One of my first books of 2025 was an audio form of Zoe Schlanger’s “The Light Eaters”, which considers the intelligence and communication of plants, opening up to consideration eg. the memory of plants of winter and the anthropomorphization of communication, leading to the false conclusion that human beings present the highest possible form of intelligence. 

At times, The Light Eaters offers too little consideration of the world these findings are produced in – I wonder if I should truly care about the machine-detectable sounds produced by a tomato in need of water when we are collectively running out of water and said machine needs to be produced and fuelled first. Moreso, when plant communication, as the author reports, is already negatively affected by pollution. 

Unfortunately, what this book lacked (for me) was a clearer connection to the work and worldviews of other people which could have given it deeper rooting in this world and stronger appreciation of the work of different communities and researchers.This showed up mostly clearly in the failure to identify clearly decolonial streams of thought when inviting readers to welcome ambiguity and the togetherness of seemingly opposed beings and ideas.

Schlanger makes a considerable effort to highlight the dangers of “intelligence” as a misused and polluted human concept, and rounds off her work by presenting the Rights of Nature in which natural entities are given legal personhood. It remains questionable to me why the Indigenous (Ojibwe White Earth Nation) case for the personhood of manoomin (wild rice) against the State of Minnesota was not referred to by the names used by Indigenous people, especially when the author herself called for increased faith in the public’s capacity for complexity (in science communication). The faith in the public when communicating scientific findings cannot be limited to expecting said public to accept plant intelligence as a concept but end shortly before expecting those raised and educated in a settler colonial nation to remember the Indigenous names for plants.