One day, when I was a teen, I remember my parents bringing me a collection of Roald Dahl’s short stories for adults. I had been a fan of Dahl’s fiction as a child, particularly Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, so it must’ve seemed only natural. Dahl’s stories for children are impish and twisted, but I’m not sure my parents knew just how much more twisted Dahl’s adult fiction often is, with its grim tales of tattoos ripped off flesh and sold as skin paintings; an all-too-literal game of “The Floor Is Lava”; or, in one I often reread, the tale of a money-strapped man who, in a desperate bid to win a bet about how long his cruise ship will take to reach land, jumps off the boat’s deck to force it to stop and turn around, assuming a woman on the deck has seen him go over, until he realizes, to his horror, that no one saw him drop off the side, that he is lost in the churning sea, with virtually no chance of being found. While uneven in quality, I loved the stories’ macabre playfulness.
There was one, though, that really stuck with me, that made me look at the world around me in a new way. Simply entitled “The Sound Machine,” Dahl’s 1949 tale follows a man named Klausner who has developed a device that can detect sounds far beyond the range of human ears. Intrigued by the idea that dog whistles are inaudible to us but clear to canines, Klausner wants to know if there are other sounds around us we never hear, a silent symphony of the everyday. When he—and, for some reason, his physician—turn it on, they hear a shrill scream when a nearby woman clips a rose.
Klausner soon realizes that every time a plant is cut, it shrieks. He acknowledges that plants don’t have nervous systems and thus shouldn’t feel pain, and yet there it is, that eldritch wail. Later, he hears a tree scream as an axe repeatedly digs into it. “The noise of the tree,” he writes, “was worse than any known human noise because of that frightening, toneless, throatless quality.” He recoils as he imagines a mower in a field, the air thick with thousands of death-shrieks. The story ends, in a kind of dark comedy, with Klausner spiraling over which fruits or vegetables, if any, are ethical to consume.
I remember feeling a frisson run through me when I got to the end. I remember staring at my mother’s jasmines and purple bougainvillea, at the grass in our yard I casually trampled upon most days, the trees whose stems I snapped to make makeshift swords. Was I hurting them, I wondered? Torturing them, even, by acts I’d always taken for granted? I reassured myself that “The Sound Machine” was fiction, outlandish as any of Dahl’s creations, and yet the image of those shrieking plants quietly haunted me for days.
“For us to truly be part of this world, to be awake to its roiling aliveness, we need to understand plants.”
Two decades later, I found myself thinking about Dahl’s tale when I read The Light Eaters, a brilliant new book by Zoë Schlanger on a potential paradigm shift in botany: the exciting—and controversial—idea that plants may possess forms of intelligence and may even be conscious. “For us to truly be part of this world, to be awake to its roiling aliveness, we need to understand plants,” Schlanger, a staff writer for The Atlantic, writes, and The Light Eaters attempts just that, exploring decades of extraordinary research that complicates not just how we define intelligence but our own place in the natural world, and perhaps even how we understand plants as lifeforms.
Indeed, as Schlanger notes, “no one quite knows what a plant really is,” despite their planetary ubiquity, the fact that, “[i]f weighed, plants would amount to 80 percent of Earth’s living matter,” and that, without them, without photosynthesis, we would have no livable atmosphere, no habitable world at all for species like us. We are here, pondering what plants can do, only because they shaped a world in which beings like us could evolve.
“‘The world is, above all, everything the plants could make of it,’” Schlanger writes, quoting the philosopher Emanuele Coccia. The book’s evocative title, which reflects the fact that “[a] leaf is the only thing in our known world that can manufacture sugar out of materials—light and air—that have never been alive,” reflects this mysteriousness. It isn’t about howling flowers, and yet, as with Dahl, I found myself encountering the plants around me as though for the first time, curious about what, indeed, they were, what strange vegetal multitudes they contained.
I found myself inescapably thinking about something else, as well. There’s something striking about such curious, open-minded, out-of-the-box work today. The Light Eaters made a splash when it came out last year, yet it feels more revolutionary in 2025. (Its paperback release is set for May.) In Donald Trump’s America, where science itself is under threat, where novel research projects are attacked as “wasteful” without understanding their details (as when Trump criticized a study on “transgender mice” that was actually about “transgenic mice”), and where politicized pseudoscience is presented in executive orders to justify attacking ideas MAGA does not like—like the facts that intersex people exist, transgender people are real, and race is a social construct—it feels difficult to know if The Light Eaters’ subject matter would receive funding today.
