Light Eaters

I skipped around in this book, and I had a difficult time getting into it. To be fair, I am not the target audience. I'm not a science writing person. But I found that Schlanger's discussion of her own love/enthrallment with plants (as well as similar feelings among the scientists she interviewed) was kind of grating after a while. I have noticed this among similar texts - that there is a lot of time talking about the sense of wonder around plants and nature...a lot of discussion of care for houseplants and walks in the garden. It sometimes feels over the top.

Intrigued by the rapidly burgeoning scientific research on plant capacities, a climate journalist turns to current questions of intelligence, consciousness, and sociality. Overlaps with Franz de Waal, Donna Haraway, Future Ecologies, etc in pushing at our human-centered and exploitative perspective on the world to wonder what it would mean to consider our intellectual capacities diffused to all distant kin.