The World Is a Prism, Not a Window

Transcript

Emmanuel Vaughan-LeeZoë, welcome to the show.

Zoë SchlangerIt’s such an honor to be here with you.

EVIn your new book, The Light Eaters, which I found truly fascinating, you explore our growing awareness of plant intelligence and how this is unfolding in the field of botany. And it’s clear from the beginning of the book that you have a strong curiosity about the mysteries of plants, but also curiosity about what it might mean for our relationship with the living world if we began to view plants through a different lens, one that recognizes their intelligence and that they have their own form of consciousness; and that this curiosity in part grew from your time spent as a climate journalist. Tell me about the genesis of this book from that place in your life.

ZSYeah, so I was covering climate change in a newsroom, and I had been doing that for six, seven years at that point, and I started feeling really numb to the material. I mean, I’m sure as you can relate to, it’s a constant barrage of bad news, and your brain just has to find a way to hold all of that and still carry on with regular life. And I found my way of doing that was to detach from the actual stakes of it all. It started to just feel like good stories. And I knew that was not a healthy place for me to be mentally. And my editor understood that as well. And so I started looking around for something else to cover. And it was around that time that the first fern genome was sequenced. Ferns have absolutely enormous genomes. And so it had taken that long for the genomic revolution to reach them.

And I had started covering that story and got a fern scientist on the phone. And he was at a botany conference, and he said, do you want another few fern scientists on this call? And he ran out and got about six fern scientists and put them all on conference call. And then I had the most delightful reporting conversation of my career. It was so refreshing to speak to people who loved their study subject. There was such a palpable love for ferns and plant life in that room, and so much awe and wonder in what they were talking about. It was completely infectious. And I know as a reporter, the best stories come out of enthusiasm, someone’s enthusiasm for what’s going on; and they had enthusiasm in spades.

And also around the same time I was finding all these studies coming out that were finding plants could do absolutely remarkable things. This was when research first came out suggesting that plants could potentially have regional dialects in their chemical communications, that they could recognize their kin and store short-term memories. And I felt myself coming back to this enlivened curious version of myself that I had missed, and it just felt like the best story of my career.

EVOne of the things you start to consider is the scientific worldview, or the scientific way of knowing and how knowledge operates in this sphere. And you look at science’s capacity to offer amazing, important understandings of the mechanics of the world, but also its limitations in working with ethical and philosophical questions, such as personhood. Can you speak to that a bit?

ZSDefinitely. So science is an amazing thing, what we call Western traditional science. It can ask amazing questions, but it’s limited to the questions it trains its scientists to ask. It can do experiments, make observations. Peer review is a beautiful, rigorous, necessary process. But what I was seeing botanists debating in journals was whether or not plants had intelligence and consciousness. And these are very, very mushy words. We have no scientific definition for either of them—no single definition at least. And we certainly don’t understand the mechanical substrates for consciousness even in ourselves. So I saw this sort of flailing going on among scientists, and it took me awhile to realize, but this was really not the purview, ever, of science, or not in the current iteration of science. There was a time of, you know, the philosopher naturalists, who certainly waded into these territories of meanings of life and selfhood and things like that. But we are not in that era right now. And it did feel like more of an ethical philosophical conundrum. It’s a social question whether or not plants should be considered intelligent, I think.

EVYou spend time with several botanists who are grappling with how to ask and answer questions about the extent of plant intelligence within a system of knowledge that, as you said, can’t ask questions about something it doesn’t see as existing in the first place. But there’s a real feeling of momentum throughout the book that something has to, and is very possibly about to, change in how science approaches the world of plants.

ZSYeah. We are in this fabulous moment where there’s so much good research coming out. Plant science went through this evolution, in a way, that mirrors the trajectory of research into psychedelics in the sense that there was a lot of flourishing in the plant behavioral sciences in the seventies and early eighties, and then it sort of went underground, in part thanks to this book that maybe a lot of people remember, called The Secret Life of Plants, that contained a lot of falsehoods, or sort of myths, that then were perpetuated about plants; and that sort of sapped the field of funding for a good long time. But now in the last fifteen or so years, we’re in this era of flourishing those questions. We have good technology, and some of that taboo has worn off, to confirm or actually allow researchers to ask these out-of-box questions about whether or not plants have personalities, or whether or not they have social structures or some sort of altruism. These are all actual rigorous questions we can ask.