And, in an America where environmental regulations are being gutted, where scientists are being fired en masse, where legislation protecting endangered species has been weakened to prop up the timber and fossil fuel industries, where we are told not to worry about species going extinct because biotech companies can just “bring them back” with “innovation,” where “climate change” is one of the myriad terms the government no longer allows in federal documents, I can’t help but wonder if it will soon be too late to learn more, too late to study certain species before they are quietly destroyed by razing machines or rising temperatures of our own infliction, a death that will come, unlike in Dahl, without screams, without bang or whimper, just as so many millions of other species have been quietly eradicated, a silence somehow more terrible for the absence of any howl.
What light-eaters will be lost through the conservative lotus-eaters in Congress who sit idly by in a Trumpian daze, letting a fascist destroy a nation by a thousand cuts?
I can’t help but wonder what remarkable opportunities we will lose in the name of unchecked corporate greed, what findings we will never find, what light-eaters will be lost through the conservative lotus-eaters in Congress who sit idly by in a Trumpian daze, letting a fascist destroy a nation by a thousand cuts, content to let those light-eaters, along with the rest of us, slowly be destroyed in the name of avarice, conservative anti-intellectualism, a bloodthirsty desire to “own the libs” at all costs, and, saddest of all, an utter lack of curiosity about what wonders they may consign to shadow-lit doors no one can open.
*
Plants, of course, as Schlanger and Dahl’s protagonist alike point out, do not have brains or nervous systems, at least not in the way that we tend to expect those to look. But, as Schlanger notes, we tend to define such things in reference to ourselves, and because of this, we might not immediately recognize a brain structure that deviates sharply from those preconceptions, particularly if that brain was decentralized. “[A] brain, this camp [of botanists] says, may be but one way to build a mind,” she writes.
If we do not start with the assumption that plants are automata responding mechanically to stimuli, we begin to see behavior that might well suggest intelligence. Schlanger explores an array of past and present research that points to just such conclusions:
Recently… researchers had found promising indicators of memory in plants. Others found that a wide variety of plants are able to distinguish themselves from others, and can tell whether or not those others are genetic kin. When such plants find themselves beside their siblings, they rearrange their leaves within two days to avoid shading them. Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them, and several plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off… Papers probing other remarkable behaviors were growing from a trickle to a fairly robust stream. It seemed like botany was on the verge of something new.
The Light Eaters revels in examples like these, some curiouser still, like boquila trifoliata, a creeping vine that near-perfectly mimics whatever plant it is near, or an orchid that attracts a specific species of wasp with a kind of floral dummy of a wasp (the wasp attempts to have sex with the dummy, while getting covered in pollen), or flowering vines that raise unique, sonar-reflecting leaves near unpollinated blossoms to help pollinating bats use echolocation to find unpollinated flowers. Presented accessibly for a non-scientific audience, and with a tone of palpable curiosity and awe, these studies and field explorations come alive as much as their subjects.
Schlanger, fortunately, is aware that readers may be skeptical about the idea of botanical intelligence. If contemporary Westerners occasionally allow for questions about intelligence and sentience into discussions about certain animals, like octopi and orcas and our domesticated mammalian pets, we rarely pause to consider that plants (as well as fungi, lichens, corals, and countless others), too, may be more than just passive, robotlike curiosities we grow and consume without guilt, rarely consider that they may have experiences of the world, may dynamically rather than mechanically respond, may, even, have individual personalities and preferences.
Mention that plants might be intelligent, and people start politely backing away from you, as if you’ve asserted with confidence that the moon landing was a hoax.
This dismissive view of plants hasn’t always been the norm. From some of our earliest cultural records, for instance, we find many examples of societies embracing animism—the idea that everything, including plants and inanimate objects, is imbued with life and intelligence, or, if you like, with souls—and animism persists in pockets of the world today. And many indigenous peoples across the globe have described individual plants as sources of wisdom—in particular, plants associated with healing and with psychedelic visions, like peyote and San Pedro cacti, or the caapi vine and chacruna leaves that make up a common ayahuasca recipe—viewing these plants not as inert automata, but as teachers, as entities to forge cultural and personal relationships with.
