Book review: The Nation of Plants
Key theme(s):
I wouldn’t be much of a translator if I didn’t love reading! And it probably won’t come as a surprise that I spend a lot of time reading about my favourite topics in the field of sustainability. And of course, as a translator working with sustainability communicators, it’s also a very useful exercise for me to try and examine how an author has communicated their message – and how well it’s worked.
Of course, there’s no shortage of books in this area – more than any one person could read in a lifetime! So every month (approximately…), I sit down and try to summarise in four simple questions a book I’ve been reading, what makes it work and who I think would enjoy/benefit from reading that book.
Media Type: Book
Title: The Nation of Plants
Author: Stefano Mancuso (trans. Gregory Conti)
Year of Publication: 2021
What’s it about?
The book proposes (on behalf of the "Nation of Plants") a new "Bill of Rights of the Nation of Plants". Leaving aside for the moment the decision to use such a US-inflected term, the declaration consists of 8 "articles":
The Earth shall be common home of life. Sovereignty shall pertain to every living being.
The Nation of Plants shall recognise and protect the inviolable rights of natural communities as societies based on the relationships among the organisms that compose them.
The Nation of Plants shall not recognise animal hierarchies, founded on command centres and centralised functions, and shall foster diffuse and decentralised vegetable democracies.
The Nation of Plants shall universally respect the rights of the currently living and those of future generations.
The Nation of Plants shall guarantee the right to clean water, soil and atmosphere.
The consumption of any resource non-reconstitutable for future generations of living beings shall be prohibited.
The Nation of Plants shall not have borders. Every living being shall be free to travel, move and live there without limitation.
The Nation of Plants shall recognise and foster mutual aid among natural communities of living beings as an instrument of coexistence and progress.
Each article of the book is then examined in turn, with various (and arguably already-well-trodden ground).
What’s the key message?
The central message of the book is that we – not explicitly stated, but I assume the Nation of Humans – should look to plants for how to organise our communities and economies. Mancuso argues that not only do we owe our existence to plants as the basis of our food chains (though he rejects the hierarchical nature of these sorts of top-down chains that place plants below everything else), but also that we can learn from their "diffuse and decentralised vegetable democracies". And this covers every aspect of animal (or human – the two concepts seem to be used interchangeably) existence, from the way we run our economies to the relationships that we establish between ourselves and the other "Nations". It is, in that sense, a piece about biomimicry in every sense. There is probably a great deal of wisdom in the arguments, and I have marked a few sections that I think are quite novel. However, I would say that the book* is mostly a fairly succinct interweaving of relatively well-known and accepted ideas. The arguments, whilst reasonable, are mostly not particularly novel and are at times a little superficial. They are painted in fairly broad brushstrokes that no one could object to, but which I imagine would be well-known to most people picking up this sort of text.
*Actually, it's normally described as an essay rather than a book, which I would agree with.
You should read this book if…
… you're looking for a fairly simple introduction to what we might call biomimicry (as a philosophy, not a scientific/engineering method) – particularly if you need to recommend a fairly easily consumable piece of writing to someone who has expressed an interest in this way of thinking but isn't particularly motivated to sit down with some of the complex or abstract writing on the subject. In that case, when I levelled the critique in the last question that the arguments were 'a little superficial', it would be fairer to say that they are more 'on an introductory level'. And I dare say the book/essay would make a good introduction to "us city dwellers" (I've written "speak for yourself" in the margin here) and an invitation to think more plant. And that can't be a bad thing.
If you're looking for a really profound and incisive view on the subject, this may not be the book for you, however. Nor unfortunately, is it – in my opinion – likely to provide much quotable material for the cover slide of your next C-suite presentation. And that is due to some slightly unfortunate quirks in the translation.
What makes it effective?
I'm afraid I'm going to turn this question around and say that the essay has one critical flaw, and that is the translation. I hesitate to critique a fellow translator, since he is clearly highly accomplished in his field, which includes translations of complex works of political philosophy. However, I'm afraid I have to be frank and say that I don't think the translation does justice to the original text – primarily in terms of the style*.
With this sort of text, there's two main options in terms of discourse styles: firey and passionate, with lots of short sentences and fairly simple syntax, of the kind you can imagine someone reading aloud to a receptive audience; or, conversely, the kind of considered and thoughtful discourse that you might hear in a nature documentary – assured, calm and authoritative. I personally prefer the former, but the latter is also a legitimate choice. But to blend the two, with long flowing, slightly old-fashioned syntax interjected with modern idioms is jarring and clumsy, e.g. "Who among us humans is not intimately convinced of being better than any other living species? No kidding."
Similarly, choosing the more scholarly tone is fine, but it doesn't following that scholarly writing in one language is going to be acceptable in another, and there are clear signs of source language interference (which is the translator's way of saying over-literal translation). Take this sentence from p1:
The uniqueness of the Earth, the lack of credible alternatives capable of hosting life – regardless of all that is commonly said about the possibilities of 'terraforming' Mars or other improbable celestial bodies – makes it so that the entire planet should be considered a common good, inviolable, cared for and looked after as befits the only possible home for life.
'...all that is commonly said...'? '...makes it so that...'? Those long introductory phrases may be tolerated in scholarly writing in Italian, or maybe even in everyday writing, as may the passive 'is commonly said' and 'should be considered', but you won't find many English sentences in where the main verb ('makes') doesn't appear until word 33 in the sentence.
Perhaps you think I'm picking at details here, but compare this part of Carl Sagan's famous Pale Blue Dot speech, which expresses a similar idea:
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Now, far be it from my to side with epistemicide by insisting on a more conventional English style of translation rather than retaining the pure Italian rhetorical style, but I know which one I would rather ready 150 pages of, and I strongly suspect that most 'casual' English readers would feel the same.
*Given it's a fairly straightforward source text, there isn't much scope for actual inaccuracies in the translation, though I did spot one highly probable error on p.21 around the term "reduction of bacterial sulphate". I don't know what "bacterial sulphate" is, and I strongly suspect that it was meant to say "bacterial sulphate reduction", i.e. the reduction of sulphate by bacteria. This is the sort of mistake that I see my French>English translation students making and for which I upbraid them.
Takeaways for communicators:
Pick a tone and stick with it.
You must have a clear sense of your intended reader.
The message of the source text matters, not the words.