In this 7 week SDG, we will consider a revolutionary idea: that the plants all around us are not passive backdrop, but responsive beings capable of sensing, communicating, remembering, and even cooperating—adapting to their world in ways that unsettle our assumptions about mind, agency, and what it means to be alive. We will use The Light Eaters; How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth as our core book introducing us to the remarkable results of recent botanical research and to the heated debates among botanists, skeptics, and philosophers about whether the new findings suggest plant “intelligence”. The author of the core book, Zoe Schlanger, is an award-winning science writer for The Atlantic. Reviews give her high marks for making this material accessible while remaining true to the science.

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