The Light Eaters

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

By: Zoë Schlanger

Narrated by: Zoë Schlanger

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

Glorious

Lovely, glorious science writing on an intriguing topic, written passionately, poetically yet extremely erudite in its dealings with scientific concepts and explanations. A masterpiece!

Science is awesome

Mind blowing, expansive, so very necessary. There is so much in here. I can hardly wait to listen to it again.

I Watch Alot Of Docos And DID KNOW All This!

Really detailed! you will never look at plants the same again!I i want more! any gardener will love this!

Best Book I've Read In Years

Thank you so much for writing this amazing book! I learned so much! Excellent narration too!

Perfection

Engaging. Beautifully written. Made me want to dig deeper into every topic discussed. Never ceased to amaze.

Good stuff

I really didn’t know what to expect from this book so I wasn’t in the least bit disappointed. But really, this was a delightful book and an amazing freshman effort by an author I hope will continue to make fun books about science and nature.

A symphony

Her voice combined with all the aspects of her research created a symphony of content and story telling

Another wonderful book to add to my collection

I’m a little over 2/3rd through the book but wanted to leave a review early first to say, shout out UC Davis! As a UCD grad, it’s always so nice to hear my university be mentioned in the books I read for their groundbreaking research. I hope to someday be at the level of them, being interviewed and later quoted in works of art.
Second, half or more of the scientific breakthroughs mentioned were known to me or at least rumored in the past, but to hear the progress that’s been made and how intelligent (yes, intelligent) plants can be is astounding. The story reads well and I appreciate its factual nature. It’s worthy of 5 stars all-around on a general scale, but for audible and my scale of works, I have to give it a 4. But trust me, this is a very enjoyable book.

Agency commands respect

Zoe's approach of presenting remarkable research discoveries across several disciplines reveals plants' surprising behavior in a way that really spoke to me

If only the messages contained were received by the artificially intelligent and authentically ignorant timber barons: that the greatest value is protecting the magnificent redwood overstory and fragile fern, trillium, mycellium, etc understory from decimation for short term profit and perennial greed

CalFire's operating budget comes from whacking the fragmented forest remnants, leaving behind disturbed and desiccated dust, perfect habitat for gorse and thistle, stable climax forest reversed to invasive spiny weedscape baking in the heat where there used to be cool, fragrant shade

Same story in Amazonia, Borneo, Congo...

It's surprising that the book optimistically lays out all the research displaying intelligence, more in the plant world than in our ZuckerMusk-infected monkey sphere

The survivors in all the kingdoms will rejoice and re-speciate when we are gone: in the meantime, listen to The Light Eaters and be amazed at their stories

Gave me a whole new perspective

I loved the authors approach, starting from exhaustion being a climate reporter to delving deeper and deeper into the world of plants by talking to one researcher at a time. I liked plants before. Now I am enthralled by them. Thank you for the new way of seeing the world around us.