Why have the most self-described “intelligent” beings on the planet not figured out what the rest of nature seems to know instinctively? When I was born in 1968 — I was born into a world where violence was the way to communicate, and what followed was grief, fear, and unresolved division. People lined the streets, the sidewalk, stairs going up into the schools, violently telling every child that certain people do not belong there. The ground I entered was already fractured, yet there was another way of communicating — one that most had not yet learned to hear.
More than fifty years later, we are beginning to recognize something the rest of life has always known: the world is alive in ways we’re only starting to understand. Plants, trees, and soil communities speak to one another, tend to one another, and have protected their families and the families of others across time. And humans, we are still learning where we fit — not above this web of life, but woven into it.
In The Light Eaters, science journalist Zoë Schlanger reveals plants not as passive green organisms, but as communities of cells pulsing with electrical life. Though they have no brains or neurons, plants generate electrical signals that ripple through their tissues — waves triggered by touch, injury, or environmental change. When a leaf is wounded, bursts of electrical activity spread across the plant, information running on bioelectricity. Our own thoughts are electrical too — neurons firing signals down their length, then passing them, cell to cell, across the brain’s vast network.
Perhaps the difference between us and the plants is not one of kind, but of complexity: the same charge, organized differently. I find myself wondering if plants have a consciousness of their own — not driven by ego or self-will, but one that moves in accordance with natural law, knowing and choosing and responding without ever needing a brain to do it. These same electrical currents run through every human being, regardless of color or race — and through mammals and reptiles as well. At the cellular level, we are all the same — the same molecular chemistry, the same currents of charge.
All living beings — plants, animals, humans — are matter and energy in continuous interplay. Matter gives presence; energy creates movement and connection. If plants can sense, share, and respond in ways that support their communities, what does that say about us — beings who have barely begun to hear what the rest of life has long been saying?
I see glimpses of an answer in school gardens. Children, teachers, and community members step into the soil together — tending seedlings, sharing water, watching and listening to the intricate networks of life all around them. They begin to notice how their part affects the whole, how care radiates outward between all life in the garden. Belonging in a garden isn’t assigned a position or measured. It’s communicated through attention, movement, and shared participation — every human, plant, insect, and microbe recognized as part of the same system.
I wonder if the ease we feel in natural spaces is something like that electrical recognition — our nervous systems registering connection to a living network we were built for. In contrast, purely mechanistic systems leave us tense, seeking guidance from something that cannot respond. There is nothing to connect with. No pulse.
Plants embody a form of intelligence humans are still working to understand. A plant does not look at another and say, you don’t belong here. The plant world runs on networks of mutual support — shared nutrients, patient timing, root systems tending one another across seasons. What would it look like if human communities organized around similar principles?
We mistook relationships as less important than dominance, and built systems that assumed we were separate from the living world, naming that separation progress. But the living network has always been here, waiting. With each moment of noticing, each gesture of care, we step back into who we have always been — living beings made of the same cells and networks, as if we are greeting ourselves.
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