Plants can hear a caterpillar chewing and respond with defensive chemistry. They warn their neighbors. Some appear to count, some to remember, and one Chilean vine imitates the leaves of whatever it climbs, including plastic ones, with no known mechanism for seeing. Schlanger, a climate reporter, spent years with the botanists doing this work and with the ones who think their colleagues have lost the plot, and the fight itself is half the book — what counts as intelligence, whether the word is even usable without a brain, and how much of the resistance is about protecting the line between us and everything else.
The Light Eaters