Armchair Birding: The Light Eaters, by Zoe Schlanger
~ Anne Kilgannon
This is a book about the exciting new discoveries reimagining the science of botany; should I begin with an apology that it’s not about birds, that birds are not even mentioned? Stay with me and you’ll have a fascinating journey reading about all the break-through reports describing what botanists are learning about plants, their lives and evolution, and new ways of understanding both. You’ll never look at a tree or a flower or weed or vine the same way again. And as you explore these new concepts, all life forms—including your thoughts about the life and evolution of birds—will be more complicated, more astounding, more full of wonder.
Zoe Schlanger is a journalist who was totally captured by her questions about plants; she takes us along on her quest to understand the newly emerging investigations of how plants live, how they shape themselves and learn to adapt to the conditions in which they find themselves, for, after all, once germinated, plants can’t up and move away to a more congenial spot. They can disperse their seeds, lure insects to themselves to spread their pollen, send out runners and root systems, but uprooting themselves is not a winning strategy. Schlanger ranges far and wide interviewing scientists who are finding new answers—chiefly by asking new questions—about the previously unexplored complicated nature of plants.
Schlanger’s subtitle: “How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth” touches on many of the issues she examines, the steepest climb being the claim that plants exhibit intelligence and agency. Not in the same way we humans might, but once researchers free their minds of the long-held notion that humans or others of the “higher” animals are holding the only blueprint for what we call intelligence, whole new realms of deliberative behavior are revealed. After extensive travel and close immersion in several pathbreaking research projects led by intrepid botanists, she can say with conviction that, “Intelligence, meaning the ability to learn from one’s surroundings and make decisions that best support one’s life, is created in a context. It arises out of a need, through natural selection.” As a conclusion, that sounds… well, like something hiding in plain sight after reading through this book, but still amazing; how the botanists she trailed discover and design proofs to argue the point is astounding to read.
As a non-scientist, I found her quest for this deeper understanding of the meaning of plant life intriguing and compelling. The botanists who allowed her presence in their laboratories and participation in their field work, who responded to her searching questions, and shared their own, were both visionary and by-the-book researchers—albeit books they were rewriting with their theories and discoveries. Schlanger shares their revolutionary work, always tempered by new questions, new experiments, leading to even deeper questions on the trail of discovery, peeling back the traces of how plants evolved—and are still evolving—into these complex, sentient beings.
It’s a thrilling read! And we birders can take these revelations-in-the-making and watch that chickadee pick over our proffered sunflower seeds and then zip away, with our own wonderings: what’s going on in that bird-brain? What does he know and feel? What was the path of evolutionary choices that came to this point in time, from dinosaur to this bundle of energetic feathers? Evolution is the thread in this tantalizing search for understanding. Evolution is not just “chance” but much more; it is also choice and striving, reaching for more light to “eat” and water and other nutrients, and away from threats and unfavorable conditions. Innovation arcing toward survival and flourishing and passing life on not just for replication but to continue the journey with new choices, new forms and experiments, plants as sentient beings in their own way.
