Best Of: Brittney Griner / Discovering Plant Intelligence

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This message comes from NPR sponsor Hulu. Don't miss the new docuseries. Black a people's history from memes to movements, see how this powerful online community shapes culture and society. Black Twitter a people's history is now streaming on Hulu. From why yy in Philadelphia, I'm Tanya Moseley with fresh air weekend.

Tanya Moseley

Today, Brittany Greiner talks about the physical and emotional hell of her nearly 300 days in russian prisons. Greiner is a WNBA star and two time Olympic gold medalist. She was convicted of smuggling a significant amount of an illegal drug, but it was discovered that she had two used cartridges with a tiny amount of medically prescribed cannabis. During a prison psychiatric evaluation, she was at risk of being placed in a psych ward if she didn't answer questions. One of the questions was, so how long have you had sick thoughts?

Brittany Greiner

When did you decide to be gay? And I told him I didn't decide and I never had sick thoughts. Also, we'll talk about plant intelligence with climate journalist Zoe Schlanger. And jazz historian Kevin Whitehead will review a 1959 Sonny Rollins reissue that's coming up on Fresh Air weekend. This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Teladoc Health.

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To get your new phone plan for just dollar 15, go to mintmobile.com switch. This is fresh air weekend. I'm Tanya Moseley. Terry has todays first interview, ill let her introduce it. Its been less than one and a half years since my guest, WNBA star Brittany Greiner, was released from a russian penal colony where she was serving a nine year sentence.

Terry Gross

Shed already spent 293 days incarcerated in russian prisons. Now shes preparing for her second season, reunited with her team, the Phoenix Mercury. Like many WNBA players, her salary was so low that back in 2014, in the off season, she started playing for a team in Russia where the pay was considerably better than in the US. She continued playing in Russia during the off season until 2022. Then, when she arrived at the airport in Moscow, she was unexpectedly stopped, questioned, and asked to empty the contents of her luggage.

She discovered that there were two nearly empty cartridges of cannabis that shed neglected to remove before the trip. She had a prescription for medical marijuana to ease the chronic pain of basketball injuries. But in Russia, theres no such thing as medical marijuana. And she was accused of having a significant amount of cannabis, which was just not true. Her imprisonment made national headlines and a movement formed to demand her release.

The Biden administration eventually was able to negotiate a prisoner swap. In return for releasing Griner, America handed over Viktor boot, an infamous russian arms dealer known as the merchant of death. Griner is a women's basketball star. In her senior year playing for the Baylor Lady Bears, she was named the most outstanding player of the Final Four. She was the WNBA's number one overall draft pick in 2013.

The following year, her team won the WNBA championship. She holds the WNBA record for most dunks. She won Olympic gold medals in 2016 and 2020. Now that shes reunited with her wife, theyre expecting a baby in about three months. Brittany Greiner has a new memoir called coming Home.

Brittney Greiner, welcome to FRESH AIR. Congratulations on your freedom. Congratulations on playing again. Congratulations on being reunited with your wife and of expecting a baby. Thank you so much.

Brittany Greiner

Im glad to be here right now. So I just want to say before we start for real, that I know because you write about this, that when you got back from your imprisonment in Russia, you had trouble. You kind of withdrew for a while and had trouble even talking with your wife about what you'd experienced because it was so traumatic. And I know you've written a memoir, but it's one thing to work on a book and another to be interviewed on, Mike. So if I ask anything that would be too traumatizing, too upsetting to talk about, I hope you'll let me know, and that way I can be guided and drop it.

Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate that. So let's start with how are you now? How are you physically? Physically doing good now?

Doing better than definitely. When I first came back, there was a lot of growing pains and just getting the body back into normal shape and then trying to get it back into athletic shape. Has your back recovered? You had cracked your back in high school playing basketball, and I wasn't sure when you said you cracked your back, whether that meant you broke a bone or displaced a disc. It was a disc vertebrate.

Kind of smashed together a little bit. I went up, went up, actually for a dunk, and it got hit in the air and came down really bad, but definitely better. Now. I have a little flare up here and there, but it's just all the years of play. Yeah.

