Program Type:
Author EventAge Group:
AdultsProgram Description
Event Details
Darien Library, along with Barrett Bookstore welcome award-winning environment and climate change reporter for The Atlantic, Zoë Schlanger,
who will talk about her new book, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. This groundbreaking book looks at the wonders and complexities of the abundant green life budding, competing, adapting, and thriving all around us.
The field of botany is undergoing a paradigmatic shift, roiling with a debate about the possibility of plant consciousness. In recent years, scientists have proven that plants can communicate with each other and with other species; they can recognize their kin and treat them favorably; they can respond to visual and aural stimuli; they can even store memories and learn. These incredible revelations and the thorny questions they raise—can intelligence exist without a brain, for example—are nothing less than explosive.
Author Zoë Schlanger takes readers into the heart of this unfolding inquiry to show how scientific knowledge is made in real time, sharing astonishing plant talents and her own epiphanies along the way. Where might a new understanding of the plant world lead?
Come listen to this fascinating lecture as Zoë Schlanger challenges us to remodel the way we see the nonhuman world, and our place in it.
About the Author
Zoë Schlanger is currently a staff reporter at The Atlantic, where she covers climate change. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, The Nation, Quartz, and on NPR, among other major outlets, and is cited in the 2022 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. A recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers’ reporting award, she is often a guest speaker in schools and universities. Zoë graduated with a B.A. from New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.