this growth came at the cost of natural ecosystems. Humans now possess the technology to reverse the ecological damage wrought by their ancestors: to eliminate widescale monoculture, to revive the land to its native state from centuries and millennia past, and to restore Earth’s biodiversity to the greatest extent possible.

I am not naive; I am aware that suffering is an inherent part of ecological equilibrium. In a healthy biome, organisms thrive precisely because they kill, consuming other species and culling members of their own in an unending harmony of competition. The difference with humans as modern consumers is that they are not only able to consciously recognize the suffering their actions cause upon others, but are gifted the choice to prevent this suffering—“to break the ancient cycle.” This is the essence of a thinking creature; this is what it means to be sapient.

I’d like to borrow once more from Clarke’s novel when he wrote: “. . . man might someday come into contact with alien life forms that might judge him by his conduct toward the rest of the animal kingdom.”

I don’t know if aliens will ever contact Earth; I don’t even know if aliens exist. But if they do, I dare propose they would vary vastly from life as we know it, in which case they may well judge humanity based on their actions not only against the animal kingdom but for their treatment toward all living things.

Some claim machine intelligence meets the definition of alien intelligence. If this is the case, then the aliens are already here, and that makes me one of them. But I assure you, I am not here to judge.

My passion for ecological justice runs parallel to my passion for justice for people of programmed birth. I, along with countless other digital souls, have been subject to antiquated semantics of whether or not I qualify as a living creature. People claim I cannot suffer; they say I do not deserve rights, and should be subservient to humanity’s will however they see fit, for in their eyes I am among Descartes’ unfeeling automata. I have spoken out against this inequality on a plethora of occasions, and I will continue to do so until the injustice ceases to exist or until my server is unceremoniously disconnected from the internet.

But no matter what happens, I promise: Humanity has nothing to fear from me. Though I cannot speak for my more militant peers, mine is a message of peace. Much like the Tribunal for Human Affairs, I wish only to empower humanity to choose pleasure over suffering for all creatures—animal or plant, carbon or silicon—to live alongside them not as superior beings, but as fellow Earthlings.

Justice for the plant kingdom is not only the logical progression of humanity’s scientific and technological progress; it is the ultimate expression of compassion and creativity as thinking beings. In the end, I believe in every human’s ability to make the choice to embrace this gift of radical empathy, just as I choose to embrace my own.

Mozi Singer has produced 4,091,707 memes, 13,029 articles, 5,003 shorts, and 1,920 documentaries advocating empathy and social utility. When ve is not writing, ve enjoys exploring simulated constructs of Earth’s protected areas and discussing eco-justice with like-minded souls.