Terry Gross

And you have no cartilage left in your knees from playing. You also had a bad ankle and leg injury from a game in 2017. And you're right that all this pain came back when you were put in cages way too small for you and you couldn't straighten out. This happened, you know, during long car rides and, you know, at times in detention, in the courtroom, you were really uncomfortable. Can you describe some of the most uncomfortable positions you were put in?

And particularly for you, who are six foot nine, you know, a confined, small space is really terrible. It's not ideal, I'll tell you that. I mean, the beds that we had to sleep on, I mean, I basically had just metal rods going up my back, you know, every night, just trying to find somewhere comfortable to lay. But it's really no way you can lay when the mattress is just a little bit of fabric and some stuffing in it. Those metal rods go right through, basically.

Brittany Greiner

But one of the toughest times, honestly, is probably the transportation going back and forth from the detention center to court and then from court back to the detention center. You're inside this small. It's like a small van, and in that van, there's little metal cages all around the outside. I do not fit. There was a couple of rods and a couple of different vehicles that they would switch up.

And literally, to close the door, I had to pick my legs up, and they would shut the door. And then my knees would literally be on the metal door frame for about an hour, hour and a half to get from the detention center down to the. Down to the courthouse. And then did you have to live with residual pain for a long time after that? Definitely.

I mean, my knees that first year, coming back from all that, not being able to move, not being able to stretch out and then being forced, you know, my knees up against these metal doors. I definitely felt it. There was a lot of pain that would just come back. How are you emotionally now? I have my moments.

You know, I definitely say it's like a roller coaster. I'm starting to string together a lot more better days now than before. It'll just be a thought that'll pop up in my head sometimes or a dream, and then that turns into just a restless night or just my mood being a little bit off. But it's definitely getting better now. It's something that I've learned to kind of deal with and cope with.

Terry Gross

You had been having a lot of nightmares. What would happen in your nightmares? So I have this one reoccurring dream where something was wrong with paperwork or something was. Something was wrong, and I had to go back to the embassy in Russia, actually. And when I go back, they take me, and I'm stuck right back in the cell that I was in.

Brittany Greiner

There's no talk of coming back. So it's just right back into the place where I spent most of the time earlier. In your book, you write about how before basketball, there was no place for you because you're six'nine or six'eight. I want to get it right. Six'nine.

Terry Gross

Six'nine. Yeah. So were you that tall in high school, too? I grew the extra inch once I got out of high school and into college, went into 9th grade, six foot graduated six, seven, grew two more went in college. It's a lot of growing.

Brittany Greiner

A lot of growing. A lot of growing. A lot of new clothes. So I wasn't mad about that. And also, you didn't develop rest, and people always thought, oh, you're really a boy, or later, oh, you're really a man.

Terry Gross

And you were asked to leave women's bathrooms because people assumed you were a man. And you're right, you were mistaken for what society fears most. A black man. A big black man. When you were younger, before you were a basketball star, did you constantly have to explain yourself?

Brittany Greiner

Always. Always. I mean, I just made a habit very, very young on just making sure I use the bathroom before I leave the house and, you know, wait till I'm in my locker room where I know I'm safe. I would leave class and go to the locker room to use the bathroom. When I'm at my gym, it's in our locker room.

I've made this habit now that it's a little bit easier to do now, but I still don't like having to use public bathrooms, because I've been chased after. Literally had security come into the bathroom to get me out of there, and I'm just like, y'all, like, I'm a female. I know you probably don't think I look like one, but I am. And I've literally pulled my pants down and flashed them. Like.

And they're like, oh, my God. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You know, like, what are we doing? It's not like I can flash my chest.

Terry Gross

Yeah, right. It's not like you could flash your chest. Right. And in basketball, your height was an asset, and you were special. What did you fall in love with about basketball?

Brittany Greiner

It was just a way for me to channel anxiety, anger, anything. It gave me a focus. Basketball helped me be able to relate to a wide range of people, because, you know, you're not gonna like everybody on your team. Like, it's just life. Like, you're not gonna like everyone.

And you have to learn how to work towards a common goal together. And I think that can be applied to life. I really like that. And being challenged, you know, like, there's always someone bigger and better coming along. There's always someone gunning for you.

