Biodiversità e Plant-blindness La difficoltà di giustificare un’etica vegetale

This article investigates the philosophical, ethical, and cultural implications of the contemporary “plant turn,” focusing on the growing recognition of vegetal life within environmental ethics and post-anthropocentric thought. Starting from the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene and the ongoing loss of biodiversity, the paper examines how Western philosophy has historically marginalized plants through hierarchical and anthropocentric paradigms that privilege animality, consciousness, mobility, and human-like cognition. Particular attention is devoted to the concept of “plant blindness,” developed in botanical and educational studies to describe the human tendency to ignore vegetal life and underestimate its ecological and cognitive significance. Through a dialogue between environmental ethics, phenomenology, posthumanism, and recent studies on plant cognition and intelligence, the article reconstructs the transition from an ethics centered exclusively on humans and animals toward broader forms of moral consideration that include plants and ecosystems. Thinkers such as Hans Jonas, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Marder, Paco Calvo, Stefano Mancuso, and others are discussed in order to highlight the tensions between traditional concepts of moral status and emerging conceptions of relational, vulnerable, and interconnected life. The article argues that recognizing the agency and complexity of plants does not necessarily imply attributing human-like consciousness or rights to them, but rather requires a radical reconsideration of the categories through which Western modernity has interpreted life. Overcoming plant blindness thus becomes both an epistemological and ethical task: a transformation of perception capable of fostering new ecological sensibilities, educational practices, and political forms of responsibility toward the living world. In this perspective, the “plant revolution” represents not only a scientific paradigm shift, but also the possibility of a new humanism grounded in interdependence between humans, animals, plants, and ecosystems.