On Our Bookshelf: The Light Eaters - Review by Ilse Schweitzer

Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters (HarperCollins, 2024)

January and February are long months for gardeners. We may spend the short daylight hours paging through catalogues, planning our spring planting strategies; we may ward off the dark evenings by scrolling through social media accounts from the southern hemisphere, where flowers are in full bloom. In Michigan, waiting for the necessary cold of winter to end and for the long days of summer to return is a challenge. In times like this, it’s refreshing to pick up a book like Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters, which provides a reminder that the green months are coming and that there’s so much about plants that we can still learn.

Though not an expert in botany herself, journalist Schlanger explains that years of writing about climate change had given her a sense of anxiety and sadness, but also a disconnection to the world whose devastation she was chronicling. She reconnects to that world in this book, bringing her considerable research experience and curiosity to the project. A key part of that journey toward reconnection is Schlanger’s exploration of the possibilities of plant intelligence. Within the first two chapters, she takes her readers on an engaging tour through the histories and philosophies that have led us to categorize humans separately from the world outside of us – what we might lump together as “the natural world.” She explains, in accessible terms, the ways that scientific paradigms like this change over time; that it might be possible very soon for us to consider what a plant intelligence might look like. As she delves into this controversial suggestion, she considers different aspects of intelligence – communication, consciousness, personality, feeling, sensitivity, hearing, sight, sociability – and in each chapter explores how researchers believe these traits might be observable in plant life.

One of the pleasures of this book is Schlanger’s ability not only to describe groundbreaking botanical studies and discoveries in plain, accessible language for her non-scientist readers, but also her lush descriptions of the different landscapes to which she travels. The first chapter finds Schlanger in the humid, green cliffs of Kaua’i, and from there, she brings us along to see a colorful sunrise over fields of sage near the San Andreas fault, and then a nighttime rainforest in Cuba, the Berlin Botanical Gardens, a cave in Peru, and even the dunes of Lake Michigan. In each ecosystem, she follows researchers attempting to understand something greater, something new about the plant world. She asks them questions, she teases out their personalities, their passions, and the stakes of their research. We hear their voices: their excitement at a new discovery, their sadness at a lost specimen.

Schlanger brings to life not only her green surroundings, but also the botanists, conservationists, and researchers whose studies are pushing at the edges of our understanding of the “secret lives” of plants. Her descriptions of far-away, flourishing environments provide a refreshing change for those of us stuck inside, as February melts into March. And as the days get longer, and we make plans to start our seeds and clean up the garden spaces in preparation for new growth, a book like this provides a fascinating new perspective on just how much we share with (and how much we know and don’t know) about our plant companions.