EVThere seems to be maybe even the beginning of a movement of scientists who were feeling around for these different ways of knowing, especially outside the strict control of the lab.

ZSYes. Yeah, I think you might be touching on the work of Monica Gagliano, who is a plant scientist who occupies a very precarious space in the sciences right now. She’s responsible for a paper that found plant roots could hear the sound of running water in sealed pipes. And when I say “hear,” there’s big air quotes around “hear”: they are sensing the vibrations, the acoustic vibrations, so it’s a physical stimulus. But still, this was an amazing paper. And it explains what probably plenty of plumbers have always known: that roots can seek flowing water even if there’s no moisture gradient to be detected because there is some capacity to sense those sound vibrations.

But she’s also had a few other more controversial papers. And then she came out with a memoir that detailed how the structure of her lab experiments were given to her by her interaction with ayahuasca. And so she has sort of exited the realm of traditional botany, botanical sciences, and gone off on her own a bit. There’s a real separation of church and state in sciences. And so she’s sort of gone into this less controlled area to do her work: she’s gone out into the forest, she’s out of the lab. And she still has a lot of support from humanities institutions, and other funding bodies, but that is no longer sort of the purview of this straight science that peer review works with at this point. Does that answer your question?

EVYeah. I mean you write that “science can feel like a monolith,” that what science “says to be true now will always be true.” But history shows that scientific paradigms can come and go, each with biases and blind spots, and that the scientific paradigm can shift depending on what we value culturally, philosophically, and ethically, which does slowly seem to be shifting towards the recognition that the living world might be more than just resources for human consumption, and open us up to different ways of knowing that that study you just referenced points towards.

ZSYeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there is this cultural shift happening in the sciences. There’s much more recognition of the lessons that traditional ecological knowledge can also teach the sciences—Indigenous science. In some ways there’s a big confirmation happening of some principles that Indigenous sciences have known for a very long time: specifically, when you think about the plant sciences, just the broadening of our scientific imagination to include plants as creatures that have spontaneous, willful, so to speak, behaviors. This is not news to Indigenous sciences. Thinking of plants as having lifestyles and proclivities and dealing with multiple variables in their environment to make very quick dynamic choices—these are all things that Indigenous sciences and belief in plants as persons of a kind have always held to be true. So there is this interesting bridging going on, and I think it’s a really exciting time in the plant sciences because of it.

EVYou look at this concept of plant blindness in the book and how our tendency not to notice the extent of plant life around us is not merely based on our biological difference from plants, but is tied to the value systems and dominant culture perspectives that rob plants of personhood. But as you said, traditional ecological knowledge has—almost in every culture—understood, as you said, this notion of personhood.

ZSDefinitely. Yeah, we’re just starting to creep in that direction now. I think it also opens up this interesting world of what personhood means in our society on a legal level even. There’s also a whole movement in legal theory—there’re legal scholars writing about this—this idea that maybe ecological entities ought to have standing as persons in the courts in the way that we give ships a legal personality: you know, ships get the feminine pronoun in the courts; and, of course, corporations. So there is this movement to think holistically: If a plant or a river or forest or a dolphin is a person, what does that mean for their legal standing? Should they be allowed to argue, through a human entity, for their right to exist.

There’s a really interesting case in Minnesota where the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a case against the state of Minnesota on behalf of wild rice. And so the case was “[Manoomin] (wild rice) vs. Minnesota,” because there was a pipeline going through the wild rice habitat and infringing upon the rice’s right to evolve. And I loved that that line was in the case: that they had an inherent right to evolve. Not that humans had a right to have rice to eat, necessarily—although, one could argue that as well—but rather that the rice itself had a right to exist and perpetuate its evolutionary experiment. And that case was thrown out for lack of precedent, which will keep happening until we get some precedent. But it does speak to a slight turn happening conceptually, backed by some of this research into the vibrancy of ecology and of individual plants, that we could maybe hope to see in our lifetime, some movement around that.

EVSomething that seemed to lessen your own plant blindness was thinking about the ways that plants literally make your own body possible. And you wrote something I loved: “Every bundle of muscle in my body was woven from the sugars plants spun from moisture and air. My blood cells that course through my veins like water through rootlets are each kept ruby red with the oxygen plants made…. Every inward breath of mine was first breathed out by plants. In this material sense, in terms of what they’ve contributed to my physical being, they are as much my relatives as any family member I know.”

