Chapter 25: Plants: The Sessile Engines

Plants are sessile autotrophs—rooted organisms that lack spatial motility and therefore represent the purest source-sector carriers, realizing structure generation without agency. Their architecture (cell walls, chloroplasts, vascular tissue) constitutes production infrastructure, and their autotrophic metabolism defines the source sector’s signature strategy. The Great Oxidation Event demonstrates a planetary-scale consequence of source-sector activity.