Book Review: The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on EarthThe Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this book fascinating. It has made me rethink how I interact with plants. I really don’t pay any attention to them and now I’m going to start. While I don’t believe in mystical mumbo-jumbo about how everything is connected, this book has made me realize that plants do communicate in their own ways – ways that we don’t yet understand and may never understand.

The book covers many examples of plant to plant or plant to insect communication. Plants, through what is currently thought to be airborne chemical compounds, can warn other plants of predators, usually insects. The plants, now warned, change the chemical structure of their leaves to make them taste bad to the invaders. Another example is a plant called boquila trifoliolata, which grows in Chile. This plant can mimic the look of many different plants. It can change its leaves to look like plants near it. Botanists don’t know how it does it. Some think it “sees”; some think it’s a chemical or microbiological transfer – they just don’t know.

One of the main points of this book is how much we do not know about plants, mostly because we haven’t looked. Perhaps it’s time we start.


View all my reviews

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Retiring from Print Book Formatting

Image
  Beginning in 2024 I will no longer format any self-published print books. I have two reasons. First, I find it far more tiring to work on a screen for too long. Even as little as last year I was able to work for three to four hours at a stretch. I can’t do that anymore. My eyesight starts to give me problems and it’s hard to keep going. Second, I am convinced that paper books are worse for the environment primarily due to deforestation and enormous fossil fuel use in the creation and distribution of paper books.  We use a lot of fossil fuels to cut logs down, haul the logs to the paper mill, produce the paper, haul the paper to the printing facility (along with the inks and solvents used in the printing process), move the heavy printed books to distribution facilities, move the heavy printed books to bookstores, and finally to deliver a book to you. Not mentioned in most analyses of this: The millions of road trips individuals take to visit a bookstore to buy paper books. You can
Read more

Are Writers Obsolete?

Image
 I wanted to write an article about the Cord 812 automobile for this anthology. I’ll tell you the reason why later in this piece, but I ran into a major block. I just could not find the words to express what I was feeling. One of the most common topics at Writers Anonymous is artificial intelligence (AI). We all wonder how it will affect us. When will it replace us? Despite having talked about it for months, I had never tried it. So, I went to Bing’s ChatGPT tool on my Windows machine and typed in the following request: “Write a 750 word article about the Cord 812 automobile.” This is what it returned, in less than a minute . ***** Here is an article I wrote about the Cord 812 automobile: The Cord 812: A Classic Car with a Futuristic Design The Cord 812 was a luxury car that was produced by the Cord Automobile division of the Auburn Automobile Company in 1936 and 1937. It was one of the most innovative and distinctive cars of its time, featuring a front-wheel drive system, a
Read more

Fiction: Culture War

Image
  “What is wrong with people?” I was checking returned books in, flipping through them looking for damage. “What are you whining about now?” The voice came from the opposite corner of our small library. I couldn’t see her, but I knew it was Jackie. She was a regular, doing research for her next book. “Ketchup and mustard!” I yelled. “People are pigs,” she responded. We were the only two in the library. It was a Tuesday evening. We closed in an hour and I didn’t expect a crowd this late, especially with a November snowstorm starting. Jackie and I would hop in our Jeeps and get home just fine, but most people wouldn’t venture to the library in this weather, this late. To my surprise, the front door opened. I didn’t recognize him. He was a typical northwoodsman. The hiking boots, flannel shirt, canvas coat, and beard would have been perfect for our town’s tourist brochure. He walked straight to me. “Hi. What can I help you with?” I asked. “Where is the gay porn section?” I l
Read more