Books Seeds of Story Vegetable Neighborhoods, Clan Wars, and Hunting Strategies: Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters What the cutting-edge science of plant behavior and intelligence can teach us about the world and our place in it… By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on June 2, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. It describes the increasing scientific evidence for plants as active organisms that respond to—and shape—their environments every bit as much as animals. Plant senses and plant communication were once treated as nonsense, but are now helping us understand the ecosystems on which we depend. What It’s About When I was younger, there was a song with a chorus that began “I’ve heard the screams of the vegetables…” It was a joke, of course. Who would imagine that plants could feel you plucking their fruits, or care? So it’s fascinating to join Zoë Schlanger in a lab, where researchers are studying Arabidopsis responses to touch. Rub a leaf, suggesting possible predatory threat, and the whole plant lights up with electrical signals. As quickly as you can stub your toe, the whole organism knows what’s happening. Following this kind of signal, plants may produce chemicals to make their leaves bitter or sticky excretions to gum up caterpillar mouths. They also warn each other through airborne chemicals. Plants that haven’t yet dealt with a pest pay attention to these signals, and start proactively preparing for attack. Lest you find yourself now feeling guilty about that carrot, many plants have mutualistic relationships with things that eat them. They work to look, smell, and taste attractive to reproductive symbionts, from humans to wasps—not only over generations but in the moment. Nasa poissoniana raises stamens at whatever rate bees have been visiting, adjusting when they grow more frequent or neglectful. Initial resistance to these findings stemmed from backlash against a bit of ’70s pseudoscience titled The Secret Life of Plants. The book was responsible for a big houseplant fad, and also for making scientists very shy of vegetal intelligence claims. (A similar dynamic delayed scientific acceptance of airborne rather than droplet-based transmission in the early years of COVID; apparently it sounded too much like miasma theory.) But the tide is turning. Current work doesn’t suggest that plants have preferences between rock and classical music, but they do redirect roots toward the sound of running water, and produce tannins in response to recordings of chewing caterpillars. Not only can plants hear and communicate, but they also have some degree of vision. This makes sense after a moments’ thought: a plant that grows toward light can clearly sense it, and it would be odd if they didn’t have a way to pick up the presence of their solar food. At that point, there’s an evolutionary advantage to sensing more details about that food, and using it to learn about other aspects of the environment. Many species, it turns out, use changes in light passing through leaves to recognize and respond to other plants. There’s also at least one species, the chameleon vine, that changes its leaves to blend in with whatever plants appear around it. Explanations vary (and all are pretty cool), but at least one study has shown it doing this with plastic plants, suggesting detailed visual processing. As we already know from Entangled Life, plants are terrifically social across species and kingdoms. Mycelial networks play a core role in their lives, trading nutrients and passing messages. So do animals. But plants also have relationships with each other. Like animals, they often share and protect kin more than strangers. Closely-related sunflowers point in different directions to avoid blocking each other’s light; many species crowd out the roots of unrelated plants while sharing high-nutrient patches with siblings and cousins. One pictures them like great Italian Renaissance families, plotting for control of the nitrogen. Schlanger quotes J.B.S. Haldane: “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” These findings have serious implications for agriculture—you can get considerably more yield from the same rice crop with just the right level of genetic diversity. But plants also cooperate across species, and do better in richly varied “neighborhoods.” Schlanger touches on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s research, showing that beautiful-to-humans flower combinations also attract more pollinators by growing together—and they put more energy into flowering when they have this opportunity. Plants change height, leaves, roots, to best fit the communities around them. They offer more carbon to fungi that share more phosphorus (and vice versa), but can also maintain relationships that balance only over many seasons. Vegetal interaction doesn’t look much like animal behavior—unless you watch a speeded-up film of a vine seeking a good climbing stem. But they can do things that animals can’t, as well. Their chemical adaptability goes far beyond ours, allowing orchids to tailor their scents to available pollinators, sunflowers to discourage nearby seedlings, and many species to fight off a variety of predators. Ironically, modern human cultivation often discourages variation and selects for qualities that undermine natural pest resistance. It’s time, Schlanger argues, that we took plant behavior seriously in its own right, and learned to work with it rather than against. Buy the Book The Light Eaters Zoë Schlanger Buy Book The Light Eaters Zoë Schlanger Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget I’m a big fan of active plants. Show me a B-movie anthropophagus green monster, and I shiver in delight. I’m sympathetic to anything that speaks and acts for itself, when people expected it to remain conveniently passive. I’m also sympathetic to the idea that living in this world is a complex challenge, requiring complex behavior for anything larger than a bacterium. (Stay tuned, no doubt, for a book about the complex social lives of bacteria. Honestly, the first primitive cell to take in the first mitochondrial organism probably has a lot to share, a love story for the aeons.) Plants are