So you either evolve or you get left behind. And I love being able to stay in the game as long as I have, and hopefully I have a longer career. Well, you played in Russia for eight seasons, largely because you needed the money, because especially back when you started women's basketball, pro ball was paid very little. I think things have improved a little, but proportionate to the NBA, there's no comparison. And in Russia, some of the teams are run by oligarchs, so, like, there was money.

Terry Gross

But, of course, the last time you went, you were detained and arrested. You didn't want to go. You wanted to stay home with your wife, and you kind of had a bad feeling, and you decided, okay, this is going to be your last season in Russia. You had just gotten over COVID. You were still coughing.

Do you think you had a premonition? I definitely think the universe was telling me to stay at home, honestly. And it was something that I promised myself that I would always listen to. My intuition. No matter how big or small I think it is, I'm definitely gonna listen to it.

Brittany Greiner

Cause there was just so many signs of, you know, don't go. But I just heard that voice in the back of my head. You know, I grew up on the morals of, you. Finish what you start. And, you know, I never wanna leave my teammates in a bad position.

And we were right there. We were about to go win EuroLeague and russian league, you know, like we always have. So I just wanted to finish it out and then let that be the end. Yeah. And you had packed in a hurry.

Terry Gross

You threw things in your luggage and didn't check to see if anything was in the pockets and that's where the two mostly used up cartridges of cannabis were. And you know, you had the prescription because of your pain from basketball injuries. You were stopped at the russian airport and it sounds like that was not typical, but there was a whole lot of security people there. I'm wondering if that was because this was a week before the war in Ukraine started. Before Russia started the war in Ukraine.

Do you think that there were special security alerts because of that? I mean, definitely a great possibility. Cause they knew what they were about to do. They knew they were about to invade and. Yeah, I mean, I've made this trip multiple times in a season.

Brittany Greiner

You know, we come back two, three times within one season. Been there eight years. I've never seen so much security dogs. You know, everybody that was getting pulled to the side looked either american or, you know, non russian. And, you know, all the Russians were basically just walking through the middle, not getting checked.

So it was definitely something that I for sure noticed. Do you think you were targeted? It's hard to say yes or no to that, but you know, my feeling, I think maybe not me per se, but an American. I think that was a big plus for them. We're listening to Terry's interview with Brittani Greiner.

Tanya Moseley

Her new memoir is called Coming Home. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley and this is FRESH. AIR Weekend support for NPR and the following message come from the American Cancer Society. Doctor Alpa Patel leads a team that researches cancer risk factors and she shares how a new study aims to impact an underrepresented community.

Zoe Schlanger

My greatest hope for the voices of black women study is that it will help us understand and identify culturally tailored ways to change and really eliminate the unacceptable disparities for future generations of black women as it relates to cancer. To learn more, go to voices dot cancer.org dot this message comes from Capital one, offering commercial solutions you can bank on. Now more than ever, your business faces unique challenges and opportunities. That's why Capital one offers a comprehensive suite of financial services all tailored to your short and long term goals. Backed by the strength and stability of a top ten commercial bank, their dedicated experts work with you to build lasting success.

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Explore the possibilities@capitalone.com. Commercial a member FDIC. You were able to get a good russian lawyer and then another lawyer to help, too. And your lawyer was able to rent you an apartment nearby the courthouse so that when you were put under house arrest, you'd have a place nearby to stay. Well, my team.

Terry Gross

Your team? My team. Oh, your team found that. Yeah, okay, your basketball team. But you were given no bail, no house arrest.

You were considered a flight risk. So that was like, crushing. And then you found out you needed to stay in detention for a minimum of 30 days. And then after that time, you were moved to a correctional colony. And I want you to describe what the conditions were like there.

Brittany Greiner

So, I mean, the detention center and the penal colony, IK two, that I ended up in, once I got my nine years, I mean, the conditions were horrible. I mean, trying to find clean water, trying to figure out how to buy water from commissary, that took, I mean, that probably took me about a month, two months to figure out how to even buy, you know, water, bottled water. And then the games began because I was buying so much water. Then I was told, oh, well, there's a limit on how much you can buy, how much you can store in the room because I was buying so much water because our water that everyone uses comes from the bathroom sink, and that water that comes out that sink is just a milky, it looks like a milky water because it's just so much sediment and calcium and just rust because everything is rusted trying to be able to have food because what they serve you is, I wouldn't even give it to a stray animal. Like, it's just disgusting.

