When the Earth Was Green was a Macmillan Audio pick. It was intriguing to learn about the relationship between prehistoric plants & how life evolved on Earth. Black begins the book by pointing out that so often we think of plants as the background to “more advanced” life-forms. But plants & other living things didn’t evolve separately, in their own vacuums. Instead, each affected the other. Black says, “Genetics alone are useless. DNA only makes sense in the context of its environment.” This was something I had never really thought of before, but immediately the world around me made more sense.

I cannot express enough how much I loved that in the conclusion of this book, Black makes the science & history of plants & the Earth a little more personal. “A crab apple tree growing in the yard or the roses we give each other to celebrate are plants that contain marks of what we may deem both male & female in the same plant. Betraying our bias to split these identities even when they are very much part of the same organism…. Of course there are plants in which what we designate as male & female parts exist on different individual plants or different parts of the same plant or involve varying expressions over a plant’s life.” Black goes on, “And just as an individual plant may express different sex related characteristics in varying parts of its body or at different times of its life, the same is true of our species. I know, because I’ve lived it.” Black tells us that she is a transgender woman. “Every body, yours included, contains the capacity to express in ways we might think of as male or female in different combinations, all depending upon our life histories & the choices we make for ourselves.”

I truly had no idea a correlation could be made between plants & queerness, despite learning some of the basics of plant reproduction in school. But the fact that Black so clearly displays the benefits of diversity among plants, & other organisms, & applies that same ideology to queerness among the human species really struck me as so important for the future of society, & life as we know it.

I think some of the more scientific language could lose certain readers, but the appendices at the end of the books were also fun & helpful. The narrator was fantastic imo. Despite being a nonfiction science book, Black’s narrative is quite romantic & poetic. This book was five stars for me!