When George III talked to plants, he was mad. But in our post-religious society, pseudoscience is king and reigns surrounded by any pagan lunacy that would have embarrassed an actual madman. Lefties insist that they are rational because they believe in science. But science isn’t a belief system. That’s scientism. When you believe in things, well you can start believing in talking trees.

Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and shrubbery. She recalls being rocked like a baby by the spirit of a fern. She has ridden on the back of an invisible bear conjured by an osha root. She once accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina, an ancient wind instrument, in a redwood forest. “Oryngham,” she says, means “thank you” in plant language. These interactions have taken place in dreams, visions, songs and telekinetic interactions, sometimes with the help of shamans or ayahuasca.

This has all gone on around the same time as Dr. Gagliano’s scientific research, which has broken boundaries in the field of plant behavior and signaling

Why don’t you believe in science?

That comes to us from fringe lefty nutter outlet, the New York Times.

Anyway, Dr. Monica owes all of this to a talking tree.

Plants have directly shaped her experiments and career path. In 2012, she says, an oak tree assured her that a risky grant application — proposing research on sound communication in plants — would be successful. “You are here to tell our stories,” the tree told her.

Dr. Gagliano tells it, she’d been volunteering at an herbalist’s clinic, and had begun using ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew that induces visions and emotional insights (and often nausea). She says that one day, sober, she was walking around her garden and heard, in her head, a plant suggest that she start studying plants.

Aren’t those dumb religious believers silly? They pray to a being in the sky when we know we can just talk to the trees?

Because science.

Dr. Gagliano worked with multiple plant shamans, or vegetalistas, in Peru. There she bathed in the foul-smelling pulp of an Ayahuma tree, which then designed a scientific experiment for her, instructing her to “train young plants in a maze and give them freedom of choice.” The Ayahuma also helped her diagram a 2017 study investigating pea plants’ use of sound to detect water.

This isn’t just a case of a scientist being a nutter. That’s hardly unknown. But the nuttiness quite clearly informs, shapes and guides her “research”. This is what lefty environmentalist science increasingly looks like. Pagan Gaianism barely hidden under the expert’s robe.

“I’m really interested in the notion of plants as teachers, what we can learn from them as models,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, an author, botanist and SUNY professor, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “And that comes from my work with indigenous knowledge, because that is a fundamental assumption of indigenous environmental philosophy.”

As a white woman on a journey through sampled bits of sacred rituals, Dr. Gagliano speaks thoughtfully and often about the legacies of colonialism, capitalism and exploitative New Age trends

Isn’t she guilty of arboreal appropriation?