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

by Zoë Schlanger

What, I wondered, is the opposite of death? Creation, perhaps. A sense of becomings instead of endings. Plants are that, given as they are to continuous growth. They’d soothed me all my life, long before studies came out confirming what we already knew: that time spent among plants can ease the mind better than a long sleep.

Plants are the very definition of creative becoming: they are in constant motion, albeit slow motion, probing the air and soil in a relentless quest for a livable future.