A Shift in Perspective: Recognizing Plant Personhood and Legal Rights

In this episode, climate journalist Zoë Schlanger speaks about her book The Light Eaters and explores what it might mean if we embraced plant intelligence within the frame of Western science. She shares a smorgasbord of new findings around the capabilities of plants—from roots that can sense the sound of running water to flowers memorizing the timing of pollinators’ visits—and wonders how a growing awareness of more-than-human intelligence can upend the structures and hierarchies we have placed around living beings, ourselves included. Talking about the politics of language in the field of botany, shedding her own plant blindness, and how we can widen our scientific imaginations to perceive intelligence in beings without brains, Zoë probes what it will take for us to let plants into the realm of our ethical consideration. 

Read the transcript. 

Photo by Yael Malka.

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