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

by Zoë Schlanger

Agricultural researchers have warned of the dangers of monocultures—planting a single genetic variety of crop over large swaths of land—ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when a microbe caused a disease known as potato blight which proved particularly deadly to the Irish Lumper, a staple food crop in Ireland at the time. The devastation of the potato harvest caused mass hunger and around one million deaths. Still, given the economics of modern agriculture, which values yield above all, many of the world’s food staples continue to be grown in vast, undifferentiated fields. The crops tend to be bred for productivity above anything else, often at the cost of other traits, like the ability to defend themselves. As such, huge quantities of pesticides and fertilizer are often needed to sustain them.