Vegetative States

A body of recent scientific research suggests that plants can adapt to new information, predict the future, communicate with animals, and confer privately with each other. Should we think of them as sentient? In our October 3, 2024, issue, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several recent books on the topic of plant cognition and argues that despite the popularity of the burgeoning field, we are hardly prepared to grapple with the implications of such a profound shift in our understanding of life on Earth. “Could people in good conscience mow down a field of wheat or rice plants?” she writes. “Could we even sow a field of wheat or rice, knowing that the plants might be suffering from a sense of overcrowding, say, or panic, but be locked into silence, unable to express themselves?”

Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers climate change and the environment. In 2015 she won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for The Sixth Extinction, her book about the mass extinction event currently unfolding on Earth. For the Review, Kolbert has previously written about the mysteries of animal cognition, as well as more somber topics like chemical warfare and fungal disease outbreaks. We corresponded over e-mail this week about her previous life as a political reporter in Albany, changing people’s awareness about climate change, and the election.

Willa Glickman: Could you tell us a bit about your career? I’d be curious to hear about your time covering New York state politics, and how you transitioned to environmental writing.

Elizabeth Kolbert: I covered New York state politics for The New York Times from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. There’s this saying that watching laws get passed is like watching sausage being made; let’s just say, I’ve seen an awful lot of offal getting ground up. Despite the unfortunate simile, I’m very grateful for the experience. It was the sort of political education money can’t buy (although one of the things I learned about was the influence of money). When I joined the staff of The New Yorker, in 1999, I was supposed to revive a column about local politics that was called “Around City Hall.” I did, in fact, write that column for a while, but, for a variety of reasons, I started looking for stories that would have a longer shelf life than Michael Bloomberg’s latest misstep. I ended up writing a three-part series on climate change, and that sent me off in a new direction. I confess, though, that I am still morbidly interested in New York politics, including, of course, in the recent indictment of Mayor Eric Adams.

In your recent article, you write that there is essentially no way human beings can live without harming plants. What do you think, then, we should take from discoveries about plant sentience, if anything?  

We tend to reserve qualities like intelligence and even sentience for ourselves and those creatures we identify as being like us. But just about everything we have learned about the natural world in recent decades suggests that these qualities are much more widely distributed across the animal kingdom. Discoveries about plants should at the very least shake us up. If plants, too, are sentient, or intelligent—a term that’s admittedly hard to define in this context—that raises a whole host of questions about how we treat (or mistreat) them. But, as you point out, there’s no way we are giving up on eating plants: no animal can live without consuming plants, either directly or indirectly. 

You’ve traveled widely for your reporting—are there any places that have stood out to you, either for their natural beauty or the changes you saw taking place there?

I’ve been very fortunate in the course of my reporting to have visited some of the most fantastic places on earth. One that really stands out to me is the Great Barrier Reef. The profusion of life on an intact stretch of reef is mind-bending and truly beyond description. 

Do you try to balance writing about climate change and environmental degradation with writing about the biology of animals, plants, and ecosystems? Do you see a separation between the two?

I wouldn’t say I try to balance them. But I do think it’s important that people appreciate what’s at stake as humans cavalierly plow through ecosystems.

You’ve been covering climate change since 2001. How was your approach to the subject changed since then?

Twenty years ago, I think most people didn’t really know what to make of climate change. Was it a big problem or not? There was a lot of confusion, and fossil fuel companies did their best to foster this. So when I first started reporting on climate change, I thought my responsibility was to sort through this confusion. Now I think most people—or at least most of my readers—realize that climate change is a very big problem. We are watching the climate change in real time. Even so, there’s still a lot of confusion around the issue, so I continue to see it as my responsibility to help people sort through the information.

Are there any environmental issues at stake in the upcoming election that you’re especially concerned about? 

Yes, loads of them. Donald Trump probably has the worst environmental record of any president in American history. And his three appointees to the Supreme Court have also been an environmental disaster.For instance, their ruling earlier this year in the case Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which the Court dismantled the Chevron doctrine, is basically an invitation to polluting industries to challenge regulations they don’t like. And that case is just one piece of what has been called the “anti-regulation quartet”—a suite of four decisions that willmake it more difficult for federal agencies like the EPA to issue rules going forward. I’ve been seeing these lawn signs around: Vote Like the Earth Depends on It. I think that’s good advice.