ZSYeah, it’s so true. This is what took awhile to sink in over the course of my reporting for this book: this primacy of plants in terms of them creating the conditions for our lives in such a literal sense. This idea that every molecule of glucose I have ever consumed, even if I’ve eaten it by eating an animal or eating some processed item of food, still was first formed by photosynthesis in a plant. And everything else is just recycling these plant molecules. And they do, they literally build our bodies. And of course, the oxygen too. I mean, these are things we learn in high school biology, maybe even middle school biology, but we don’t spend enough time internalizing the true materiality of the fact that they grant us our very lives; that we’re wholly dependent on them. It doesn’t matter, almost, if they are considered intelligent; they are still the basis of our lives.

EVYeah. And moving from an intellectual understanding of that to a felt embodied experience, which you seem to journey towards.

ZSYeah. Yeah. It really, it helped me in so many ways. You know, life feels very abstract when you’re in an office building covering the news, but when you sit there and really try and think through what plants are doing for our lives, that shifts the perspective quite a bit.

EVAs you said earlier, intelligence is a very loaded word. And you wrote about this, and you share lots of examples throughout the book of scientists naming the capabilities of plants very diplomatically, tending towards terms like “plant sensing” over “plant behavior,” or labeling the communication of plants “signaling” rather than “neurobiology.” On the other hand, there’s an argument that that kind of language could limit our ability to truly grasp the depths of plant intelligence. And you write that you feel this dispute over language is actually a “dispute over worldview,” “over what plants [a]re, particularly in contrast to ourselves” and human intelligence.

ZSThis is a central struggle: the fact of human language being quite limited in its ability to convey actual realities about the world. This, as a writer, is—and I’m sure you experience this—we are all just drawing these perimeters around concepts. The writer Clarice Lispector, who I love, wrote once that she was trying to unite the symbol with the thing itself. And the symbol here is the language, and the thing itself is the reality.

And when it comes to this, like, heady concept of looking at a plant—something without a face, something without a brain—and trying to understand its alacrity and its vibrancy without reducing it to a sort of humanoid form, is the struggle around using a word like “intelligence” or “consciousness” to describe a plant. And so scientists that, you know, you just mentioned— Scientists are flipping over backwards to use words that dance around that concept so that they are not drawn into this sticky debate about how much of our own human notion to drape onto plants. And I applaud them for their efforts. I mean, they’re doing this because they’re really aware of their responsibility. I mean, they’re writing this first draft of knowledge that will carry us forward and carry into popular culture. And they don’t want to be wrong. They don’t want to introduce a flaw. An inaccurate idea. At the same time, I think that words are all we have, and for those of us who are not super acquainted with scientific jargon, we have to use these words like “language” and “intelligence” and “desire” to talk about plants, in part because these are the metaphors that we have at hand. It’s the closest thing we can understand that gives us this little bridge of understanding between plants and ourselves.

I mean, I think a lot about Theophrastus, who was a disciple of Aristotle, and he is often talked about as the first person in classical Western history to write a book about plants that was about the plants themselves as opposed to what they were good for for humans. And he coined this term “heartwood,” which is what we still use to describe the core of trees. And he wrote about this conflict. He was trying to signify that the core of the tree is its tender part, that if you wound the core, you could kill the tree. And it’s where all of this flowing was going on and its vital systems. And he was well aware that there was no true heart in a tree, but he wrote that it’s by the use of the better known that we have to understand the unknown. And that’s why he justified calling that “heartwood.” And of course we still use that word, which speaks to its efficacy. And no one expects to find an actual beating heart inside of a tree. It’s like, if we give everyone a little more credit to sort of hold these complexities in mind, we might be more able to use these words to talk about other creatures, even if the exact meaning is a little bit out of our grasp.

EVIt seems that “consciousness” in particular is the most hotly contested word in relation to plants, and consciousness points to an awareness of the self, which is really a threshold that we attribute exclusively to humans, at least within Western dominant culture. But this is shifting, in the book at least, around the edges it seems of your conversations with scientists.

