On my reading list

This book, The Life of Plants by Emanuele Coccia, sounds like a welcome expansion. An excerpt from Ania Soliman’s intriguing review:

“Long before the Anthropocene period, it was plants that radically altered the Earth—the oxygen they emitted was a catastrophe of “pollution,” followed by a mass extinction of organisms unable to breathe the new air. We are part of the biomass that thrived in this changed environment, a biomass that plants constantly remake from the energy of the sun….

“Coccia views vegetative life not as an inert chemical dream from which we humans have woken up, but as the continuing basis of our ability to reason. The seed is a form of reason because, like the DNA it contains, it carries with it the potential for analysis and a plan of action. The root is a form of reason because it is analogous to the brain.”