Philosophical foundations of plant awareness for sustainability.

Plant awareness disparity—humans overlooking plants—is linked to negative consequences for education, biodiversity conservation, and sustainability, motivating a philosophical re-examination of perception and value.

• Why it matters: The gap is that prevailing human attention and ethical attitudes toward plants are shaped by cultural assumptions, contributing to missed educational opportunities and weaker conservation and sustainability efforts.
• What they did: The work proposes four complementary modes of perception—hierarchy, similarity, relation, and otherness—integrating phenomenology, Indigenous worldviews, Eastern thought, ecofeminism, everyday aesthetics, and vegetal ontology to frame plant awareness.
• The result: Practicing to see plants differently through philosophy is argued to retrain human perception and foster humility, gratitude, and responsibility, strengthening ethical foundations for sustainability and dialogue across science, education, and the humanities.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.