ZSYeah, absolutely. I mean, consciousness—it’s like you can pick and choose different definitions for it, right? I mean, some people define it as basic as the ability to be knocked unconscious, which we now know— First of all, we don’t know why anesthetics work on us, but they also work on plants. You can etherize a pea seedling and it will cease the action potentials within it that— The electrical impulses will cease, it will cease moving, which otherwise it’s doing all the time. And then you remove the ether and it reanimates within fifteen minutes. So there’s that one.

Or you can think about consciousness, like you said, as the recognition or awareness of self. And on a very mechanical level, plants certainly do this. Plant roots recognize self roots from non-self roots. They’re very closely monitoring the boundaries of their body and how they relate to the bodies of other plants and other creatures near them. You see this in just the basic ways that plants compete for resources. But you also see it in things like— There’s this marvelous study about how sunflowers share nutrient patches where perhaps the assumption would be that a sunflower would sort of ruthlessly compete below ground for patches of nutrients with its roots. Instead, what researchers found is that it can sense from afar, belowground, exactly how far away it is from its nearest sunflower neighbor, and then triangulate that with the nutrient patch. And if you have two sunflowers that are exactly equidistant to this patch, they will sort of diligently share the patch. They will both stick roots into it but won’t try and overtake it or push out the other plant’s roots. But if one sunflower is just a little bit closer to the patch than the other, then that sunflower will dominate the patch and there won’t really be competition as such.

So I mean, sense of self, sense of other—there’s a thousand examples of that in the plant world. There’s a way to define intelligence that goes back to its very basic Latin root of interlegere, which just meant to choose between. And so we see plants making choices constantly and spontaneously in ways that go beyond rote reflex. I mean, you change little subtle things about their environment, and they make a different choice. So it becomes harder to sort of deprive them of these words, in a way. One starts doing backwards somersaults. And you know, one of these core complaints within this world is that plants don’t have brains, which is absolutely true. But we are starting to tiptoe into ascribing intelligence to creatures that don’t have brains. I mean, I’m sure you’ve talked to lots of people who deal in mycelium and the sort of network intelligence we’re starting to think about with fungi spread across vast distances and this decentralized network of decisioning that’s happening belowground. So maybe it doesn’t require a brain at all.

EVYou do a lot of investigation into this in the book and how plants can sense and interact with the world without a centralized system to process information. And you arrive at the possibility that the entire plant functions as a brainlike command center, which is very different than our own.

ZSYeah. That is something that was bubbling up for me while doing this research. I had gone, recently, to Wisconsin to a lab where scientists had imbued plants with fluorescent green protein from jellyfish that would light up in response to touch. So I got to pinch a plant with tweezers and watch the signal of that pinch—that sort of assault, so to speak—travel throughout this plant body until the whole plant was glowing. In other words, the whole plant had received the signal of my pinch. And this is provoking comparisons to nervous systems. The scientists themselves who are involved in this work are absolutely opposed to using that language: there are no nerves in plants; they don’t want to muddle those waters. But other researchers in their field are suggesting that maybe this is an analogous system to a nervous system. It’s a vascular system, a system of veins throughout the plant that are being used for transporting signals, information about what’s going on in one part so that the whole rest of the body can react to it.

And this is sort of tiptoeing into this realm of starting to think about the whole plant as something like a brain, some sort of very distributed sensing system. Of course, there are no neurons in plants, there are no pain receptors in plants. Whatever’s going on is almost certainly a much simplified version of what’s happening in our own brains. But nonetheless, does that mean you can’t call it what it is, in a way, this distributed sensing system? It starts to become hard to not think of a plant that way.

EVAnother fascinating part of the book was your exploration into plant memory. And you look at several studies that indicate it’s possible that plants can hold individual memory both at the cellular and also behavioral level. Tell me about this.

ZSYes. Well, I think anyone listening would have some sense of plants having a sort of calendar-type memory. We know plants are counting the days of elapsed cold. There are a lot of plants that, in winter, actually count the days of cold in order to decide when to bloom in the spring. It’s called the “memory of winter,” or “vernalization.” A lot of bold plants, a lot of fruit trees, require these days of cold, which is a sort of counting thing.

