Of course they do! I would love to speak to the person who says “no”, and then I would ask them: “And a computer, does that have a memory?” Everything is linked to everything else in mutual harmony. That is the law of evolution, and memory is the bond that connects. Right now, even in forensics, a technique is used: suspects are made to walk through a room where a violent act has taken place, and the plants scream in horror, reacting in their own way to the person who caused the violence. That is a known fact. In the world we live in, everything is alive. Life could not have arisen from non-life! From the spiritual comes the soulful, from the soulful – the material. This is the path of evolution, gradually thickening. It can be called the descent of spirit. And a human is the one who must unite the soul with the spirit to become like the creator. A plant, like everything created by God, is closely connected and influences people through emotions and feelings. If plants are destroyed within the limits of necessity, it could be compared to milking a cow: you are not committing violence against the cow, for her it is pleasant. Likewise, rye or grass is pleased when it is mown. A tree also has its own time when it must grow and its own time when it must be felled. Once it has fulfilled its task in this world. People do not take that into account. They are in such a deep material fixation: a tree or a stone, nothing to them is alive except themselves. Everything is just a resource.

“No!” Ruslans, DJ

In every sense, in the way one typically understands human memory—which I assume is what is meant here—no! Clearly, a plant has some purely genetically programmed function so that it “remembers”, for example, that it must sprout leaves. However, it certainly cannot be a memory that recalls events or accumulates knowledge. The fact that there must be some argumentation so that a person doesn’t pick, pull, and try to tear everything apart, is probably why plants and animals are compared to humans, so that people can understand something—but not that a tree remembers. Unfortunately, it only “clicks” for a human if someone is compared to someone else, and plant memory, in my opinion, is a purely poetic metaphor. In a way, it is even narrow-minded, because we also think Martians are just like humans, only “slightly different”: with arms, but four of them, with a head, but huge, with eyes, but like a Furby. We also try to “humanise” plants or animals by attributing human-like traits to them. And ultimately, we don’t feel sorry for all the possible living beings, but for ourselves! The thing is, it’s not that they can’t live without us, but that we can’t live without them! But they—having survived all the ice ages, dinosaurs, mammoths, possible Lemurians and Atlanteans—will survive us too, regardless of whether a few trees are preserved by the Bank of Latvia or not.
Prepared by A.A. Article first published in the May 2001 issue of Rīgas Laiks magazine