large, multicellular, and face the same basic challenges as us—sessility should be no more a constraint on their intelligence than it is on human babies. But what an alien intelligence it must be! Slow movement, shape-changing rather than traveling, processing distributed across the body and perhaps beyond, into the fuzzy boundaries of entwined roots and mycelia. So I’m excited by the scientific results and arguments that Schlanger shares here. But I’m frustrated by the way she sometimes presents those arguments. Debate and disagreement are natural parts of research. Stubborn resistance to new scientific paradigms is a real thing. But that resistance is practically the only narrative that Schlanger has for scientific disagreement. Every cutting-edge researcher is risking their reputation, every failure to get an NSF grant is an indication of skepticism, every young scientist fears being ostracized for admitting to belief in plant intelligence. It’s true that the Society for Plant Neurobiology (now the Society of Plant Signaling and Behavior) picked their original name to make a sharp point, and received a fair amount of blowback. But resistance hasn’t been one-size-fits-all, and Schlanger treats fringe theorists, well-meaning researchers whose experiments fail to replicate, and tenured eminences with the same scripted brush. This feels like a minor point, but it’s also incredibly frustrating as someone who cares how people think about science. The idea of resistance followed by paradigm shift isn’t wrong, but it isn’t complete either. And this kind of simplification is what leads vaccine deniers to think “scientists disagree” just makes them brave mavericks—that the preponderance of evidence doesn’t matter, and that truth is the polar opposite of consensus. Schlanger’s not doing that, but she’s feeding it unnecessarily. A lot of her mavericks look less like Galileo and more like one faction among many trying to hash out the interpretation of exciting new results. I’ve been in that room, it was just that we were arguing about the right framework for studying reconstructive memory. Nobody ostracized us; they didn’t even usually schedule us for separate sessions. The new results really are exciting all on their own. Combined with The Sounds of Life, Is a River Alive?, An Immense World, Braiding Sweetgrass, and Entangled Life, they add to my increasing sense that our world is an interconnected place of thriving awareness, connection, and communication—and that we are on the verge of dramatic breakthroughs in how we participate. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Growing Together. Hey solarpunks! We’ve written about regenerative agriculture and the death of monocultures—but wouldn’t farming be even cooler if it involved mediating relationships between plant neighborhoods, or using plant behavior findings to build the best cooperative vegetable gardens? That is, gardens where the vegetables cooperate with each other. What about sending translators into the food forest to figure out why the spicebush isn’t thriving? At the end of the book, Schlanger also brings up the Rights of Nature movement centered in Is a River Alive? She mentions a couple of failed efforts, in particular the Ojibwe effort to give legal standing to wild rice. But the tide is shifting on this as well—and it seems like it ought to make a difference if the rice can testify. Talking to Trees. Every time I write, lately, I imagine communication with non-human life. Not just extraterrestrials, with whom I’ve always been obsessed, but octopuses, ravens, fungally-networked swamps—and plants. It’s the attitude shift that most appeals. We’d have to slow down, to think about what a redwood is likely to say, and what we could possibly say in return that it would care about. What would a future look like where we could have these conversations? It probably wouldn’t be much like talking to another human, or even a whale. But we already have longstanding relationships with these organisms, which have shaped us as much as we’ve shaped them. Grains changed the shape of the human jaw; human cultivation changed the shape of grains. There’s a mutual aspect to domestication—much as dogs benefited from our trashpits and then from hunting with us, grasses like rye evolved to blend into our early wheat fields. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about longstanding traditions of plant communication, and the evidence for their value. Technology for translating plants’ chemical, electrical, and acoustic communication could add its own layer to those connections. About That Mean Green Mother… Yeah, I’m still not tired of triffids. We could—and should—use new findings about plant capabilities to imagine how those abilities might be turned against… us. Da-da-dum! New Growth: What Else to Read Schlanger quotes Sue Burke’s Semiosis, in which humans submit to alien plants, and Ursula Le Guin’s “‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.” Both are great. She also recommends the poetry of Báyò Akómoláfé, a Yoruba poet of interspecies interconnection. I’ve recently been introduced to Tractor Beam, an SF magazine focused on “soilpunk.” They’re publishing cool stories that aren’t like anything else. I particularly liked T.K. Rex’s “Like a Skeleton in Desert Sand”—not actually related to plant communication, but how often do you see stories about the future of paleontology? If you want dangerous plants more recent than Little Shop of Horrors (Da-doo!), Mira Grant’s Overgrowth and Jenn Lyons’ Green & Deadly Things are recent favorites. The former is an alien invasion in the tradition of Audrey II and the triffids; the latter is epic fantasy and, unexpectedly, a strong critique of the Jedi Order. Probably that bacteria book I’ll eventually cover will be Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World looks like an interesting take on multi-kingdom intelligence. Riley Black’s When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance covers our early symbiosis. Do you sing to your plants? Or listen to them? Tell us about it in the comments![end-mark] The post Vegetable Neighborhoods, Clan Wars, and Hunting Strategies: Zoë Schlanger’s <i>The Light Eaters</i> appeared first on Reactor.