Nature Literature discussion

Please add your comments about The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth here.

I read The Secret Life of Plants and was very annoyed by the clearly irreproduceable nature of the bogus studies described. But the studies mentioned in Light Eaters seem more legit. How would you talk with other people about plant sentience and communication? I wouldn't want to seem like a new-age apostle of the Secret Life school, or like an animal rights person telling others not to eat animals because they're sentient. I also want to avoid seeming to culturally appropriate ideas from cultures that believe we are all relatives and we are all sentient. So I'm a but stumped about how to talk about it.

FYI: I found an error in the book. At the end of chapter 7, the author writes, "In the United States alone, as many as 11,000 farmworkers are fatally poisoned by pesticides each year, and another 385 million are severely poisoned, but don't die. ... Incredibly, that means about 44% are poisoned by pesticides every year." 


The author doesn't cite sources, but her numbers align perfectly with a retracted article published by Wolfgang Boedeker et al. BMC Public Health in 2020. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33287770) It's not the retraction of this article that concerns me, as that seems to be more a political battle between the Pesticide Action Network, which funded the study, and Bayer Corp, whose employees published the letter to the editor that precipitated the retraction. 


The main error is that 11,000 in the original source was a global number, not a US number. 385 million cases of acute pesticide poisoning was clearly also a global number as this exceeds the total US population.


I am the last person to defend the ag chemical industry, but factual inaccuracies undermine any argument.

I listened to this book, and loved it. The narrator is excellent, and I'll definitely never look at plants the same way again. Really hope the author writes more books about nature.