The Light Eaters. Zoe Schlanger. 2024. 259 Pages. (Hardcover.)

A former New York City science writer for The Atlantic, this author then spent four years studying the life of plants, visiting and interviewing botanists around the world.

Well organized, she shows that plants have personalities with variable kin loyalty, volatile warning chemicals and different degrees of risk aversion. The ways that some plants ward off threats, warn others, and even seem to see their environment, is quite amazing. Although plants do not have brains, she considers the whole plant as akin to a brain and there is no doubt that plants can be anesthetized by ether to stop doing anything implying something equivalent to a mammal’s nervous system.

The biome of plants (and of ourselves) is extensive and leads to the difficulty of defining what a self is. It may be one explanation for plant’s apparent ability to see its envivonment, the other being the primordial ‘eyes’ found on many plants.

The mystery of detecting gravity in spite of calcium channels communications remains largely unexplained.

This is not just botany, but botany with a wide-ranging liberal dose of zoology, physiology, genetics, evolutionary science, native folklore, and philosophy. The debates about plant intelligence, consciousness, and agency get bogged down in linguistic semantics and inadequacy.

Industrial large-scale monoculture farming, using highly toxic pesticides, comes in for scorn, because it weakens some plant’s natural communication and defences, as does air pollution with excess ozone and carbon dioxide. She comes close to promoting the regenerative farming movement but never mentions the name. (Full disclosure; I sometimes volunteer at a regenerative farming project with extensive biodiversity, no use of insecides, pesticides or fertilizer other than composted hay and weeds.The produce is abundant and delicious.)

The book is loaded with data and one needs to pay close attention, but her logic and reasoning should be reasonably easy (and astounding) to follow even to nonscientists if you do so, even though she lost me in a few places.

Probably one of, if not the very best nonfiction books I have ever read.

10/10.

Thanks, Goodreads and BookBrowse.

Thanks, The Atlantic.

Alan Tomlin.