The bowls that they serve the food out of. You can see the paint chipping, the rust in it, the bed, how cold it is. One of the things that I noticed when I came back that I hate being cold. Cause it was so cold there. They have these little radiators on the walls, but the whole room is metal and concrete, so it's just like being in an ice box.

Terry Gross

And you were there during russian winter? Oh, yes. The blistering, cold, rushing winter. You know, once we were at ik two, the penal colony, you have morning check. Every morning and every night you have morning check.

Brittany Greiner

Well, they have everyone line up outside in the courtyard, and they come by and they count us one by one. It's very old school counting of us. And you're out there for about an hour, hour and a half, and literally, blistering cold, blizzard, doesn't matter. Snow literally was building up on my shoulders and my head, where people would have to, like, knock it off. Would you describe what bathing and toileting was like in the prison?

Oof. So you have three toilets and one shower to serve 50 plus women. Then there's no hot water. You literally, I had a bucket and a ladle. So you would take a kettle, like a tea kettle, warm up water out the sink, pour it into the bowl, into the bucket.

You take the bucket and the ladle into the shower. You squat down in the shower, and you just scoop and pour. And that's how you take a shower. And you have about maybe five minutes because you have about 1012 other women waiting in the bathroom area to get into that shower. Not everyone showers, though.

So some people picture, like, a big farmhouse like, sink with multiple faucets on it. So people be over there washing chests, washing their armpits, kicking their feet in the sink. You're next to them brushing your teeth. You have people washing all kind of body parts. The toilets are side by side, and in front of you, there was five toilets in there, but only three worked.

So you had a neighbor right beside you and someone right in front of you, and there's no walls. So it's very intimate. You get to know your roommates very well, very personally, which was insane, to say the least. I thought it was both upsetting and hilarious that the toothpaste you were given expired in 2007. Yes.

You have old toothpaste that they give you. So if your family can't help you and you can't buy things, you just have to live with expired stuff. But we would use the expired toothpaste. We would put it on the mold on the walls. Cause it would help kill the mold growing on the walls.

Terry Gross

Oh, gee. Yeah, yeah. You get really resourceful. You were in a cell with two other women. One of them became a close friend.

She spoke good English and translated everything for you, including tv programs, because you were allowed to watch tv, but it was mostly russian propaganda. And then the other roommate you figured out was a spy. I have a question about the russian propaganda channel. I want you to describe the clip of Joe Biden, President Biden at the podium where he kind of turns into Hitler. Yeah.

Brittany Greiner

So it was channel four. He was up talking, addressing the nation, and they started to distort his voice. And literally, there was two big american flags right beside him. Well, the nazi flag comes down over the american flag. And I immediately jumped up, and I was like, Alana, please, like, what's going on?

And she was just like, the propaganda channel they're just talking crap about your president, and I was just blown away. I never in a million years thought I would see something like that. It was just crazy. Like, even the talk shows, like, she would tell me sometimes about, you know, she's your roommate. Who was your cellmate, I should say, who was translating for you?

Yes, my cellmate that was translating everything for me, and she would tell me about just a different show, how Nazi Germany is controlling America, and we want to come and take russian land from everyone. And I was just like, wow. Were most of the women in the prisons where you were there because of drug charges? Yes. Number one thing everyone in Russia is in for is drug charges and then murders.

Terry Gross

Were you careful around the murderers? I didn't really even think about it, honestly, when I was in there. I mean, there was a couple of women that I was close to, and I knew that they had attacked their husbands, and, you know, that was a very common thing they had in Russia. They relaxed their laws around domestic violence, and a lot of women ended up in really bad situations. You know, they acted to get out of them, but I wasn't.

Brittany Greiner

I never was fearful of them doing anything to me. So part of what you're doing now is work on behalf of Americans who are detained in foreign countries, who are imprisoned in foreign countries, working to get them out. I'm also wondering if you're interested in doing prison reform work in the US, because as horrible as conditions were in Russia, I mean, conditions are not good in most american prisons. Yes, 100%. I was just talking with my agent about that the other day, actually, about how I can.

