Even Darwin had to continually calibrate that impulse. We are only just beginning to comprehending non-human minds, only just beginning to concede that there are infinitely many other ways of seeing and other ways of being within the same reality; we would sooner grant consciousness to AI, modeled on our own minds arising from nervous systems crowned with brains, than consider different forms of intelligence as portals to a wider conception of consciousness. In The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (public library), journalist Zoë Schlanger offers a mighty antidote to our tyranny of self-reference through the emerging science of organic beings we have long treated as stage decor for the drama of our earthly lives — a science rife with controversy and confusion, which is always the mark of a paradigm breaking down and breaking open, contouring a new way of thinking about questions of consciousness, communication, memory, gender, personality, interdependence, and agency.
Rising from the pages is that rare achievement of meeting otherness on its own terms while broadening and deepening the terms on which we live our human lives. Schlanger draws from the world of plants “a masterclass in living to one’s fullest, weirdest, most resourceful potential,” and a counterpoint to the survival-of-the-fittest model of the natural world, intimating instead that the animating force of life may be not a combat for a kill but “an improvisation, or a collaboration, or something else entirely.” A quarter millennium after Darwin’s grandfather popularized the young science of botany through poetry, and two centuries after Emily Dickinson wrote that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Schlanger writes: A life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing, us included.
Many are so ingenious that they seem nearly impossible for an order of life we’ve mostly relegated to the margins of our own lives, the decoration that frames the theatrics of being an animal. Yet there they are all the same, these unbelievable abilities of plants, defying our anemic expectations. Their way of life is so astonishing, I will soon learn, that no one yet really knows the limits of what a plant can do.
In fact, it seemed that no one quite knows what a plant really is. This perplexity, Schlanger observes, is one of the most exciting things to happen in our lifetime — “depending on how comfortable you feel with seismic shifts in what you once thought to be true.” Looking back on the past half-century of botany, she reflects on this generative discomfort: Controversy in a scientific field tends to be a harbinger of something new, some new understanding of its subject… The more botanists uncovered the complexity of forms and behaviors of plants, the less the traditional assumptions about plant life seemed to apply. One of those assumptions stems from our basic taxonomic model of life on Earth, separated into six kingdoms — as though plants, animals, fungi, and all the rest are separate and sovereign territories of being, bound by borders and occasionally at war for resources.
This tendency to mistake our models of reality for reality itself, universal to the human animal and manifested across all cultures in different ways, and this particular blind spot of Western science, unshared by indigenous and Eastern traditions, have left our view of plants on par with Descartes’s view of non-human animals. An epoch after the poetic naturalist John Muir observed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Schlanger writes: For us to truly be part of this world, to be awake to its roiling aliveness, we need to understand plants. They suffuse our atmosphere with the oxygen we breathe, and they quite literally build our bodies out of sugars they spin from sunlight.
They made the ingredients that first allowed our lives to blink into existence at all. Yet they are not merely utilitarian supply machines. They have complex, dynamic lives of their own.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
