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Being Green: A new book marvels at the strangeness of plants
Most modern humans regard plants as alive but a bit boring by the standards of creatures that can move around freely. They're wrong.
Zoë Schlanger.Photo by Heather StenOnly in the recent past has this cloud passed from the face of botany, allowing researchers to celebrate such wonders as a Chilean vine that conceals itself from herbivores by mimicking the leaves of nearby plants of entirely different species. Where Yong made An Immense World more wondrous by emphasizing the dissimilarities between human and animal perception, until that final chapter Schlanger seems to insist that if we can’t identify with plants and see forms of our own experience in their very alien way of being, we will continue to disrespect and ignore them. The strangeness of plants; their (apparent) stillness and slowness; their resilience; their ability to survive on air, water, and dirt; their capacity to transform garbage into food and desolation into beauty, all in the course of pursuing their own unfathomable business: These are the unsung miracles that surround us daily.
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