The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

Zoë Schlanger is a science journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic. Her work centers on climate change and the environment. In The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, Schlanger explains how her climate change reporting impacted her outlook. The negativity and hopelessness she experienced while working in investigative journalism caused her to compartmentalize her emotions. To push back against this internal change, Schlanger turned to what had long been a source of comfort: plants. Her research into botany became an obsession that helped transform her perspective on life and the planet.

Schlanger’s casual interest soon grew into a new way of viewing the world. While reporting about the first fern genome, she found herself rediscovering the wonder of discovery and curiosity that had driven her early career. Plants offered an exciting and ever-evolving field that stood in contrast to the climate change stories Schlanger told as a reporter, which seemed to focus on a singular path of destruction.

By engaging with botanists and other researchers, Schlanger began to recognize the many ways human perception colors how people pursue research. Schlanger highlights how Western science often limits scientific understanding because it examines the world through a limited lens. By emphasizing an ecological understanding, Schlanger expresses a need for a more collective way of thinking about life. The Light Eaters blends scholarly scientific investigation with philosophy, establishing a framework for thinking about intelligence that moves beyond the rigid lines of a single discipline.

Schlanger admits that the word “intelligence” is loaded and often only associated with academics or IQ. Critics of research into plant intelligence or consciousness argue that these lines of inquiry run the risk of anthropomorphizing plants. Rather than viewing plants through the lens of human intelligence, Schlanger highlights how scientists are beginning to understand that intelligence comes in many forms. Furthermore, notions of memory and communication can be expanded beyond how these concepts manifest in human experience. Research suggests that plants have a physiological way of remembering the number of cold and warm days, and botanists now realize that plants engage in a complex language of chemical communication. Rather than anthropomorphizing plants to align with human expressions of life, Schlanger and other scientists seek to reimagine expressions consciousness and intelligence themselves.

Schlanger has been recognized for her scientific reporting and was a finalist for the 2019 Livingston Award. In addition to her work for The Atlantic, Schlanger’s writing has appeared in NPR, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek, and other publications. Her 2021 New York Times article “America’s National Parks in a New Hotter World” was featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022. The 2020 Society of Environmental Journalists gave honorable mention to Schlanger’s work on the global plastic trade in Audubon Magazine. In 2015, her Newsweek piece “How to Defuse the Population Bomb” was named Best Article by the Global Media Awards, and in 2017, she won the National Association of Science Writer’s Science Reporting Award for her investigation into air pollution in Detroit, Michigan.