But there’re other more spontaneous and more short-term versions of this memory. There was a flower that grows in the Andes in Peru called Loasaceae, or it’s in the Loasaceae family—it’s related to stinging nettles—and it’s this beautiful starburst-shaped flower. And I went to go see it in a greenhouse in Bonn in Germany. And researchers know that when a bee comes along and sticks its tongue under this little flap, it triggers a stamen to sort of stand upright from the horizontal position to the vertical, and it has some pollen on it. And so the bee gets this pollen, and that’s how the flower achieves pollination.

But much more recently, something like three years ago, researchers found that this plant was actually keeping track of this time interval between pollinator visits. So if a bee came and went every forty-five minutes, it would raise its stamen in anticipation of the arrival of this pollinator every forty-five minutes. But if there were fewer around and that interval changed to every hour and a half, the plant would quite quickly adjust and raise its statement every hour and a half. And this has clear ecological advantages. You don’t want to expose your pollen to wind and rain and loss if you don’t need to. So it’s best to sort of conserve it for when a pollinator is truly likely to come by, especially if you’re in this extreme high altitude environment where there may not be that many around. Every shot at pollination has to count.

So this is another form of memory, of counting time, in a very short-term way. And there’s a plasticity to it. In other words, the plant is changing its behavior according to changing information that it’s somehow storing and retrieving, and no one knows where these memories are stored. But, of course, memory in us is still very much a mysterious thing.

EVYeah, you point out how memory has long been entangled with how we think of our own consciousness. It’s what allows us to be aware that we are moving through time and space. And you write, “memory and experience are intrinsically linked, because a being that can remember the contours of its world can be said to have experienced it,” which opens a lot of questions around what it would mean if a plant held memory beyond what you described. It kind of pushes the realms of what might be possible.

ZSSure. It suggests that a plant is somehow retaining the experience of everything that may have happened to it. We’re not sure if that’s the case with all plants, but certainly with long-lived species.

I remember learning for the first time from a researcher about how plants are monitoring the pressure in their limbs at all times and the flow of nutrients and the flow of resources throughout their bodies. And right after having learned about that, I was in western Washington, living near the coast, and was walking around, and there were these gigantic fir trees, or maybe they were cedars, I can’t remember. But I was seeing on one side they had this incredible waterfall of branches covered in needles. And then I sort of walked into the stand and walked around the other side, and there was, first of all, total darkness, because there was so much needle cover on the outside. But I looked up, and there were also these kind of nubs of limbs where there were no needles at all. And that, in a way, was this memory that the tree had held of where sun used to be; that these limbs were then deprived of whatever it took to keep them growing needles because the plant assessed the situation, realized there was not photons to be caught on that side of the tree anymore—the overstory had shadowed those limbs out—and it cut those limbs off and reallocated those resources somewhere else to grow leaves elsewhere where they could actually photosynthesize.

So in a way, you can think of the whole body plan of a plant, and especially long-lived plants like trees as a sort of memory map of anything that had ever happened to that tree, which totally rewrites the way I look at plants now. Even the network of roots is a memory map in a way. The roots are constantly foraging for nutrients, and if they hit a dead end or see no more nutrients in that area, they’ll redirect. And so you end up with this living map of tissue, in a way.

EVI interviewed an Akwesasne seed keeper named Rowen White a couple years back, and we spoke about memory. And she spoke about it in the context of the memories that seeds hold from all the hands that have held those seeds generationally: the songs that have been sung, the ceremonies that have been offered to those seeds as they were planted, or the harvesting of the crops that came from those seeds, which speaks to a different kind of memory and a different kind of level of traditional ecological knowledge than is often talked about in mainstream circles. What’s your feeling around this?

ZSI think that’s absolutely beautiful, and I can’t wait to go back and listen to that conversation. This reminds me of another field that I spoke to some researchers in around epigenetics in plants and this idea of ancestral memory, so to speak: that everything that happens to the parent plant is transformed in a way and used quite intelligently to design and build this new seed, this second generation. And I was speaking specifically to a lab that dealt with invasive plants and how plants become invasive. And the truth is, invasive plants are just fabulously good at being plants. They are so good at transmitting information generation to generation. So let’s say the parent plant encounters extreme drought and in its own lifetime that parent plant may adjust the shape of its roots to be longer and thinner to sort of seek moisture farther, but it will only get so far in its own lifetime. It will then make a seed that, when it emerges, its child plant will be immediately ready to take on that challenge. It will have a body plan suited to that harsh environment that its parent encountered at some point throughout its life. And you see that with invasive species; they adapt very quickly, generation to generation. They’re just good at transmitting memories, in a way.

