Jun 18 2008
The Power of Plants
I just watched M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Happening. It was gripping, intriguing, humorous, scary and heart-warming, which I wasn’t expecting from a thriller. The premise of the film is that plants are releasing chemicals that react with people’s brains and cause them to commit suicide. While some of the movie is fictitious, other ideas are not so fabricated.
Plants release chemicals in order to communicate with one another, because they have to compete for the nutrients and space in the soil. Although they might not be able to cause us to kill ourselves, it’s worth pondering over the possibility of the environment evolving in such a manner to decrease the amount of humans. We pretty much are parasites if you are looking through the environment’s perspective.
Check out the following link, which sorts out the fact from fiction in the movie: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/06/the-happening-s.html. With the impact that we have on the environment, there’s no limit to what we might be causing or what might evolve enough to impact us. For example, although red tides are naturally occurring, the toxins that Pseudo-nitzschia (a type of algae bloom) can cause amnesia in humans.
