The Light Eaters Quotes

“But science’s biggest flaw and biggest virtue is that it almost always mistakes agreement for truth.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“But plant personhood itself is a concept as old as human culture. As we've already learned, Native philosophies from all corners of the globe often understand plants as relatives, or ancestors, or otherwise persons in their own right. It's not that plants are human, but that humans are just one kind of person, as are animals. Personhood means one has agency and volition, and the right to exist for their own sake.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Everything, at every level of life from a microbe to a rain forest, then, is an ecosystem. We are more like a system than a single unit. All biology is ecology.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“I think the plants are primary organisms, and we are the secondary ones. We are fully dependent on them. Without them, we would not be able to survive,” Baluška says. “The opposite situation would not be so drastic for them.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“It's not that plants are human but that humans are just one kind of person.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“It’s that lack of faith in the public that always results in an erosion of the level of public discourse. A faithlessness in the public is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remove complexity, and the capacity for complexity degrades farther. I think people can be trusted to handle a complicated truth. Plants are not omnipotent, otherworldly creatures. They are also not just like us. But neither are they neither of these things. There are elements of reality in both images, and fallacy in both too. This is hard stuff: one needs to welcome ambiguity and delight in the lack of easy tropes. Complexity is the rule in nature, after all. Thinking through this requires occupying a mental space of in-betweenness rarely tolerated in our contemporary world concerned with linear narratives and known entities. Báyò Akómoláfé, a Yoruba poet and philosopher, wrote about this in-betweenness, contemplating the way all creatures are in fact composite organisms. The state of nature is one of interpenetration and mingling that defies easy categorization. It occupies a middle place, both in the material reality of the world and in our understanding of it. “The middle I speak of is not halfway between two poles; it is porousness that mocks the very idea of separation,” he writes. Akómoláfé outlines our collective biological reality as a state of “brilliant betweenness” that “defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.” It reminds me of Trewavas, telling me in his living room outside Edinburgh that scientists don’t know enough about plants to say anything dogmatic about them.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“When such plants find themselves beside their siblings, they rearrange their leaves within two days to avoid shading them. Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them, and several plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Plants made me, after all. Every bundle of muscle in my body was woven from the sugars plants spun from moisture and air. My blood cells that course through my veins like water through rootlets are each kept ruby red with the oxygen plants made. The branching structure of my lungs are suffused with that too. Every inward breath of mine was first breathed out by plants. In this material sense, in terms of what they’ve contributed to my physical being, they are as much my relatives as any family member I know.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“When an old paradigm falls away, in preference of a new one, everyone acts as though they’d known the new one was the truth all along.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Plants, Bose decided, must have nervous systems. He was convinced that electrical impulses were responsible for controlling most plant functions, like growth, photosynthesis, movement, and responses to whatever the environment threw their way—light, heat, exposure to toxins. “The results of the investigations which I have carried out for the last quarter of a century establish the generalization that the physiological mechanism of the plant is identical with that of the animal,” Bose wrote.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Of course plants don’t have neurons or brains. But research was suggesting they might have analogous structures, or at least some physiology that could do similar things, and a cognitive capacity that deserved to be taken seriously. Plants produce electrical impulses, and seem to have nodes at the tips of their roots that serve as local command centers. Glutamate and glycine, two of the most common neurotransmitters in animal brains, are present in plants also, and seem to be crucial to how they pass information through their stems and leaves. They have been found to form, store, and access memories, sense incredibly subtle changes in their environment, and send highly sophisticated chemicals aloft on the air in response. They send signals to different body parts to coordinate defenses. Plant neurobiology “aims to study plants in their full sensory and communicative complexity,” they wrote. And what is a brain, really, other than a hunk of specialized, excitable cells, coursing with electrical impulses? “Plant neurobiology” was nonliteral, sure, but it wasn’t a stretch, its proponents said. We don’t need new words for things that are functionally similar—just new prefixes. Plant brains, plant synapses, plant thought. See, they said: Darwin was doing it a century ago.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“researchers had found promising indicators of memory in plants. Others found that a wide variety of plants are able to distinguish themselves from others, and can tell whether or not those others are genetic kin. When such plants find themselves beside their siblings, they rearrange their leaves within two days to avoid shading them. Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them, and several plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off. (Other plants—including a particular tomato—secrete a chemical that cause hungry caterpillars to turn away from devouring their leaves to eat each other instead.) Papers probing other remarkable behaviors were growing from a trickle to a fairly robust stream. It seemed like botany was on the verge of something new. I wanted to stick around and watch.