Thursday, November 5, 2026 | 6:30PM | GBC Gallery
6:30 PM – Arrivals & Refreshments
7:00 PM – Lecture & Q&A
$25/Educator or GBC Member | $35/Non Member

“A masterpiece of science writing.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

“Mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.” –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

“Rich, vital, and full of surprises. Read it!” –Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction 

“A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.” –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom, “destabilizing not just how we see the green things of the world but also our place in the hierarchy of beings, and maybe the notion of that hierarchy itself.” (The New Yorker)

It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.

The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

About Zoë Schlanger: 

Zoë Schlanger is a former staff writer at the Atlantic, where she covered climate change. She is the author of The Light Eaters, a New York Times bestselling book about the world of plant-behavior-and-intelligence research, published by HarperCollins. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, and The New York Review of Books, among other major outlets. She was the recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers reporting award for coverage of air pollution in Detroit, and a finalist for the 2019 Livingston Award for a series on water politics at the Texas-Mexico border. She is often a guest speaker at journalism schools. She lives in New York.

The Light Eaters is a New York Times bestseller that has been dubbed a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom. It is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence.