The unseen world of plant intelligence (NPR)

Plant and fungi kingdoms are conscious and communicate? Yes! Once one said to me, "Go outside and sit in the dirt." I was inside a Buddhist meditation next to the garden that I could see through big windows. I didn't understand why it was so insistent. Then I realized that it sits.

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The Light Eaters: How Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers New Understanding of Life on Earth

India's J.C. Bose gets too little credit for founding the scientific study of plant consciousness and intelligence. Fortunately, Paramhansa Yogananda documented Bose's scientific contributions in Chapter 8 of his famous book Autobiography of a Yogi. This eventually led to the publication of the mind-blowing The Secret Life of Plants.

More recently, Michael Pollan took a deep dive with This is Your Mind on Plants. Emma Farrell published Journeys with Plant Spirits about the details and real secrets of plants. Now there is more amazing science and shamanism looking at our plant cousins.

Author Zoë Schlanger releases an amazing book of botanical research tomorrow, May 7, 2024. Plants are aware and intelligent.  They have a secret life! We can hardly wrap our minds around the idea, but science reveals what many from the Buddha to St. Francis of Assisi to female scientists always intuited. This book is a #1 best seller in Ecology from pre-orders. The author appeared on NPR on May 6.

• “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

This forest is enchanted. I'm not alone here.

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom and reveals the astonishing capabilities of the green life all around us.

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 [like a space alien chameleon squid under the sea] 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.

Journeys with Plant Spirits (Emma Farrell)

Plants/shrooms are alive on another frequency.

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 (Heather Sten/Harper Collins)

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.

• AUDIO: Zoë Schlanger makes the case for plant intelligence in 'The Light Eaters' (NPR)
• Waging war on sex workers: The journalist and former sex worker on what feminists get wrong about prostitution – Zoe Schlanger interviews one (guernicamag.com)

What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously?

More importantly, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities?

Go vegan: plant "meat"

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.

Healing with Medicinal Plants of the West (Chumash Cecilia Garcia, USC Prof. James Adams)

Plants know. Isn't this exactly what we've always been trying to tell the White Man?

• Michael Pollan revolutionized our view of plants and psychedelics
• Zoë Schlanger (NPR), May 6, 2024; text (amazon.com); Dhr. Seven, Kelly Ani, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly