But beyond that, I think, you know, on some level, being an animal that relies on other living things to support our lives and our survival means we have to sort of acknowledge that we have to enact some form of violence, just keep going.

I don't think it's useful to, like, segregate that fact away from your daily life.

In some ways it's kind of a beautiful thing to open yourself up to that because it underlines this sense of dependence.

And that's a very humbling thing.

So if we acknowledge that we are, in some way, doing some violence to creatures that very much want to live, which is probably all biological life to some extent.

Then what can we do with that feeling?

Instead of backgrounding it, maybe we can transform it to have some greater sense of respect for how we cultivate these things or think about things more from a plant's perspective in terms of "Can we grow them in ways that respect their inherent abilities to do things like communicate and defend themselves?"

Which gets into, like, growing crops maybe in more diverse settings, where they're interacting a lot more in ways that might benefit everyone involved.

Maybe including them sort of in our imagination as highly animate actors would not leave any more room for indiscriminate destruction.

There's, like, a degree to which we need them in every aspect of our lives, but then there's a degree to which we're, like, maybe ripping up a ton of mangroves to build a hotel is something we think twice about or even, felling 30-year-old trees for toilet paper.

There's other ways to do these things, and maybe some cognizance of the incredible biological creativity of all plant life could change how we do those, ideally.

Yeah, I definitely need to go home and hug my potted plants.

They may respond to that as an assault, so that's up to you.

I'll just look at them lovingly-with appreciation. They'll read your thoughts. Yes.

Think very pleasant, not setting-them-on-fire thoughts.

So we talked about how you got started thinking about plants.

How has your relationship with plants changed in the course of writing this book?

I see plants more as individuals rather than kind of the wash of green I think I, like, experienced in general before-I mean, I've always appreciated them.

But now when I see, like, a bunch of plants growing together, I can't help but think of, like, the intense plant drama that's definitely happening.

They sense the presence of other plants around them.

They have all these complex dynamics depending on how related or unrelated or aggressive or whatever.

You know, some of these words have way too much human feeling attached to them.

But they are interacting aboveground, belowground.

And I especially like walking around Brooklyn and see a ton of Japanese knotweed, for example, now that it's spring.

It's a highly invasive plant. I'm so impressed by it in some ways.

I mean, I get that it's a problem, but I've learned a lot about how plants, particularly plants in the knotweed family-there's a lab at Wesleyan (University) that studies this-smartweeds and knotweeds pass down skills generationally.

So, like, if the parent plant is grown in a nutrient-scarce or, like, water-scarce environment, they will have offspring that is better suited-or some of them will have offspring that is better suited to handle those conditions.

And then that happens every generation, and then you end up with, as this lab puts it, like, monsters of their own making-just, like, incredibly adapted plants.

And that is so cool.

So I can't help but, like, commend plants for their resourcefulness when I see them around now, even the ones that pose problems for us.

And has it changed how you think about other things in the natural world?

Yeah, I think it's really interesting how some of these findings about how amazing plants are are kind of resettling us back into this notion that plants are agentive organisms.

And I feel like there's a lot to learn from Indigenous science.

Part of this whole process for me started out with reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, in which she writes so much about how the questions Indigenous science can ask of the natural world are so different, in part because they see all of life as part of the same system-humans are not separate from nature.

One other thing I'm really interested in is how we kind of draw lines in the sand between species and groups of life.

One thing I was really intrigued by in writing about plants was how those categories all start to falter.

Like, I learned about this sea slug that I'm now obsessed with called-this brilliant-green sea slug; that's literally what it's called-and it eats-its first meals are chloroplasts from algae, and it's shaped like a leaf.

And so after these first few meals of chloroplasts, it starts running photosynthesis, and no one knows how it can genetically run photosynthesis, but that blurs this boundary between animals and plants.

Sure, yeah.

And it makes me think of Why Fish Don't Exist, by Lulu Miller, which is also-you know, she also came to that realization that maybe the whole category of fish as sort of separate from other animals is faltering, too.

So I think it's really important to remember that science is such an incredible form of knowledge generation, and, and it keeps changing its mind, so who knows what's gonna come next.