Such ideas, of course, are rare, if not almost verboten, in the West today, treated instinctively like tinfoil-hat conspiracies. Mention that plants might be intelligent, and people start politely backing away from you, as if you’ve asserted with confidence that the moon landing was a hoax. This impulse, and many botanists’ fear of their work being crudely misrepresented by the media, is partly why the work The Light Eaters chronicles isn’t in every news outlet.
So great are botanists’ fears of seeming “woo-woo” in the face of scientific orthodoxy on the one hand, or being misunderstood on the other, that many botanists studying plant intelligence have lost their jobs, been blocked from publishing in mainstream journals, or been ostracized from the wider scientific community. To merely propose this idea is often to risk exile, an Inquisition of the Sciences.
It is only recently, in the face of more and more overwhelming evidence, that the tide may be turning, yet, as Schlanger notes, to accept the idea of plant intelligence is to accept a significant paradigm shift—and science is understandably, if notoriously, slow to shift its paradigms. “To hold back the larger scientific inquiry based on a fear about how it would be received seem[s] unfair to the rest of us,” Schlanger writes, and I agree.
In a healthier society, we would be open to, if not excited by, the idea that life and intelligence can take myriad forms. We would be humbled to wonder what the slower, more overtly interconnected lives of plants could teach us. To be open-minded to the as-yet-unanswerable question of what mind itself is—well, that should be the norm.
And yet here we are.
Then again, we have a long history of diminishing and denying the agency and value of those we do not immediately understand. Descartes infamously argued that (nonhuman) animals, lacking logic and language, could not feel pain; European colonists frequently claimed that nonwhites were subhuman, if not another species entirely; my own experience as a trans person is all too often dismissed as somehow false or wrong by people who have never walked in, or tried to walk in, my shoes, yet who believe they know my own lived experiences, my own inner world, better than I do.
In a healthier society, we would be open to, if not excited by, the idea that life and intelligence can take myriad forms.
Perhaps this, then, was why I felt such kinship with The Light Eaters as a trans person, a person accustomed to being told I can only be one binary thing, that I must fit into a neat box lest some ignorant person feel uncomfortable for a moment in their ignorance. How easy, after all, to sympathize with a story of selfhoods deferred, of a class of beings forced to fit into our species’ unnecessarily rigid categorical boxes not because they fit there, but because of our existential fear of what might happen if we accept—truly, wholeheartedly accept—that they do not.
*
The Light Eaters’ research is robust, quite different from the quick sensationalism of Dahl’s machine, yet I find myself feeling a similar sense of surprise and reorientation to that evening as a kid by the jasmine.
I wasn’t wondering, now, if flowers and grasses might be shrieking into the void; instead, I found myself wondering if, in some way, the trees and bushes I walk by in my apartment complex might sense my presence in some way, wondering, as Thomas Nagel famously asked of bats, what it might be like to be a plant, wondering if, somehow, a plant might be able to wonder in its own vegetal way about what it is like to be me.
Schlanger seems to understand this wondering. “Now when I go into a park,” she told Tonya Mosley in an interview, “I feel totally surrounded by little aliens. I know that there is immense plant drama happening all over the place around me.”
It’s a sentiment I share. My encounters with nature have softly shifted. There is indeed something alien about plants when you realize they might have agency and autonomy, if in ways that might force us to expand those terms. I don’t imagine the infernal symphony of mowed grass in Dahl’s story, or the psychedelic terpsichorean forest of the famous 1932 Silly Symphonies’ cartoon Flowers and Trees, the kinds of deliberate caricatures the most conservative botanists understandably fear their research being misunderstood as, yet nature feels psychedelically symphonic, a curious polyphony of unfurling leaves and opening blossoms and slow-flowing sap and alarm flares and misting pollen, a searching of root and leaf, an everyday alchemy of light into life, magic for a disenchanted world, magic we need amidst so much Trumpian horror.
I think now of how different the world feels, not because it has changed in of itself, but because I’m seeing it anew. The way that when I pass a tree near my apartment complex I have passed by for years I may wonder, for a few moments, what the pages of its life say, what things flicker-flit along its roots and branches as synapses do in me, the way I wonder, with a smile, what memory means for it, wonder if it is akin to a shadow on Plato’s fathomless cave wall compared to the multisensory cinematic awe of human memory, or is quietly like ours, or, thrillingly, if it is something else entirely.
