Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Each week we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology,

culture, and spirituality. Over the summer, I read The Light-Eaters by the journalist Zoe Schlinger.

It's a smorgas board of science around the mind-blowing capabilities of plants and a wonderful

journey into the growing awareness of plant intelligence and botany. She digs deep into what lies

at the very edges of our knowing in this field, realizing that the more we discover, the more

questions arise. In this episode, Zoe joins me to speak about the mystery of plant intelligence,

and what it means when we embrace it as a possibility within the frame of scientific inquiry.

We talk about the complexities of language, the politics of using words like personhood

and consciousness for non-human beings, and the limitations of our vocabulary

to encapsulate the reality of plant intelligence when it is so very different from her own.

And she wonders what it will take for us to let plants into the realm of our ethical consideration,

and if we are ready to upend the structures and hierarchies we've placed around different species.

Now living in a far more enchanted world than she did before writing the book.

So he talks about her own inner shift away from plant blindness,

towards an embodied feeling of the ways her existence is deeply entangled with the lives of plants.

Zoe, welcome to the show.

It's such an honor to be here with you.

In your new book, The Light Eaters, which I found truly fascinating, you explore our growing

awareness of plant intelligence and how this is unfolding

...