Nature, Tech, and Our Hubris

"I would never take my laptop into a garden. [Laughs] ”

When I first started shifting my work life from tech to growing things, I thought I would find a way to combine the two. Honestly, I’m glad I haven’t felt compelled to try. I appreciate the hard line between them and I’m happy to read others on the same path do too.

Though I believe it'd be a misuse of the word to call a plant technology, it's a fascinating exercise to view it through the same lens as you would something like a computer. Comparing in this way leads me to a real sense of awe― plants are so much more elegant than our cludgey computers. And in a way that mirrors our own awe-inspiring existence.

As a technology, plants are ancient self-replicating, gene drifting, solar powered, living machines building themselves from abundant materials in the air and ground, utilizing us and other creatures and the elements for dispersal.

In my mind, computers and plants occupy some similar territory: magically automatic, minuscule in operation, dictated by invisible-to-us coded instructions, and, with care to selection and application, beneficial to my continued existence. I set up the operating conditions for both, kick off its process, monitor performance along the way, and take the output of its work to make my life easier, better, or just plain possible.

My personal approach to working with plants is distinctly different from computers though. My relationship to computers is similar to how I use tools; they're lifeless, they serve mefor now, and I don't have reason to consider their experience. With plants, my relationship is more like a collaboration. I am helping a living being to grow and thrive and propagate. In that way I am not a godly creator or even a manager, but an assistant to the plant doing the real physical work. I believe this perspective leads to a deep reverence for the gradual magic of plants― a feeling I would describe as spiritual.