Book Recommendation: The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger absolutely blew my mind. From the very first page, my mouth was hanging open and I was repeatedly bothering my wife, Reilly, who sat beside me peacefully reading her own book, to tell her all of the facts Zoë Schlanger outlined. My perspective has been thoroughly changed, and I can honestly say that this book convinced me that as humans, we are doing plant life an incredible injustice by considering them below us.
The Light Eaters is an exploration of plant life and how human society perceives plants. Schlanger makes the case that plants have more to offer than we believe, and questions how humans define “intelligence” and whether or not our definition is too human-centered and therefore limited. Much of the problem here lies in the scientific community and how new ideas are often treated. Plants don’t have brains like the beings we consider “intelligent” do, we have yet to discover where in their bodies they process information, react to stimuli, communicate with others, or how exactly it happens. Despite plant life breaking the human-focused frame of reference we have for “intelligence,” after reading The Light Eaters, I can say I have been convinced that plants are intelligent.
One of the more mind-bending revelations in this book was the fact that without plants, humans are nothing. Plants have made every single ounce of sugar that we’ve ever consumed. They have an unshakable chemical control over our bodies—we need them, as more than just crops, to survive. Despite our dependance, they could take or leave us. In this way, you might argue that plants are more complex than us, being able to manipulate their environment, the beings around them, etc in more complex ways than we ever could. Here’s an excerpt about this concept from Chapter 2 that I found particularly fascinating:
“Think about it: every animal organ was built with sugar from plants. The meat of our bones and indeed the bones themselves carry the signature of their molecules. Our bodies are fabricated with the threads of material plants first spun. Likewise, every thought that has ever passed through your brain was made possible by plants.
This is crushingly literal. The brain in particular is a machine run chiefly on glucose. Without a continual source of glucose, communication between neurons will slow and then cease. Memory, learning, and thinking will shut down. Without glucose your brain will wither, shortly before you do. All the glucose in the world, whether it arrives in your body packaged inside a banana or a slice of wheat bread, was manufactured out of thin air by a plant in the moment after photons from the sun fell upon it.
In this way we are, at every moment, brought into conversation with plants, and they with us.”
Thinking about this concept gave me an appreciation for how fragile human life is. It’s a colonist, white supremacist mindset that compels us to think of ourselves as superior or in control of our existence on this planet, as if we’re able to dominate or master nature. But our lives are at the mercy of plants, as well as the environment we make in concert with each other, and we forget that we are also part of the delicate balance of the natural world. We are nature too. This section of The Light Eaters underscored for me how dangerous it is to move forward with this individualistic, capitalist mindset, that we are competing with the other beings we share the earth with, rather than working together.
Another section that blew my mind that I’d like to share with you was from Chapter 3: The Communicating Plant. In particular, in this chapter, Schlanger relays the story of an informal case study from South Africa where plants and animals seemed to be communicating or learning from each other’s actions and reacting accordingly. More than that, plants were changing their chemical makeup seemingly in self-defense. When thousands of kudu, a species of ungulate, dropped dead seemingly out of nowhere, wildlife nutrition zoologist Wouter van Hoven discovered the cause to be the acacia leaves the kudu ate regularly. The acacia is commonly eaten by African ungulates, but in this instance, the plant had heightened the tannins in its leaves to deter the kudu from eating too much of it. They discovered heightened tannin levels in other acacia plants within range of the kudus, but too far away from the other acacias for the plants to be communicating through any root system. Hoven found that the tannin-heavy leaves, when snapped, gave off plumes of ethylene that then traveled through the air to the other acacia trees as a warning for the feast that might soon befall them. The kudu had not faired well against this kind of chemical defense, but giraffes, however, have seemed to have figured it out.
“How did they get away with eating acacia leaves? [Hoven says,] “They’ll eat and eat, and all of a sudden they’ll stop and walk away. Even though there’s plenty of leaves.” It didn’t make sense from an energy-conservation perspective. But soon it was clear they were only eating from one out of every ten trees, and never downwind. [Hoven] guessed the giraffes had learned to eat only from trees that had not received a warning to release their tannins.”
Not only is it incredible that the acacia plants can communicate in this way with each other, but it’s incredibly smart of the giraffes to have figured out the acacia’s play. More than that, this example illustrates a very interesting kind of communication, one that transcends a more human definition of “communication.” There is just so much that we don’t know that we don’t know!
I could talk about this book for hours! But to wrap a nice bow on things, I highly recommend The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger. If you’re looking for a fast-paced and engaging nonfiction book to sink into, and for your worldview to be challenged in a good way, you can’t go wrong with The Light Eaters.
Keep heart,
Shannon