EVWhen we do open up to intelligences that lie beyond the human, we also open ourselves to a category crisis. To begin to view plants with a lens of intelligence not only destabilizes the way we organize taxonomy, but destabilizes our place in the hierarchy of beings, and maybe the notion of that hierarchy itself. It starts to upend the structures that we’ve created around plants and humans.

ZSAbsolutely. I think that many of us who grew up in a more European-based thought tradition, where there’s the Christianized version of like this ladder of worth, of being hierarchy— And that comes from all the way back to Aristotle with this sort of skala naturae, this ladder of life, with plants at the bottom, somewhere above rocks, and below the lowest animals. And, of course, then you have humans at the top. And then I’ve seen some Christianized versions where it’s God and then angels and then men, and then educated men, and then women, and then children, and then uneducated— You can endlessly splice this hierarchy. But, always, it’s people at the top.

And while doing research for this book, I read this amazing book from an Anishinaabe plant practitioner—it’s called, Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask—and she wrote something that changed my perspective forever and that I try and repeat as often as I can, which is that in Anishinaabe cosmology, plants are the second brothers of the world. So the first brothers are these forces of air and storms and soil and sun, and they depend on nothing else for their lives. And then the second brothers are plants who depend on the sun and the rain and the air, but nothing else. And then third brothers are animals that depend on each, the eldest and second brother, for their existence. And then humans are the baby brothers. They’re the youngest brothers of the world. They’re the most recently created of the world, and they’re wholly dependent on each of the other elder brothers for their lives—without giving all that much back.

And that is such a total inversion of what many of us have been raised with in terms of a belief system. And hews so much more closely to the absolute scientific truth of the ways that we are dependent—exactly what we discussed before—for every molecule of sugar that’s ever entered our bodies and every bit of oxygen we’ve ever breathed. We are so wholly dependent on all these other life forms and all these other categories of life, but in a way, plants especially. Right? So I think that’s instructive to think of ourselves as the youngest brothers of this world of ours.

EVAnd acknowledging the evolutionary timeline, which is something we conveniently like to forget about…

ZSExactly.

EV…and say the most recent is sometimes the best.

In the book, you look to knotweed, which often reclaims spaces we deem human as symbolic of the possibility that plants can exist in the niche of exceptionalism we have created and kept for ourselves. And you write that, “Even just a single tendril of green flesh rupturing concrete begins to split open our understanding of plants as sessile, squishable, and inert. A soft thing without eyes or a mouth that applies sustained pressure to our hard boundaries, the only thing between us and the dirt, and it wins the fight? … The possibility that we are not in charge flicks through the mind.” I loved that. Talk to me about this.

ZSYeah, so I’m talking to you from Brooklyn, where we have a lot of Japanese knotweed around. It’s everywhere. It’s in every open lot. I was living in an apartment for a while where the previous tenants had put down a tarp in the backyard and then put sort of sod over it. And it was amazing to watch in the spring. These chutes of knotweed just absolutely burst through this tarp and puncture the sod and just come up so quickly, and honestly, so beautifully. You’ve never seen a hardier-looking plant than a knotweed. They look really—the picture of health.

And I was thinking about this. I mean, we have a lot in our pop culture, in our media, about humanoid plants sort of taking back space or doing violence unto humans. And you can see where we’ve come up with these narratives of monstrous plants, because, really, it does trouble the mind to think about these vines being able to take back our landscapes that we worked so hard to build, or the fact that if you left a house unoccupied and unmaintained for a certain amount of time, plants would take it back and render it useless to you. Certainly in a tropical environment, that happens extremely quickly. Your roof will cave in very quickly because of the amount of plant life that will take over and find foothold for themselves there. And I think it’s just another reminder of who’s really in charge here.

