written by Zoe Schlanger
book review by JoAnn Hackos
It is quite easy to dismiss plants. After all, they are rooted in one place and seem to have little if any connection to other plants around them. Zoe Schlanger is on a mission to change that but exploring the science that has revealed the complex and creative that plants defy our expectations. In the Light Eaters she reveals the emergence of new botanical science uncovering their “unseen world.” Reading her book results in completely thinking how we think about plants.
The results of her explorations and interviews are stunning. Researchers have learned that plants remember, they recognize their kin, they store information in some way that researchers are trying to figure out.
At their most basic level, plants provide the oxygen needed for all other creatures to live on the earth. Leaves manufacture sugar from light and air. Leaves also remove carbon dioxide from the air and absorb water from the ground. Plants turn these substances into glucose to build more pants and provide nutrients for us to eat.
We have long recognized that basic function (and its importance). What we know now is that plants communicate with each other. They warn others if something bad is happening. Zoologist David Rhoades watched tent caterpillars decimate a forest for several years, until they abruptly began to die. The trees were communicating. Those that the caterpillars hadn’t yet reached turned their leaves into weapons and killed the caterpillars. What was most amazing—they were not communicating through their roots but through the air. And they were communicating intentionally to save others. Researchers Jack Schultz, a major expert on communication between plants and insects was known to say, “the scent of cut grass is the chemical equivalent of a plant’s scream.” Rick Karban’s research shows that wild tobacco can summon predators to eat the caterpillars that are feeding on it.
The story of plant communication is just one of the amazing pieces of information that Schlanger provides. We learn that plants are sensitive to touch, often becoming incredibly stressed and defensive. They are fully aware of our contact with them. What makes it so difficult to us to accept it that plants don’t seem to have brains. Perhaps, the researchers are beginning to suggest, the entire plant is a brain.
Schlanger continues to provide scientific evidence that plants can hear and can tell time. Pollution hurts them, sabotaging the plants’ ability to send and interpret each other’s signals.
Plants pass adaptations to their babies. If yellow monkey flowers are exposed to predators, they “produce babies with a quiver of defensive spike on their leaves.” I urge you to read Schlanger’s work. It’s completely stunning to learn what scientists are now coming to understand about plants. It makes you think differently about the plants you have at home. I know I have changed how I think about them. Some people advocate giving nature rights. From what we are learning about plants, it’s about time that we recognize their rights to a peaceful and productive existence.