Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola.

2/5 rating. 170 pages.

Book #42 of 2021. Read May 7, 2021.

This book was mostly a diatribe against science’s unwillingness to take plants as anything but low beings.

The authors do a great job of showing the incredible attributes that plants possess. But I couldn’t get over how most of the book was complaining that plants don’t get enough respect or dignity. It’s obviously true that plants are not nearly as loved as they should be as without photosynthesis, we would not have oxygen, without past plants that decayed, we would not have fossil fuels, and without plants in science we would be missing a large proportion of our medicines.

I also realize that it is in our nature to think that we – and our work – are underappreciated. But this book seemed to go beyond that and was just 170 pages of bitching about it.

I also think the personification of plant attributes goes too far. They have incredible sensory abilities (surpassing humans in many ways), but saying that they taste, smell, or see seems to really be stretching the definitions of these words.

Plants are awesome, they are vital, and a lot more scientific study needs to be conducted on them to see what they can teach us. But this book did not exactly win me over to those ideas by their gigantic grudge…

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