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The Light Eaters

How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

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The Light Eaters

Written by: Zoë Schlanger
Narrated by: Zoë Schlanger
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About this listen

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

An Audible Best Nonfiction Listen of 2024

TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 A Best Book of the Year: Barnes & Noble and Publishers Weekly An Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

“A masterpiece of science writing.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

“Mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.” –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

“Rich, vital, and full of surprises. Read it!”Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction

“A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.” –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom, “destabilizing not just how we see the green things of the world but also our place in the hierarchy of beings, and maybe the notion of that hierarchy itself.” (The New Yorker)

It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.

The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is.

We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for—if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world.

©2024 Zoë Schlanger (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers
Biological Sciences Nature & Ecology
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so fascinating

I saw the adam conover episode and it was mindblowing I like how many different topics are mentioned

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Change your mind about plants!

Humans are amazing. But we always seem to make assumptions about the lack of agency in plants. As we learn more about plants, we learn more about ourselves. For sure I learned much from this book about the complexities of life, of plants and of ourselves. I’m reading it again so it stays in my head.

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Disappointing

This is not a scientific or informative book, the author talks too much about herself and reveals very little about plant intelligence. I was really looking forward to get informed about the topic, but got quite annoyed with her lack of substance and returned the book. First book I’ve ever returned

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