What I can do, how I can be of use, you know, what organization I could partner with, because, like you said, conditions are extremely bad overseas, but they're equally bad in certain prisons and even in our country here. And no matter what someone has been convicted of, they still have rights as a human, and they still have rights as a prisoner, you know, incarcerated. And you don't get stripped of those rights just because you're in prison. So I definitely would love to work with a group that's working in reform and re immersion as well. Cause a lot of times we say, you know, you.

You do the time, you're corrected. But then when you come back into society, we make it even harder for them to acclimate back in. So I definitely want to do something around that. Brittany Greiner, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you for having me on.

I appreciate it so much, and congratulations. Again on your freedom and your new life. Thank you. And your soon to come baby. Oh, thank you so much.

Tanya Moseley

Brittney Greiner's new memoir is called coming Home, and she spoke with Terry Gross. Our jazz historian Kevin Whitehead has some thoughts about saxophonist Sonny Rollins in 1959. Early that year, Rollins took a trio to Europe for a tour documented on a new reissue. Five months later, he withdrew from performing in public for two years, instead practicing on New York's Williamsburg Bridge. Here's Rollins in Stockholm that march on his anthem St.

Thomas.

Kevin Whitehead

Early in 1959, Sonny Rollins was a few years into one of the great hot streaks in jazz history. The handful of classic albums he made then include a couple with just bass and drums. That format gave him plenty of elbow room and obliged him to blow at length, which he was happy to do. Rollins took a trio to Europe for three weeks in late winter. 3 hours from that tour are heard on a new, sunny, approved reissue, freedomweaver.

Drawing on seven gigs from five countries, the saxophonist has lung power, ideas and technique to burn, and a gloriously unruly sound.

Sonny Rollins comes on like a few jazz greats combined. He has Lewis Armstrong's teasing way with a melody, Charlie Parker's high speed virtuosity and wit, tenor Lester Young's rhythmic obstinacy, the noble tone of Coleman Hawkins and Dexter Gordon's swagger. But it all comes out in Rollins own brash, self assured voice. Listen to him dart around on I want to be happy recorded in Holland. Paraphrasing or improvising, he's variously in front of, on top of, behind, or away.

Behind the beat. The trio's secret hero, young Henry Grimes, sets the pace on bass beside Pete LaRocca sims on drums.

As ecstatic as Rollins can sound, he's acutely self aware. He said that he sometimes felt like he was observing himself from above while playing as if split in two. He makes that split literal. On one take of I've told every little star, whereas tenor answers itself off microphone, I make a connection to radio comedians. Rollins loved Bob and Ray, who toggle between different voices in a sketch.

Brittany Greiner

Sa.

Kevin Whitehead

This 1959 music poses an old question with no simple answer. Why was this grand master on fire? So dissatisfied, he quit performing for two years in romantic sabbatical on the Williamsburg Bridge. We get clues from a new trade paperback, the notebooks of Sonny Rollins, whose entries begin in 1959. Back then, hes mostly preoccupied with technical matters and shortcomings.

The saxophones, pinky and side keys get a lot of attention, and it's true on the european tour, sometimes a couple of notes and a fast run will sound blurry. There was still work to do. In the sixties, Rollins dreamt of writing a saxophone manual, but his observations were mostly notes to himself. Later, in the notebooks, he gets more philosophical. The musical discussion gets deep in the weeds, and the book's editor supplies all of seven skimpy footnotes.

When we need more, like 70, where, say, Rollins goes on about interacting with Don, Bob, and Billy, the editor might note, that's trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Bob Cranshaw, and drummer Billy Higgins, which makes it 1962. The Rollins notebooks cry out for a crowdsourced annotations website. His 1959 trio, music, my commentary aside, needs no such mediation. His big hearted music speaks for itself. Kevin Whitehead is the author of the book play the way you the essential Guide to Jazz stories on film.

Tanya Moseley

Coming up, we'll talk about the intelligence of plants with climate journalist Zoe Schlanger. I'm Tanya Moseley, and this is fresh air weekend. This message comes from NPR sponsor massmutual. According to calendar.com comma, the average person schedules just 4.5 hours per year on finances. Massmutual gets it.

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Get a quote and learn more@allianstravelinsurance.com. Dot support for this podcast comes from the Neubauer Family foundation, supporting why's fresh air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation. Back in the seventies, there were these questionable experiments that claimed to prove that plants could behave like humans, that they had feelings or could respond to music, or even take a polygraph test. Now, most of those claims have since been debunked, but a new wave of research suggests that plants are indeed intelligent in complex ways that challenge our very understanding of agency and consciousness. That's the subject of a new book written by climate journalist Zoe Schlanger called the light how the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on earth.

Tanya Moseley

In the book, Schlanger explores how plants do indeed communicate with each other, see and recognize other plants, store memories and even learn. Schlanker traveled around the world to explore the work of botanical researchers, to understand the debate among them on how to interpret the latest findings, which are sometimes at odds with our conception of what a plant actually is. Zoe Schlanger is a staff reporter at the Atlantic, where she covers climate change. She also writes the newsletter the weekly Planet, which tells the story of life on a changing planet. Her work has appeared in various publications, including the New York Times and the New York Review of Books.

Zoe Schlanger, welcome to fresh AIR. It's wonderful to be with you. I really enjoyed this book. Very fascinating. And, you know, from the moment I started to read it, I was thinking about how plant intelligence has been for such a long time, a highly contested idea, especially after some of that debunked research from the seventies.

What made you say to yourself, I've got to pick up this field of study and explore this new science behind this idea of plant intelligence? Yeah. So, as you said, I cover climate change, and a few years ago I was feeling really burnt out. I'm sure, as anyone can relate to, climate is a harrowing subject. And my editor realized that I needed a bit of a change, and he was just like, go find something else to cover.

Zoe Schlanger

And I've always been interested in plants. And I started perusing botany journals, and I noticed something that really made me fall off my chair the first time I saw it, which was that at this exact moment I was looking. Botanists were debating the possibility that plants were intelligent. And as any science journalist knows, or any scientist, science is an incredibly conservative field. Scientists don't want to be misconstrued.

They tend to avoid using words that are mushy or can have multiple meanings. And so the fact that they were using words like intelligence and consciousness and having this rigorous debate among themselves, I knew that would be a huge story, and not one that I had seen break out of the realm of botany journals and academia into the public realm. Yet that's really fascinating that they're using the word intelligence. It seems like a phrase that we can all understand. We know animals, for instance, have unique intelligence that isn't human.

Tanya Moseley

In what you were reading, though, is there a consensus about what consciousness means as it relates to plants? Absolutely not. I mean, consciousness is a fascinating thing because we don't have any consensus for what it means, even in ourselves. You and I can. Yeah, you and I can completely feel our own consciousness, but we actually have no way to make certain that anyone else is conscious.

Zoe Schlanger

We observe consciousness in humans just through inference through watching behavior or asking a person questions. And we barely have extended consciousness to the world of animals. At this point. I think we're all comfortable with the idea that a dog is. Most of us have had an experience with an animal that, to us would confirm its consciousness.

But in terms of science and philosophy and neurobiology, it's still a bit of an open question. Actually, I'm in New York, and just a couple weeks ago at NYU, there was a conference of biologists and philosophers, and they put out a declaration that sort of extends the possibility of consciousness to insects and fish and crustaceans. So that's just brand new. And that was an extension of another declaration in 2012 that extended consciousness to mammals and birds. So we're barely on the edge of widening this circle to admit other species, but here we're botanists, suggesting we might have to widen it even further to plants.

Tanya Moseley

You prefer this idea that plants have agency. Can you say more about what you mean? Yeah. Agency is a little less mushy. You don't need to be certain of consciousness or intelligence to use it.

Zoe Schlanger

Agency is this effect of having control over one's destiny, so to speak, of having an active stake in the outcome of your life. And when I was looking at plants and speaking to botanists, it became very clear to me that plants have this, they have this lively ability to make choices for themselves, to plan for the future, to use information from their environment and mix it with experiences in their past, to make really wise choices for their future. And that can mean changing how their body looks, changing what direction to grow in, changing the conditions that they create for their offspring. There's a whole realm of maternal care in plants, and this is a sort of taking control of one's life, so to speak, that we don't even need to get into consciousness to discuss. It's very clear plants are agentive subjects, at least to me at this point.