I’m trying to think if I have more to say about that. I don’t know. I mean, invasive plants also occupy this space in our minds in the sense that we use a lot of xenophobic language sometimes for invasive plants, calling them “alien” to a landscape, which of course we’ve put them basically anywhere they are at this point. If you’re encountering an invasive, it’s been brought to wherever you are by human hands. And again, I mean, they’re depriving us in some cases of landscapes we, in our short human times on Earth, have come to love. And that can be very sad. And I’m not saying that efforts to abate invasive species should cease, but I think there should be some recognition that actually these aren’t evil creatures. They are simply extraordinarily good at doing what they do: at photosynthesizing, at finding niches. And in some cases they’re better at it than the plants who’ve been here without much competition for a very long time. And in some ways, they are the future of plant life in certain places. Whether we like it or not, we brought them here; it was our mistake, perhaps, but they’re thriving where they were put. And there’s a tremendous amount of resourcefulness to be looked at there.

EVThroughout the book, you hint that when the separation we place between plants, the living world, and ourselves dissolves, the experience converges on the mystical. And you note that these flashes of the eternal, the real, the gestalt, run like a thread throughout naturalist literature. You referenced the nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who wrote how “everything is interaction and reciprocal” and therefore “gives the impression of the whole,” and Bernard Berenson who wrote of the “Itness.” And you go on to wonder what these moments of Itness and these experiences of the real are, and what space they can open up for thought. Tell me about this.

ZSI think the more time we spend considering the ways in which our lives are absolutely interwoven with the non-human—and in my case, plants—the more it settles us back into our rightful place in the world in terms of, you know, not this pinnacle on some evolutionary hierarchy, but rather just one more node of biological creativity; and thinking of all of biological life as the most recent iteration of this constantly growing proliferating web of life, that we are each just the most recent outcome of evolutionary creativity, and all in this sort of entangled map that both Darwin and von Humboldt spoke about. But also there’s something that it does to our ability to see ourselves as part of a system: not only to see ourselves as one instance of biological creativity, but as also nodes in a broader system of biological interchange and dependency and interdependency.

One of the hardest things about writing this book was keeping it to plants, because where a plant begins and ends is a very difficult question to answer. Plants are suffused with, first of all, with fungi. There are fungi growing into and around every single plant root in the wild. And we now know fungi are performing duties for these plants and for themselves that we think of as plant duties rather than fungi duties. Like the ability of a grass to withstand salt water is sometimes just dependent on the kind of fungi that’s colonizing its roots, not the plant itself; or microorganisms of other kinds, bacteria and viruses. Everything is in this deep interchange, of which plants can be so instructive for thinking about this, because they’re incredibly porous to this. By being rooted in place, they’ve evolved to be completely porous with their environment, changed by every single little change in their environment. It comes out as an expression, as a change in the plant. And it’s just such a reminder looking at a plant of the way that we are all, the truth is, we are all that porous to our environment. The environment is changing all of us absolutely constantly and flowing through us. And that environment’s not an inert thing. It is microbes, it is fungi, it is viruses, it is everything else we share the planet with. And our very being is substantiated, or made, from that. I know that everything we’re learning about our own microbiomes is useful for thinking about that as well. The ways that our microbiomes might mediate things as basic as our gut health or our mental health or decisions we make. The research into this is really—we’re just scratching the surface.

And all of it points to the same thing, which is that we are ourselves a system of many, many organisms, and we exist in a system of many organisms. I think a lot about Lynn Margulis, who wrote many fascinating books and made discoveries of her own that speak to this nested interrelationship with ourselves and other organisms. But she described us as—each of us is a “loose committee,” as it were; that we are just a committee of creatures. So I find plants extremely useful for settling us back into the systems thinking. I mean, I think it’s very hard for the human brain to kind of glimpse the system in which we live, but when people talk about that Itness or these moments of existential awe at the natural world, I think those are brushes with that sort of numinous idea of being part of a system.

EVI’ve always been touched by the ability for plants to hold deep mystery, and as much as we’ve become more aware of how they function and work in an interconnected way, and in a systemic way, there’s still a mystery. There’s so much we don’t know. And while it can be wondrous to decipher some of the inner workings of plants, it strikes me that throughout the book you aren’t uncomfortable with the potential that there are things that are unknowable. And one of my favorite lines in the book is, “Nature, never a flat plane, has always more folds and faces still hidden from human view. The world is a prism, not a window. Wherever we look, we find new refractions.”

