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

by Zoë Schlanger

This state of unseeing has become a named affliction, lamented among botanists: “plant blindness,” the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout. The term shows up in research papers and at conferences where worried scientists wring their hands over how to get the public to even see the subjects of their life’s work. For botanists, plant blindness amounts to a perennial struggle to get basic research funded, or to convince anyone that a particular plant needs saving if it falls outside the few plants included in the human economy, like the type of corn with the highest starch content, which we use to feed cows, or the two species of coffee we drink.