Will I love The Light Eaters?

I love this book because it gives me a plant version of human cultures.

The important point is that each species develops its own special capacities to survive in its own environment. Call it intelligence, culture, or something else; this “shared wisdom” gets passed down from one generation to the next and changes mainly when a new feature becomes more adaptive. I admire the fairness with which the author describes scientific debates such as those over whether concepts like human intelligence can be correctly applied to plants.

If there is agreement at all, it is that evolutionary differences in “intelligence”… show more.

Plants, too, have an umwelt, which makes this a companion to An Immense World.

Plants may not seem like a subject for ethics and philosophy, but the author makes a crucial case for humans changing their behavior toward them. They are neither mute nor static objects; they have senses. They feel things, solve complex problems, communicate with each other in various ways we would call ingenious.

At times, they communicate with animals. Their world is more alien to us than the animals’. I know someone who describes evolution as a story of planimals and aniplants. I initially thought… show more.

The book introduced me to a new world of plants, their intelligence and preferences. They, too, are thinking and feeling beings! For example, when a bee settles on a flower, the plant decides whether to give it lots or little honey depending on that particula bee. I am sure the book will also change your attitude to all the plant life around us.

This book was a revelation. I've read a little bit about plant intelligence, volition, community, etc., but I've never read a book filled with so many truly amazing insights based on contemporary science. At times, I felt as if the author was being a bit slipshod in her logic--she tends to assume that plants' behavior proves them to be sentient when in fact much of the behavior she examines might simply be evolved--but I'm willing to overlook that minor lapse in a book that made my head pop with so many new ideas.

An environment and science reporter, Zoë Schlanger reveals the usually hidden world of plants. She tells the ways that plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. I was fascinated to discover plants' newly-understood methods for communication, the ways they recognize their "kin" (plants from the same original plant) and engage in social behavior (yes, SOCIAL). Did you know that plants can hear sounds, transform their bodies to camouflage themselves for survival, store memories for self-protection and utilizing techniques to manage cyclical events, and manipulate animals into helping them? I didn't, either, until after reading this book. 

This book requires us… show more.

I’ve been studying the world of plants since first pursuing graduate degrees in the 1980’s. So, one might surmise that I know quite a lot about how plants function and respond to their environment. Reading through this book, I was fascinated to learn how much I didn’t previously know about these amazingly diverse and complex organisms. Some readers may recall an earlier tome titled The Secret Life of Plants.

In the first chapter of this book, author Schlanger dismisses that once-popular work as “a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection.” She then goes on to interview… show more.

Fascinating topic, blew my mind and changed how I think about plants.

This book really blew me away. First of all, I'm a gardener and a plant lover--and I talk to my plants, too. But Schlanger's principled, passionate pursuit of the contemporary scientific understanding of "plant consciousness" was mind-shattering. She's an excellent writer and her research fully persuasive. But even more, she offers a glimpse of a completely revolutionary way of seeing the world we inhabit. It's a clear instance of Thomas Kuhn's notion of scientific revolution--or the 100th monkey. Once we see what these scientists are seeing, everything will change. Meanwhile, I'll never prune a rose or cut the grass without… show more.

As someone deeply immersed in the world of botany as an artist, photographer, and gardener I love reading an expanded story about the world of plants, their society, and how they communicate. There's more to the personality and character of the plant world than one expects, although it moves on a very different time scale than we are used to.

A non fiction book, at the leading edge of a long overdue science story