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Actual fern sex turned out to be much weirder. First of all, they reproduce using spores, not seeds. But here’s the kicker: they have swimming sperm. Before they grow into the leafy fronds we all know, they have a completely separate life as a gametophyte fern, a tiny lobed plant just one cell thick—not remotely recognizable as the fern it will later become. You’d miss them on the forest floor. The male gametophyte fern releases sperm that swim in water collected on the ground after a rain, looking for female gametophyte fern eggs to fertilize. Fern sperm are shaped like tiny corkscrews and are endurance athletes—they can swim for up to sixty minutes.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“But moral attention is not a finite resource.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“What did it take for that tree to live through those years, make thousands of leaves each spring, store sugars through the winter, turn light and water into layers and layers of wood? It is hard to underestimate the drama of being a tree, or any plant. Every one is an unimaginable feat of luck and ingenuity. Once you know that, you can't unknow it. A new moral pocket has opened in your mind.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“I remember when I first learned that human beings had microbial clouds hovering in the air around them at all times. I'd been sitting at my desk on the fifth floor of a corporate building in lower Manhattan for five hours when the data scientist James Meadow told me I’d probably shed millions of microbes all over my cubicle that day. "You know the dirty kid from Peanuts? Pig-Pen? It turns out we all look like that," Meadow said into the phone. He worked at the time at a company in San Francisco focused on monitoring the health of the indoor microbiome in places like offices and hospitals, and he'd recently published a paper.

"We give off a million biological particles from our body every hour as we move around," he continued. "I have a beard; when I scratch it, I'm releasing a little plume into the air. It's just this cloud of particles we're always giving off, that happens to be nearly invisible.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Within a decade, evidence to support Dudley’s work began flowing in. In 2017 a researcher in Argentina found that sunflower farmers could get up to 47 percent more oil yield from their plants if they grew them in rows with kin closely packed next to one another. They grew the flowers at densities unheard of in sunflower farming, but instead of attacking each other underground, as closely grown sunflowers were assumed to always do, they did the opposite: aboveground, the sunflowers tilted their stalks at alternating angles to avoid shading their kin-neighbors. There was no sign that they were robbing each other of nutrients, either. If they were allowed to grow at odd angles, rather than be forced to stand straight up, each flower received more light, and oil production skyrocketed.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“A good idea has a habit of showing up again and again.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Nature, never a flat plane, has always more folds and faces still hidden from human view. The world is a prism, not a window. Wherever we look, we find new refractions.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Genes are of course important to many things in a plant’s life. But increasingly it seems like they’re less akin to a code that the organism reads out than to a flexible repertoire, a choose-your-adventure novel with a multiplicity of endings, each influenced by a million subtle changes in the storyline.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“The fact that a brain produces the experience of “mind” is not explained by its mere physical existence.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“plants know how to wait, how to endure the inhospitable, knowing their time has not yet come but will, and that their flourishing is not a question of whether but when.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“For everything that science does know about what, biologically, is going on here, there is so much more it cannot yet explain. All around me are complex adaptive systems. Each creature is folded into layers of interrelationship with surrounding creatures that cascade from the largest to the smallest scale.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“The lichens crawling up the base of trees curl the edges of their disklike bodies up, catching drops as they receive a new day and another chance to grow.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“After a pattern of rejection, Rhoades gave up applying to grants, the researcher’s equivalent to giving up eating.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Communication implies a recognition of self and what lies beyond it—the existence of other selves. Communication is the forming of threads between individuals.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Maybe when dealing with plants, this is a formula for ignorance; a plant is a multidimensional organism in constant biological conversation with its surroundings, the bacteria, fungi, insects, minerals, and other plants that make its world. It is no wonder then that zoologists and entomologists have been the ones to make some of the most groundbreaking discoveries about plants, often by viewing them through the lens of animals and insects.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“A paradigm can’t ask questions about something it doesn’t see as existing in the first place.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“they allowed themselves to unleash their volcanic enthusiasm.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“Making the mental space to imagine truly different intelligences, without jumping to easy human conclusions, is a difficult task. Most of us haven’t been asked to do that before. But grappling with complexity is a mind-expanding exercise.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany