Federico Comollo

The rise of the more-than-human characterises our era. Every day, we are surrounded by evidence that our planet is subject to different forces and agencies. Various entities, from animals to plants, act in their environments, changing and performing territories. This paper will analyse the biosemiotic vegetal agency and its ethical consequences. Starting from the biosemiotic approach and some phytosemiotic theories, I will show how critical plant studies, particularly plant ethics, can benefit from adopting a multidisciplinary viewpoint. Following the biosemiotic definition of agency, semiosphere, and semiotic freedom, vegetal action can be better grounded, and the intrinsic value of plants can be assessed more straightforwardly. This paper, therefore, aims to contribute to the communication between plant philosophy and biosemiotics, showing how biosemiotic theories can go beyond the purely semiotic field of study.

In his extensive and revolutionary work, the biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll examined the animal kingdom, laying the first foundations for a wider reflection on non-human animal agency in ecosystems. However, the scientist did not include in his reflection on _Umwelt_ plants and fungi, widely considered passive organisms in the 1900s. In this paper, we will try to find the contact points between the biologist’s theories and contemporary botanical discoveries, taking into account some of the findings on plant agency, communication, and interaction even with fungi, crucial actors in the vegetal organization of the territory. The core of the work will be to demonstrate that plants could fit in an integrated and extended theory of _Umwelt_ abandoning the “zoocentric” perspective that permeated the studies on botanical species. To achieve this aim, it will be necessary to first deconstruct the historical theorization of plants’ passivity, which has ancient roots and was enforced in some philosophical perspectives of the 20th century. Consequentially, with two focuses, the first one on communication and the second one on agency, the paper will highlight the possibilities and horizons that could be opened through a comparison between the theories of von Uexküll and nowadays botanical breakthroughs.