Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Avenue
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. PLEASE RSVP HERE.
Come join Milkweed as we welcome Zoë Schlanger to Minneapolis to launch her new book, The Light Eaters: How Unseen Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. Zoë will be joined in conversaton by Ranae Hanson, author of Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress, winner of the 2022 Minnesota Book Award.
About the book
What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is. We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for—if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world.
About the speakers
Zoë Schlanger is currently a staff reporter at the Atlantic, where she covers climate change. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, The Nation, Quartz, and on NPR among other major outlets, and is cited in the 2022 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. A recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers’ reporting award, she is often a guest speaker in schools and universities. Zoë graduated with a B.A. from New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ranae Hanson wrote Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress (winner of a
2022 Minnesota Book Award) in response to her students’ requests that she share their
climate-refugee stories. She wove those with a love song for the watersheds of
Minnesota. Ranae taught at Minneapolis College for 31 years where she learned with
diverse native-born and immigrant students. She now lives in Seattle; she advocates for
climate justice for all beings and is writing and translating novels about earth-honoring
but destitute Forest Finns who left Sweden to settle on Ojibwe land.