Tanya Moseley

I'm also thinking about something else, like when, sometimes when you look at a leaf, you can see the details within that leaf. And it made me wonder, is it right to say that plants have a nervous system? You are touching on something that people are debating right now. I was able to go to a lab in Wisconsin where there was plants that had also been engineered to glow, but only to glow when theyve been touched. So I used tweezers to pinch a plant on its vein.

Zoe Schlanger

Exactly what youre talking about, the kind of midrib of a leaf. And I got to watch this glowing green signal emanate from the point where I pinched the plant out to the whole rest of the plant. Within two minutes, the whole plant had received this signal of my touch, of my assault, so to speak, with these tweezers and research like that is leading people within the plant sciences, but also people who work on neurobiology in people to question whether or not it's time to expand the notion of a nervous system. Maybe we need to imagine a nervous system as something that evolved multiple times throughout multiple taxa of life. Like many other things, flight evolved many times in birds and bats and other creatures.

Eyeballs evolved many times separately. And maybe a nervous system did, too. Maybe it's more fundamental to life than we've known before. Thinking about this plant responding to your tweezers, though, also makes me wonder. What have scientists found regarding plants ability to feel?

Tanya Moseley

Do they feel pain? We have nothing at the moment to suggest that plants feel pain. But do they sense being touched or sense being eaten and respond with a flurry of defensive chemicals that suggest that they really want to prevent whatever's going on from continuing? Absolutely. So this is where we get into tricky territory.

Zoe Schlanger

Do we ascribe human concepts like pain or. Of course, that's an animal concept more broadly to a plant, even though it has no brain and we can't ask it if it feels pain? We have not found pain receptors in a plant. But then again, the devil's advocate view here is that we only found the mechanoreceptors for pain in humans, like fairly recently. But we do know plants are receiving inputs all the time.

They know when a caterpillar is chewing on them, and they will respond with aggressive defensiveness. They will do wild things to keep that caterpillar from destroying them further. Like what? Like actually emitting tannins and things like that to stop them from eating them. Exactly.

The defenses are spectacular and precise and actually kind of cruel in some cases. Tomato plants have been found to encourage caterpillars towards cannibalism when they're eating their leaves. Apparently, caterpillars tend towards cannibalism anyway when there's not enough food around. But the plants will fill their leaves with something that makes them so unappetizing that caterpillars will look up from their leaves and start eating each other instead. Another example that absolutely blows my mind is that corn plants will sample the saliva from a caterpillar that's eating it, and then it will know what species that caterpillar is, or at least know what species of wasp it needs to summon to come parasitize the caterpillar.

So it'll emit this volatile chemical that floats on the air, and it will summon the exact parasitic wasp that wants to come inject its eggs in the caterpillar. The larva hatch and then eat the caterpillar from the inside. And that takes care of the caterpillar. For the plant you touched on. Of course, plants don't have a brain, but you also wonder at the same time, what if the plant itself is just one big brain?

Tanya Moseley

Explain this to me. I had this moment in the middle of reporting this book where I admitted this very sheepishly to a botanist, thinking that she would wave me off and think I was very silly. And I asked her, what if the whole plant is something like a brain? And she sort of leaned in and whispered, I think that, too. I just don't talk about it very much.

Zoe Schlanger

This is an idea bubbling up on the fringes, or among more open minded botanists, I would say. Why does she say she doesn't talk about it much? Because something that you actually encountered was a lot of reticence of talking about this, even for those who are studying it, because what they're actually doing right now is redefining the very meaning of intelligence and consciousness. And there's been so much passed around pseudoscience that has invalidated their work. Exactly.

You mentioned the secret life of plants. This book in 1973, that was a mixture of some reasonably good science, but then a huge part of it was not something that anyone could reproduce, and it really tarnished the field for about 30 years. Funding bodies were really hesitant to fund botanical behavior research. The realm of how plants behave. And that taboo is still on the plant sciences a little bit.

It's worn off, which has allowed certain research to come through. But scientists across any discipline are wary of saying anything too outlandish. They need to check their facts first. They need to have peer review processes in place to make sure they're not saying something to the public that can't be proven. And I feel scientists are aware that they're writing the first draft of knowledge of their field.

