Excerpt from The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Other botanists are more circumspect, unwilling to apply what they see as distinctly animal-centric notions to plants. Plants, after all, are their own clade of life, with an evolutionary history that swerved away from our own long ago. Painting them with our concepts of intelligence and consciousness does a disservice to their essential plantness. We'll meet this camp of scientists too. Yet no one I met—not a single botanist—was anything less than agape with wonder at what they were learning that plants are capable of. Thanks to new technology, scientists in the last two decades have gained incredible new powers of observation. Their findings are reshaping the meaning of "plant" before our very eyes.

Regardless of what we think of plants, they continue to surge upward, toward the sun. In this ruined global moment, plants offer a window into a verdant way of thinking. 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—social lives, sex lives, and a whole suite of subtle sensory appreciations we mostly assume to be only the domain of animals. What's more, they sense things we can't even imagine, and occupy a world of information we can't see. Understanding plants will unlock a new horizon of understanding for humans: that we share our planet with and owe our lives to a form of life cunning in its own right, at once alien and familiar.

In the Hoh Rain Forest, a bigleaf maple stretches out above me. Its trunk is sheathed entirely in licorice ferns and lungwort and spike moss, giving the impression of a tree wearing a Grinch suit. Only a few ridges of the tree's bark are visible, rising through the green fuzz like a mountain range above a mat of thick woods, like the Olympic peaks that pierce the evergreen forests just east of here. I lean in, looking closer. The green suit is a world within a world, the little tufts and fronds replicating the structure of a forest at tiny scale. Three-leafed oxalis and feathery stairstep moss coat the ground. I am lost in their world, taken into it. Then again, we've all been lost in it a long time, unaware of its true machinations. This seems imprudent. I wanted to know, so I went out and looked.

Excerpted from The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger. Copyright © 2024 by Zoë Schlanger. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.