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The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life o...

Zoë Schlanger

Start date: July 1, 2025

Finish date: July 31, 2025

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Jul 30, 2025 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, academic-notations, science, dropped-the-mic, a-jack-in-the-box-pop-surprise, non-fiction, twisted-me-peculiar

I love ‘The Light Eaters: how the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth’ by Zoe Schlanger. The book is full of plant facts I had no idea of. I learned of new and controversial researches and information. The problem with many of the researches and facts Schlanger includes from plant specialists, botanists and biologists is while the observed plant behaviors are reproducible and obvious, how to describe these behaviors is the part which is controversial. T I love ‘The Light Eaters: how the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth’ by Zoe Schlanger. The book is full of plant facts I had no idea of. I learned of new and controversial researches and information. The problem with many of the researches and facts Schlanger includes from plant specialists, botanists and biologists is while the observed plant behaviors are reproducible and obvious, how to describe these behaviors is the part which is controversial. The observations are based on lab-based visual examinations, and instruments of measurement, such as those which pick up electrical activity going on inside plants, and ‘vivisection’, so to speak, that definitely result in scientific results which fulfill all standards for rigorous scientific methodology. But the measured and observed activities all appear to show plant bodies are doing everything mammalian bodies do. Does this mean plants are, *ahem*, intelligent? Plants don’t have a brain. Right? But all descriptions, if accurately written down, of plant ‘behaviors’ appear to show plants might have intelligence. Scientists do not want to use that word intelligence in regards to plant activities. At all. Those who have, have been laughed at and scorned, even losing job promotions.

So. Schlanger talks to scientists afraid to use the word and those not afraid to use the word, all the while detailing their experiments and observations.

I have copied the book blurb:

”“A masterpiece of science writing.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

“Mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.” –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

“Rich, vital, and full of surprises. Read it!” –Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction

“A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.” –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom and reveals the astonishing capabilities of the green life all around us.

It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.

The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is.

We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for—if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world.”

People literally would not exist as life on Earth if it wasn’t for the activities and evolution of plant life. They put the oxygen into Earth’s atmosphere. Full stop. Yet we are doing our utmost to wipe out plant life because it gets in the way of “progress”.

*Sigh*

I highly recommend this science read! And talking to your plants. Please. Perhaps they are returning your affection….

The book has an extensive Notes section and an Index section. ...more

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