Control the narrative!

Who gets to decide what we talk about when we talk about plants?

A few weeks ago, I published a review of a new popular science book. I found the process of writing it interesting for a number of reasons, at least one of which is relevant to the topics we cover here on Unprofessoring. Below is a story about the anxiety I—and I think many an academic—have about the ways that our work moves out into the public domain.

Unfinished Business

I was scrolling through Twitter, and just by chance I saw a post announcing that a new book, “The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth”, by Zoë Schlanger, would be coming out in May. I perked up immediately.

For one, the topic of “plant intelligence”—and the question of whether it was useful or harmful to use these two words together—felt like unfinished business. On the one hand, we are always finding that plants do more than we’d thought; on the other hand, relying on words that describe human attributes seemed limiting. . . I would go around and around, not quite sure what to conclude. I had thought I was going to dig into this debate way back in 2015, when I bought a stack of books (see below) and brought them with us to New Zealand for my sabbatical. I did read a few chapters, but quickly got sidetracked writing papers and grants and doing a research project. I have been dragging these books around with me ever since.

The stack of unread books I brought with me to New Zealand for my sabbatical.

Another reason I was intrigued by the notice of this upcoming book was that the author had interviewed me in what I recalled as a thoughtful, wide-ranging conversation. I don’t know that my input was particularly useful for Schlanger—the research in my lab was peripheral to the topic of “plant intelligence”, and I was no more sure what I thought about any of it than I was during my sabbatical. She captured my ambivalence accurately in the book:

Haswell isn’t sure where she stands on the plant intelligence debate. “I struggle with having a strong opinion on this topic,” she says. “I don’t like saying the plant has a brain. I don’t like making animals the foundations-they developed different-we need to approach them differently.” Still, something about it nags at her. “I went on sabbatical and thought, I’m going to develop my own view of this. I didn’t.”

—Schlanger, The Light Eaters

Getting Emotional about Plant Perception

So, when I saw the announcement on Twitter, it seemed like a great chance to dig into something I am qualified to comment on but have, for some reason, chosen not to engage with in any depth. I pitched a review to a few scientific journals within a few hours and had an agreement within a day or so. The journal sent me a digital version to read and gave me a deadline a month away.

I was inordinately excited—this was my first book review as a professional writer and the first time I’d ever received an advance copy of a book. But a few pages into chapter one, I started to regret my decision. “O God, what have I gotten myself into,” read the marginalia next to a printed line that describes a seedling as “mantling itself in the features of its lineage and then adapting them to a new environment.” I knew what the author meant—that plants have both stereotyped elements that are genetically determined AND developmental plasticity that allows them to modify their body plan as conditions change. But there is something about the way scientific terms were mixed in with anthropomorphic metaphors that set my teeth on edge.

I forged ahead, taking copious notes and cross-referencing with the literature. There were humorous portraits of plant scientists, many of whom I know and respect. There were lyrical portraits of plant biology, much of which was new to me. And the discussion in the book around “plant intelligence” really did help me decide what I think. In the end, I came down in the middle—imagination and metaphor are important tools in science, but only when they are tethered to reality through experimental data.

But I got more and more agitated the farther in I read. Most of the science was right; but some of it was kind of wrong. Phrases here and there were copied from the literature, too few words to be plagiarism; but enough for me to recognize. The author’s critiques of plant scientists as slow-moving, judgmental and conservative weren’t wrong; but they missed how these characteristics reflect a field grounded in scientific reality.

Trying to fit all of this into an 800 word review took days (I wrote 4800 words as a first draft!). I ran it past my writing teacher because I felt so cranky and was so worried that I wasn’t being even-handed. (He suggested the title “What We Talk about When We Talk about Plants” which I think is genius, but the reviews editor didn’t agree. (She also took out all my plant puns, which was probably for the best). I sent it to my dad, and several plant biologists who were also profiled in the book. I tried to make it balanced but may have ended up making it more positive than I really felt.

Losing Control of the Narrative

Though another review from a plant biologist was critical, for the most part, The Light Eaters was well-received. It was blurbed by science writer extraordinaire Ed Yong and the beloved plant ethnobotanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, and got glowing reviews from Maria Popova, among others. Schlanger was interviewed in the New York Times and on NPR.

So, what was MY problem? I felt defensive of my field and the people in it, for sure. I didn’t like the way The Light Eaters built on Michael Pollan’s New Yorker essay “The Intelligent Plant” without giving him credit. But there’s something more, something very academic, that can be found in my reaction to this quote from the last chapter of the book:

Science will continue to find that plants are doing more than we’d imagined. But then the rest of us will have to look at the data and come to our own conclusions.

—Schlanger, The Light Eaters

These two sentences TOTALLY freaked me out. They seemed no different than “Do your own research!”, the catchphrase of misinformation and conspiracy theories. They recalled the world we all saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the mistrust of experts confounded efforts to prevent the spread of the virus.

Read in another light, though, the passage seems innocuous, even aspirational. What was I doing basic research FOR if not to change the way that we understand and think about the world? And I never made an effort to make what my group was discovering meaningful to non-scientists. In fact, I avoided talking about my research outside academic circles, wincing at the inevitable jokey questions about whether kale feels pain when we eat it. If I was doing research, as I once wrote in an NSF grant, to “help us understand our place in the universe”, and I wasn’t going to help the public do so, why wouldn’t I applaud a journalist who encourages them to do it themselves?

Maybe academics need to acknowledge that can’t always our discoveries lose a little control and be willing to let our creations and our understandings take on a life of their own.

Of course, as I write that, I know that is too simple. There are tangible effects when science is misinterpreted. Those who have followed the debate around the wood wide web will be familiar with the way the story of “mother trees” has gotten ahead of the data. You can probably think of many cases where scientific findings were twisted, overstated, or ignored in the public sphere. Scientists immediately lose control over what is done with our work.

But some of this we do to ourselves—after all, Schlanger interviewed many scientists who claim that plants have intelligence, personality, agency, hearing, even vision. So here I go, around and around. No simple solutions, no easy answers. How can scientists help the public understand and interpret our work, but with mutual respect and a recognition that in the end we can not—and should not—control the stories that are told? Maybe for me this is the next “unfinished business”.