I was looking around my office today, and I happened to meditate on the overwhelming abundance of plants. We actually have people on staff whose only job is to keep our captive flora hydrated. Plants are virtually everywhere in this building—on the file cabinets, forming little oases between cubie clusters, and in the hallway by the elevator. You see them just inside the glass entrance doors on the bottom floor, and in the room where job hunters fill out their copious applications. Most of these plants will never see genuine sunlight, and that makes me sad. Day after day these poor plants subsist beneath the cruel glare of fluorescent lights, never getting the opportunity to engage in authentic photosynthesis. They enrich our lives with their beauty, produce oxygen for us to breathe, and remove noxious gases from the air. What do we give them in return? A stick of stale plant food and a pat on the leaves.

It's shameful.

And I want to set them free.

To that end, I would like to propose the first national Plant Amnesty Day. On Thursday, the first day of July, I'm asking everyone who works in an office to "adopt" a plant and carry it outside to freedom. Your bosses will not look favorably on this activity so you may need to conceal it beneath a bulky raincoat or in a cooler marked "human remains." With as little ado as possible, carry your adopted plant outside and drive it out to a nice, secluded spot in the country. If your lunch hour doesn't permit you to travel that kind of distance, simply deposit your plant far enough away from your building that it will not be found by nosy groundskeepers. The last thing I would want is for one of these plant to experience a taste of freedom, only to have it stripped away because some lazy schmo wouldn't carry its pot farther than the CEO's cherry-red convertible MG.

I'll be the first to admit it—I don't know what kind of mayhem will result from these acts of wanton liberation. Perhaps the plants will un-pot themselves and scurry away on thin-tendrilled roots. Perhaps the sudden infusion of sunlight will have a radioactive effect on them, causing them to burgeon into huge, deadly creatures like Triffids that will quickly multiply and take over the planet. But I doubt it. The most that will happen, I suspect, will be a little nostalgia on our parts, and a tremendous karmic sigh of relief on theirs.

So the question remains. Shall we not defend the powerless? Shall we not protect these meek and gentle entities, who quietly take nourishment from the soil and do not trouble us for anything more? I say yes! These noble plants would never ask for our help, even if evolution had given them voices with which to do so. We must be their advocates. We must speak for the philodendron, the chrysanthemum, the ivy, and the various species of Dracaena, not only because they are older and wiser than we are (carrying in their genes the imprint of life billions of years ago), but because they are our little green brethren.

Plant Amnesty Day. July 1st. Power to the plants.

Tags: anthropomorphism