By Jean Ponzi
The Light Eaters
Covering climate change for Atlantic magazine for seven years, science journalist Zoë Schlanger was burning out. She sought refuge reading nothing less than academic botany journals. Like lichen in fog, her curious spirit revived.
Her pivot-project book, The Light Eaters, climbed the 2024 New York Times Bestseller list, compellingly subtitled How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. This is a big-fun read.
Schlanger tracks changes in the sacred objectivity of science, stepping into suspect stuff like “consciousness” – for plants!
As a diligent science writer will do, Schlanger visits labs, conferences and field sites. She discovers she’s reporting on nothing less than an evolution in Botany itself: “the most exciting thing to happen in a generation, depending on how comfortable you feel with seismic shifts in what you once thought to be true.”
The force in play is a fierce debate about Plant Intelligence. Schlanger takes us ringside to an academic ruckus, with plenty of insights on the stakes and the rules.
She spends time with botanists grappling with questions about plant intelligence within a system of knowledge that, as she well knows, can’t ask questions about something it doesn’t see as existing in the first place. Talk about being in a climate of change!
One subject is Monica Gagliano, a plant scientist Schlanger met in a precarious place.
Gagliano had conventionally, respectably reported study findings that plant roots could hear the sound of running water in sealed pipes. “Hear” in this case means physically sensing the acoustic vibrations, through a physical stimulus.
Every human music lover physically hears, with a brain in the chain of vibrational and electronic exchanges. So what does “intelligence” mean if plants, who don’t have what we call brains, deliberately, rapidly move their roots toward that running water sound? To that point, this was still garden-varietyBotany work.
“The game changed (for Dr. Gagliano) when she published a memoir describing how the structure of her lab experiments were given to her through her interaction with a plant, ayahuasca.
“There’s a real separation of church and state in sciences. She still has a lot of support from humanities and other funding bodies, but that is no longer the purview of the straight science that peer review works with at this point.”
Schlanger also spotlights a cultural shift in the sciences. This space is recognizing the value of TEK, traditional ecological knowledge.
Indigenous science is “… broadening our scientific imagination to include plants as creatures that have spontaneous, willful, so to speak, behaviors. This is not news to Indigenous sciences. Thinking of plants as having lifestyles and proclivities and dealing with multiple variables in their environment to make very quick dynamic choices—these are all things that Indigenous sciences and belief in plants as persons of a kind have always held to be true.
“I think the more time we spend considering the ways our lives are absolutely interwoven with the non-human, the more it settles us back into our rightful place in the world in terms of not being just this pinnacle of evolutionary hierarchy but rather being just one more node of biological creativity.”
The Light Eaters affirms that something must, and is very well about to, change how science – an entrenched global human institution – approaches and relates to our massive, ancient sister “kingdom.”
How, this book implicitly asks, might such a change in climate with respect to plants change us?
Green Jean Ponzi is a longtime local voice for Earth, through her work for the EarthWays Center of Missouri Botanical Garden and community radio features, now on our new internet station Community Radio STL. Dig her Earthworms Castings commentaries at www.CRSTL.FM.