Possibly one of my favorite chapters, because it talks about one of my favorite topics: plants.

Every amazing species of plant described in the first paragraph deserves to be looked up in DuckDuckGo (yes, ditch the monopolizing search giants), and marveled at. The latter half of the opening also accurately describes my despair about the narcissistic human race: completely ignoring the fact that “green beings” are, hands down, the most effective vehicles of healthy carbon flow, yet we continue to talk about technology to save the planet. Excuse me while I go scream into a pillow.

Plants and trees have gone from being revered, venerated and respected, to being mere objects, relentlessly engineered to serve mankind.

They have 470 million years of cumulative complexity, more genes and more photoreceptors than humans. They make invaluable contributions to the earth’s atmosphere, and they more than tithe – they donate 30% of their sugars to the microorganisms living in the soil. They move, they communicate, they connect and cooperate with each other.

I have to say, the preceding paragraphs did not prepare me for the description of yet another inhuman act on par with Columbus’ treatment of the Taino people mentioned in Chapter 5 – studying damselfish as a scientific experiment before killing and dissecting the entire school of fish being studied.

Shaken, I nevertheless carried on reading, to hear Fred Provenza say that “the language of plants is organic chemistry. Each of the estimated 400,000 species of plants… can synthesize hundreds to thousands of primary and secondary compounds… from an ‘alphabet’ of as few as twenty compounds, plants can create trillions of different ‘words’ by varying the relative amounts of compounds.”

Plants emit and perceive ultrasonic acoustic signals when stressed. They “scream” when there’s persistent dehydration. Each plant and type of stress is associated with a specific identifiable sound.

It was also appalling to hear that male botanists boo and heckle female botanists who dare to present plants as capable of hearing and speaking.

There is no question in my mind that we on this planet are not individuals, but an inextricable network of life, with plants being the wisest, most evolved ancestors that we must hear if we are to survive.