Zoë Schlanger

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 • TIME’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 • New York Magazine’s 10 Best Books of the Year • Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2024 • Smithsonian’s 10 Best Science Books of the Year • A Best Book of the Year: Boston Globe, Scientific American, New York Public Library, Christian Science Monitor, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly • An Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Prize • Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize • Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History “A masterpiece of science writing.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass “Mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.” –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World “Rich, vital, and full of surprises. Read it!” –Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom, “destabilizing not just how we see the green things of the world but also our place in the hierarchy of beings, and maybe the notion of that hierarchy itself.” (The New Yorker) It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents. The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close. What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is. We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for—if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world.

How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

The Light Eaters

Fascinating research is being done in plant science!!! Also tomatoes can release a chemical that caterpillars will eat that causes them to cannibalize each other!! Plants are crazy!!!

Jonnie

And it could be wildly useful to agriculture, if scientists can find the right application. After all, in Appel's work, a sound cue caused the plant to make its own pesticide. If plants could be made to produce pesticides through simply playing sounds to them, it could reduce or eliminate the need for synthetic pesticides on farms, and in some cases increase the level of compounds that the crop in question is grown for. In a crop like mustard, for example, the plants' own pesticide is the very thing it is farmed for—mustard oil. Putting a lavender bush on high alert by playing the right sounds would cause it to make more of the defensive compounds we prize in lavender oil.

Researchers globally have tried to see if playing certain tones to plants can prompt them to certain actions. They experiment with various frequencies for different lengths of time. Right now, the research on tones is rather scattershot. One study found that playing arabidopsis a series of tones for three hours per day over ten days increased its ability to fight off a harmful fungal infection. Another found that playing some tones to rice for an hour improved the plant's ability to survive drought conditions. And researchers who played tones at different frequencies to alfalfa sprouts for two hours saw that they increased the plants content of vitamin C, which means their nutritional value went up. When they repeated the experiment with broccoli and radish sprouts, they managed to increase their content of flavonoids too. One can imagine a future where farmers set up boom boxes instead of crop dusters.

This is what it's like to know me. I feel such kinship with the author in this single passage.

Consider the emerald green sea slug. When I first read about it, I couldn't stop talking about it with anyone who asked what was going on with me lately. The green sea slug, this whimsical thing that seemed to defy all boundaries between plant and animal, was going on with me. It was all I could think about.

It is hard to underestimate the drama of being a tree, or any plant.

The Light Eaters quotes

Join the club