1/7/2025 Dear Anna,

I’ve just finished the remarkable book The Light Eaters. It’s truly astounding, and I’m excited to discuss it with you at length after you’ve had a chance to read it. In the final chapter—don’t worry, I don’t think this is a spoiler alert—the author Zoe Schlanger acknowledges that she now sees the world completely differently in light of all she’s learned about how plants interact and participate in their environment, noting that “her most luscious thoughts have all turned green.” And from that place, she draws the same conclusion we’ve both come to—once you know plants as ingenious companions on planet earth who offer no end of insight and intrigue and imaginative possibility, you can’t unknow it. “A new moral pocket has opened in your mind,” as she says.

The question that must follow such an assertion is of course the central one driving us as well: what changes when we know? How does our society—its laws, its systems, its moral and ethical conventions—reorient itself when we collectively accept this fundamental reality? We know how it has profoundly altered our own lives and ways of being in the world, and we see how our friends, students, and clients also orient themselves differently when they come to know it truthfully as well. It’s like we turn toward the light in a different, more plant-like way. It’s so validating to read such a wide-eyed, well-written account from a person whose life has changed completely by taking plants seriously as study subjects and recipients of our curious affection.  

She writes, “Rather than seeing a march toward doom, as I did as a disaffected office worker writing the news, I now see a boundless sea of change. Life finds a way, if given a chance.” This sea change is precisely what we’re after, and it’s alimentary to me to ground into this end goal as we’re slogging through the soul-sucking minutiae of trying to develop a pitch and marketing plan for our book. This process makes me feel like I’m trying to squeeze the most miraculous thing I know, the sacred light at the center of my heart, into a stifling shoebox of “platforms” and “followers.”

I truly believe that we are growing something together that can open the doors for others in the way that Zoe’s journalistic curiosity opened them for her. And I know that the marketing and self-promotion is a necessary evil for birthing this book into the world. I pray that we can do it in a way that doesn’t strangle its essence.

For my part, I have decided that, at all costs, I will prioritize the thing we enjoy most—our conspiratorial daily interactions with plants. When I feel ground into a pulp trying to figure out how to post a fucking video to Instagram, or paralyzed by imposter syndrome, or losing faith that this little seed we’ve planted is worthy of tending amid the intimidating world of capitalist book markets, I will stop and go outside. I will go outside to remind myself of the world we really live in, the boundless sea change of adaptation in real time, the unlimited capacity we humans have for what she calls “moral attention,” the way that simply being with the plants makes me feel wealthy beyond measure and ridiculously grateful to be alive.

I hope that you’re able to get outside today, and every day. I hope that even in the darkest times you can still glimpse the world offering itself to your imagination, the plants waving as you wander by.

I love the transformative power of paying generous attention to plants, and I love YOU for continually bringing me back to that when I get distracted.

We can do this!

Casey