An old riddle asks, “what has eyes but cannot see” (answer: potato), but this week’s leaf has nothing to do with visual deficiency IN plants! Rather it is about a very human deficiency, our tendency to completely shut out the plants in plain sight around us, and focus instead on other things. This is called “Plant Blindness, ”a term apparently coined in 1999 by James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, educators who raised concerns about how biology teachers and students tend to focus much more attention on animals than plants.
Plants are our most-important living resource, able to supply all human needs, food, fuel, clothing, even the oxygen we breathe. I believe that plants generally trump animals in terms of scientific interest because their special ability to do photosynthesis and their much more sophisticated biochemistry that enables them to accumulate so many diverse phytochemicals, many of which feature in herbal medicine and in the dermocosmetic herbal ingredients produced by @Green Mountain Biotech.
So why do animals attract more human interest, and why does the World Wildlife Fund logo feature a giant panda rather than an endangered plant? One reason is that being able to pick out animals may be an essential survival skill, enabling us to see and flee from predators. Another reason is that we are also animals, with similar neurological wiring that enables us to connect with animals in a very special way. Of course, there are many tree huggers among us, but even they will admit that the trees don’t hug back.
There are literally hundreds of academic articles about Plant Blindness. They are mostly concerned about how people can be made more aware of plants and their importance, not just in the classroom but in everyday life. No, we are not blind to plants but often need to be reminded to take more notice of them. In fact Kathryn Parsely (2020)proposes renaming the phenomenon “Plant Awareness Disparity”. I hope my almost-weekly ramblings are a small contribution to overcoming the disparity.
Further reading
😎🌿 Wandersee JH& Schussler EE (1999). Preventing plant blindness. The American biologyteacher 61, 82-86. https://doi.org/10.2307/4450624
😎🌿 Allen W(2003). Plant blindness. BioScience, 53(10), 926-926. https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2003)053[0926:PB]2.0.CO;2
😎🌿 ParsleyKM (2020). Plant awareness disparity: A case for renaming plant blindness. Plants,people, planet, 2(6), 598-601. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10153