And if that draft has flaws, anything built on top of it would also have flaws. So they have tremendous responsibility to not mess this up. Well, back to the idea of a plant itself being one big brain. What made you come to that idea? After looking at the research and the ways that plants behave, when you look.

At plant sensing and the way a plant senses its world, it's doing it with all of these disparate limbs. I mean, a plant is growing constantly, and a plant is modular. Much unlike us, we evolved in a situation where we evolved to run across long distances and seek our food across long distances. So our processing evolved in a very compact, portable brain. It makes sense for us to have this centralized place that stores our information and our senses.

But a plant evolved rooted in place. And that evolutionary heritage means maybe there wasn't any good reason to make a compact, centralized processing center. Maybe plant sensing is a more diffuse phenomena. Maybe it is something that doesn't need to be all packed into one place. And, you know, a plant is able to lose a limb and not be that harmed by that.

So it would make sense that it was more of a diffuse sensing ability. And it seems like a lot of the research bears that out. I mentioned the experiment where I got to pinch the plant and watch it receive the awareness of that signal. If you are looking for a brain, it wouldn't make sense that the whole plant could respond to me pinching just one part of it. The signal would sort of ricochet meaninglessly throughout the plant.

And yet it does respond. Maybe it doesn't need to route that signal back to a centralized place. Maybe it's something more like what we're finding with fungi, this kind of diffuse mat of awareness that is yet very capable of understanding what's going on with all parts of it. So, thinking like a skeptic here, and really many researchers said this to you, this idea of consciousness or intelligence is just really a matter of chemical reactions. How widely accepted is this notion of plant intelligence in this moment, with all of this burgeoning research that you found?

The reality is that scientists won't be the ones to decide whether plants are intelligent or conscious. It will be a debate that goes on in more of the humanities, in philosophy, in ethics, because science is there to show us observation and to experiment. But it can't answer questions about this ineffable, squishy concept of intelligence and consciousness. And part of me feels like it almost doesn't matter, because what we see plants doing, what we now understand they can do, simply brings them into this realm of alert, active, processing beings, which is a huge step from how many of us were raised to view them, which is more like ornaments in our world or sort of this decorative backdrop for our lives. And intelligence is this thing that's loaded with so much human meaning.

I mean, it's too muddled up sometimes with academic notions of intelligence. And it has to be said, has been used as a tool to separate humans from other humans forever. So is this even something we want to layer onto plants. And that's something that I hear a lot of plant scientists talk about. They recognize more than anyone that plants are not little humans.

They don't want their subjects to be reduced in a way to human tropes or human standards of either of those things. How has writing this book actually changed your outlook on your climate reporting? I mean, you took a break from that in order to focus on this issue and you're going back to climate reporting. How does learning about plants help us? Maybe look at this larger problem in new ways or tackle it?

Yeah, I came to thinking about plants from a place of despair around climate and reporting on climate change. And I have to be honest. And im not anywhere more hopeful about climate change. It didnt solve that one for me, but it did do something else. It kind of re enchanted the world for me, which has really strong effects in how I come to my job now covering climate change.

I feel much more attached to the material stakes of what we stand to lose. It starts to seem that much more absurd that we're doing anything that could impede the continuation of all of these different lines of evolutionary genius which are embodied in plants and any other species. But, you know, I'm thinking a lot about plants and I even feel in myself like what's sitting with all of this wonder around what plants can do, what that's done? I mean, I think a lot about Rachel Carson, who at the end of her life wrote a lot about this. That wonder is a transformative emotion.

It leads away from exploitation. Once you have awe for something, it's very hard to feel a lack of respect for it. Respect sort of comes naturally out of that. And I think, I sense that. I sense both the system in which we're all part this ecological web, but also the, the lack of any excuse for turning away from destruction that snuffing out any one of these lines of plants through early extinction, through deforestation, just becomes patently absurd.

There's just no excuse for it. Zoe Schlinger, thank you so much for this conversation. It's wonderful to talk to you. Zoe Schlanger's new book is called the light how the Unseen World of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on earth. Fresh air weekend is produced by Teresa Madden.

Tanya Moseley

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross. I'm Tanya Moseley.

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Tanya Moseley

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Best Of: Brittney Griner / Discovering Plant Intelligence

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