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

“Plants are the very definition of creative becoming: they are in constant motion, albeit slow motion, probing the air and soil in a relentless quest for a livable future.”

Schlanger equates plant evolution with The Constant Motion of Biological Creativity. Unlike humans and many animals, plants utilize a fine-tuned and highly efficient manner of change. Schlanger relates her study of plants to her previous work as a climate change reporter. Plants teach her to continue to seek survival and growth, even in the face of extremely difficult circumstances.

“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.”

Schlanger continuously wrestles with is whether it is right to draw comparisons between human and plant life. Here, she suggests that doing so does a disservice to plants and prevents scientists from considering the full breadth of what plants can do. By imposing human qualities on plants, scientists run the risk of overlooking how plant experiences and behaviors diverge from that of humans.

“The experience of flashes of the eternal, the real, the gestalt, runs like a threat throughout naturalist literature.”

This quotation exemplifies how Schlanger blends philosophy, science, and spiritualism in her study of plants. She suggests that plants have much to reveal to humans—both rationally through science and mystically through an emphasis on the collective whole and the interconnectedness of all beings.