> Over the last five years, a cluster of books has brought these ideas to public attention. In 2016, Peter Godfrey-Smith published Other Minds: The Octopus, the

> Over the last five years, a cluster of books has brought these ideas to public attention. In 2016, Peter Godfrey-Smith published Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, in which he argued that “evolution built minds twice over”, and octopuses’ invertebrate intelligence may shed light on what it means for us to be conscious, too. > In 2019, Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, about eight people’s lives connected through their relationship with trees, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. > In 2020, word of mouth lifted Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, published seven years previously, into the New York Times bestseller list, for the vision it presented of mutual care and connection between people and plants. > That year, Merlin Sheldrake published Entangled Life, another bestseller, exploring fungi and the “wood wide web” of their mycorrhizal collaboration with plants. ——- And yet the tree, fungus or octopus who can write award winning literature has yet to be seen. To confess my unpopular opinion: humanity is special.