Last year during Wild Week, several of us spent some time in conversation with The Light Eaters. In preparation of our second annual Wild Week, we are expanding the conversation. We hope you will read the book and join the conversation in the first RH Book Circle of 2026:
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
by Zoë Schlanger
Tuesday, February 18, 2026
10 to 11:30 am in person at Retreat House and on zoom (hybrid)
6:30 to 8 pm - on Zoom only
Do you talk to your plants? Do you feel their welcome when you arrive? Have you ever thought about the science around these questions? This is why we are reading Light Eaters together.
“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
Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom, “destabilizing not just how we see the green things of the world but also our place in the hierarchy of beings, and maybe the notion of that hierarchy itself.” (The New Yorker)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024
TIME’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
New York Magazine’s 10 Best Books of the Year
Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2024
Smithsonian’s 10 Best Science Books of the Year
A Best Book of the Year: Boston Globe, Scientific American, New York Public Library, Christian Science Monitor, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly
An Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Prize
Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History
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 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. 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 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. What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? 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.