Look, first let me confess that I’m a hypocrite on this. I own two fake plants. They are both “palm trees.” One is in the Current Affairs office. Another is in my bathroom at home. And I love them. But there’s also something that profoundly disturbs me about fake plants, and I think we need to confront it if we are to have any hope of fixing our civilization. (I’m exaggerating, but only a little.) 

A new upscale Mexican restaurant has opened a few blocks from the Current Affairs office. From a distance, it looked inviting, because it was covered with bright flowers. On the patio outside, tropical greenery was arranged in planter boxes along the perimeter. The place’s name is “Tacos del Cartel,” which I find to be in bad taste, but I love lush tropical greenery. But then I looked closer and… it was fake. All of it! Plastic! There is no living plant life in the whole place. It’s an illusion.

“Tacos del Cartel,” New Orleans 

I was horrified by the revelation. And then I was curious about my reaction. Why am I so horrified? I wouldn’t mind, say, a painting of a flower. Why do I object to having imitation flowers everywhere? One obvious response is that a painting of a flower does not pretend to be a flower, and so it has a certain honesty. This, on the other hand, is a fake place, something that pretends to be what it is not. The restaurant wants me to think it has tropical plants, but it does not have tropical plants. I feel lied to, and therefore upset.

But this explanation is only superficially convincing. I don’t mind someone making a new car that looks like an old car, or building a new building that looks like an old building. I’m particularly disturbed by something that poses as something alive but is in fact dead. And I’m concerned that if we stop caring about the distinction between living and non-living things, we will gradually exterminate huge parts of life on Earth without even noticing what we’re missing. 

A plant can be a finicky thing. I’ve tried and failed before to keep plants alive. I’m not an attentive owner. When I was a child, even my cactus died from neglect. I’m doing reasonably well with my current hibiscus, but my last hibiscus withered and could not be saved. I still don’t know why, but I’m sure it was my fault. A plant is a living thing. Sometimes it can almost seem to have a personality. The creeping vine that attacks my house almost seems to be mocking my efforts to tame it by wrapping itself ostentatiously around the iron grille on one of the windows, mere days after I have cut it back. I love the vine. I speak to the vine. The vine is clearly a living thing.

An artificial vine made of polyethylene would never attack my house. I would not need to tame it. An artificial hibiscus would look superficially similar, but it would never die. It would always be flowering, unlike mine, where each flower is a little event. I wouldn’t need to water it, or ever touch soil. It would be perfect, and perfectly horrible.

I wrote recently about the rather disturbing way that our culture uses representations of animals. We show children cartoon animals, we put them on stickers and notebooks, we love videos of animals doing funny things. But our treatment of actual animals in the real world is appalling, whether we are torturing and destroying them by the millions in vast industrial killing facilities, or eliminating their habitats and forcing them to suffer agonizing deaths as they struggle for bare survival. We like images of animals, but animals themselves are messy, inconvenient, wild. I have been struck before by the fact that, across 25 years of formal education in leading public and private institutions of learning, I was never encouraged to get better acquainted with real-world animals, though I saw an awful lot of pictures of them (and we did dissect a pig fetus in anatomy class). The most extreme example of our detachment from animals that I’ve seen is the philosopher who argued that a computer-generated simulation of a cat essentially is a cat. Today, more of our experiences of animals are of videos and computer graphics, rather than flesh-and-blood creatures, and at one extreme you can forget what real animals are even like. 

I worry that with plants it will be the same. If all we know about plants is what they look like, and we have no appreciation for them as living things, no understanding of the miraculous process by which they are generated and live, then the difference between synthetic and real flowers will cease to mean anything, because the only thing that matters about a flower is what it looks like, not the incredible, astonishing process that brings it into existence. And I fear that we will kill off more and more of the natural world, replacing it with things that superficially resemble it, at least enough to stave off nostalgia for what we have lost. The simulations of living things will allow us to pretend that we still have the real thing, because our knowledge of the real thing was so superficial anyway. We’ll eliminate nature, and won’t really notice, because we’ll be given the equivalent of those creepy AI simulations of deceased relatives. Not the actual thing, but close enough to mitigate your feelings of loss and heartbreak. 

Tacos del Cartel could have filled its patio with real plants. Plants are a thing! They exist. (I also pointed this out when the New Orleans airport installed a giant monolithic picture of a tree in its terminal, when it could have had an actual tree.) But I’m sure the fake plants were cheaper, and easier to maintain, and in a ruthless capitalist system, whatever makes the most money is the thing that will happen, so it was never going to be otherwise so long as the fake plants were more cost-effective. But what happens if getting rid of nature entirely is cost-effective? Unless there are countervailing forces fighting against the forces of the profit motive, ecocide becomes an inevitability. 

I am not saying you can never have a fake plant. If I was saying this, I would immediately have to throw away two of my favorite possessions, my dual useless imitation palm trees. I am saying that we have to notice when we are converting living things to dead things, or putting something fake in the place of something real. And we have to see what this process, if carried to extremes, could do to the world. We have to ask ourselves: do we want imitation life, or real life? And then we have to fight to fill the world with things that are real, and not let ourselves be tricked into destroying everything worth conserving by accepting plastic imitations of it.