ZSThank you. Yeah, it’s one of my favorite lines too. I think in this moment when we’re trying to learn as much as we can—and I think that’s a very human instinct—about the non-human world, there is some level of understanding that I think even the scientists I spoke to have, or perhaps they have it most of all: that there are certain things we may never know about what plants are and what they can do. And that applies to lots of categories of life. I mean, it certainly applies potentially to this hard problem of consciousness in ourselves. We’ve had the best minds on this for a very long time, and have yet— You know, consciousness studies is sort of hitting a wall. We are not finding the mechanical substrates of consciousness. That doesn’t mean they’re not there, but it does maybe mean we’re not looking in the right ways or haven’t found the vocabulary of questions to actually get to this answer to speak about consciousness on the level in which it exists.

So if there are still these abiding mysteries about ourselves, it becomes pretty clear that those mysteries will remain, certainly in organisms that are quite alien to us in some ways. And I think scientists are pretty comfortable with that, even though their whole lives are dedicated to uncovering little parts in this web of knowledge and finding their little piece of fact to add to the whole mosaic of understanding of a thing. They are humbled by the work it takes to get the smallest fact, and how it’s going to be left to future generations, if at all, for some of our biggest questions to be answered.

EVThroughout your process of writing this book, you spoke about how it drew you back towards a material intimacy with the natural world that allowed you to reattach to the stakes of the ecological crisis we are currently in, which initially kind of removed you from a sense of feeling; and that this process brought you back with the ability to understand it in a different way.

ZSYeah, absolutely. I am back to climate reporting. I’m covering climate change at The Atlantic now, and it feels like a huge privilege to get to do that. And I’m coming to it with a different perspective. The human tragedy of climate change is enormous, and it’s one thing; but this process has better allowed me to sort of include the whole biotic world in what I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about the impacts of a disaster or the impacts of warming temperatures. Especially in that it introduced me to a world of people that are thinking about plants on their own terms, not about how plants are useful to people necessarily; that there’s a sort of vitality to, and urgency to, every single species that’s here. I mean, I think that’s been my biggest takeaway: that every single form of plant life is this incredible example of biological creativity and should get to continue that process.

We don’t know what’s going to come next. Evolution will continue its grand experiment and produce new species for each one that we lose, but the loss of each one is the loss of a whole world of experimentation, a whole world of cleverness, ultimately. Whatever you ultimately want to call it, it is a form of cleverness, and they found a way to be in this very challenging world—ingenious ways, complex ways, ways that we’re just beginning to understand now. Even just the level of the ways that plants communicate via complex airborne chemicals is something we’re just hardly starting to understand. The depth of complexity of that type of communication and the idea of taking one voice, so to speak, out of that chorus has been elevated in my mind to a very legitimate concern, and I’m glad for it. It makes it drearier at times, but also more enchanted—that I exist in a far more enchanted world than I did before this process. And I want to keep every part of that world here.

EVOne of the big questions that arises towards the end of the book is, at what point do we let plants into the realm of our ethical consideration? What is that threshold? When they have language? When they have memories? We spoke about maybe when they have family structures? What’s the tipping point into us viewing them as animate beings with agency? And as you discover that they indeed have all these characteristics, you suggest that it is now our choice whether we are going to let that reality in.

ZSRight. Ultimately it is a social choice. In much the same way, one can think about the animal rights movement being a social movement more than a scientific one. Science is creeping towards including more animals into the realm of beings we consider conscious. This is an ongoing project. There was just a conference at NYU this year that put out a statement extending the substrates for consciousness, or the possibility of the substrates for consciousness, to fish and cephalopods and some insects. So we’re just widening that circle scientifically. But behind all of this is a social movement and a philosophical movement to bring more and more animals into our ethical regard and think about whether or not our behavior towards them is justified given their animacy and willingness towards life.

And so plants, of course, also have that willingness towards life in their own way. And whether you want to call that “consciousness” or not will be a choice of perspective on your part—whether or not you can imagine a nonhuman entity as having such faculties, and what that word actually means to you. I do think we’re getting to this point culturally where there’s going to be a tipping point where it will become laughable that we maybe ever didn’t consider them at least agentive and animate in this way. I can just imagine thirty, forty years hence, just us looking back on this moment and thinking it quite funny: these debates around syntax or debates around language, what language to use, when it is becoming abundantly clear that plants are agentive actors; they’re subjects, not objects. And I’m so grateful for all the science that’s pointing us in that direction now.

EVZoë, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been lovely speaking with you.

ZSSuch a great talk. Thanks for having me.