{"id":280,"date":"2010-09-03T10:46:38","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T09:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=280"},"modified":"2010-09-03T10:46:38","modified_gmt":"2010-09-03T09:46:38","slug":"recognising-plants-and-their-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2010\/09\/03\/recognising-plants-and-their-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Recognising Plants \u2013 and their Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A good conversation with a colleague yesterday about evaluation and learning, especially about plants. \u00a0Is it really enough if young people can recognise a few plants \u2013 and colour in their copybooks correctly? \u00a0Shouldn't we be seeking something more sophisticated \u2013 something more connected to their lives and to the Earth? \u00a0I thought of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.solearabiantree.net\/namingofparts\/namingofparts.html\">Naming of Parts <\/a>and this obsession with trivial knowledge and labling.<\/p>\n<p>All this took my mind to Plants Rights, and wondered if life has caught up with satire yet. \u00a0It has, as the always <a href=\"http:\/\/www.treehugger.com\/\">interesting treehugger.com<\/a> confirms. \u00a0It reports that<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ekah.admin.ch\/en\/index.html\">Swiss Government's\u00a0Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology<\/a> concludes that plants have rights, and we have to treat them appropriately. A majority of the panel concluded that \"living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive\".<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I'd say that it's only a matter of time before a more militant wing \u00a0of the argument emerges, probably about equal opportunities. \u00a0There will likely be much talk of speciesism, nativeism and a call for non-discrimination around bio-geography and time: so what that a species has been here for millenia? \u00a0Such\u00a0grandfather rights\u00a0are always rent-seeking special pleading of one sort or another \u2013 the argument will go. \u00a0It will then turn to disability and quotas. \u00a0They may find a natural ally in <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2010\/08\/02\/the-quality-of-strawberry-jam-if-not-strained\">Ofscoff<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A good conversation with a colleague yesterday about evaluation and learning, especially about plants. \u00a0Is it really enough if young people can recognise a few plants \u2013 and colour in their copybooks correctly? \u00a0Shouldn't we be seeking something more sophisticated...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}