Wednesday, June 25, 2025
5:00 – 7:00pm

Plants come in over 400,000 varieties–and that’s just the terrestrial ones. They got their start on the earth 460 million years ago, and they are largely responsible for oxygenating the atmosphere and creating a habitable paradise for other lifeforms, including humans. They feed, cloth, heal, and house us, filling our lives with beauty, bounty, and creative inspiration. But how well do we know them? Why do we label more than half of them noxious weeds, farm just a handful of them, and consign all of them to the lowest rung of life, possessed of mere “nutritive souls” in Aristotle’s memorable phrase? And what if we have it all, or mostly, wrong?

Join philosopher and educator Bill Vitek as he explores the historical and contemporary efforts in botany, philosophy, and neuroscience to reconsider the lives of plants in terms of agency, communication skills, playfulness, awareness, and intelligence. There’s quite a lot of disagreement among the experts, and a lot at stake for the rest of us in terms of how the new discoveries about plants might change dramatically how we think about ourselves and the other-than-human world of living beings.

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Bill Vitek directs the New Perennials project and is a scholar-in-residence and affiliate humanist chaplain at Middlebury College. Bill taught philosophy for 32 years at Clarkson University, always with the objective of helping students understand that the philosophical imagination can and must do useful work in the world. He was the W. Ford Schumann ’50 Professor in Democratic Studies at Williams College in 2010. Much of his work has engaged ecological issues, including collaborations with Wes Jackson for over three decades. Vitek and Jackson co-edited two books, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (1996) and The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2008). A semi-professional jazz pianist, Vitek founded and performs in The Jazz Collective in Middlebury.

Price: $15 Members, $25 Guests
Members save 40% on tickets

• Minimum Number of People: 1
• Maximum Number of People: 50
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• Free infused water and tea available

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