Are you plant blind?

(Written as part of a Science Writing course at UC Davis in 2017)

Panoramic view of the UC Davis Botanical Conservatory

Plants are boring. They don’t have claws. They can’t fly. They don’t make noises. They can’t even move. Compared to a roaring lion or a 200-ton whale they are unremarkable and downright boring. Yet plants are arguably the most successful organism on the planet (next to microorganisms of course) and one of the most important.

What would you say to someone who thinks plants are boring?

Ernesto Sandoval, the curator of UC Davis’ Botanical Conservatory, answered “I think it’s part of the human condition. We’re trained to look at moving objects from our hunter-gatherer days, but plants actually do some amazing things. Many of them move just not at the rate animals move. Animals get to run away or fight. Plants are stuck there. They have to figure it out and they have some amazing ways of solving those challenges.”

Ernesto gives tours to hundreds of visitors that visit the conservatory greenhouse every year. His hope is that even if just for a short time after the tour visitors will take notice of the living, breathing organisms around them that make all other life possible: plants.

To many, plants are seen as green backdrops to the rest of life on the planet, if we see them at all. In this blindness we are also blind to the essential role of plants in our lives. “Plant blindness,” a term coined by the botanists James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler in an editorial published in The American Biology Teacher in 1999, is seen more so today than ever. Our attention is monopolized by LCD screens, HD everything, fast-paced onslaughts of information and eye-catching advertising filled with colors and sounds and motion. As technology opens the avenue for more efficient information sharing some argue that it makes us less apt or even able to focus our attention. Plants hardly stand a chance. It seems the adage that you can’t see the forest for the trees is backwards. We can’t see the trees for the forest—if we see the forest at all.

You can see the disconnect between people and plants in the media as well. People don’t know where their food comes from or how it is grown. Modern life and the division of labor it creates has separated the majority of people from having to grow their own food. You can see it in the numerous contradictory articles about farming and agricultural biotechnology and the strong emotions it elicits.

Wandersee asserts that plant blindness is the “default condition” for humans. We are programmed to see only those things that move quickly and can cause direct and immediate harm to us. Trees won’t stampede you if you spook them, but buffalo might. Plant blindness in this respect can be likened image processing. William Allen wrote in BioScience in 2003 that “humans don’t see all their surroundings by just opening their eyes.” Our eyes take in and generate millions of bits of information from our surroundings; however, we only fully process and are conscious of a miniscule amount. Much like when you take a picture with a camera, the camera captures the raw information and then processes it into an image.

Imagine then that you need to shrink that image to send it to someone via text. You lose information in the conversion. Then imagine the recipient changes the format of the image from .tif to .jpeg and even more information is lost. What you are left with is a conversion of a smaller copy of a record of the real life thing. This is what happens to plants in our brains. Plants fade and blur to the background.

These two tree-like plants are actually each a single leaf of Amorphophallus titanum (the corpse flower) when it's not in bloom.

The situation is made even worse considering that plant biology and botany is not given the same amount of attention as animal science in the classroom. Students are not trained to challenge the default of zoocentric thought. Suddenly the entire educational system is robbing students of a holistic perspective of life on Earth and they are left with a misunderstanding of carbon flow, sometimes even to

the point of not immediately realizing that plants are alive.

Wandersee and Schussler describe plant blindness as a condition, the “symptoms” of which include not understanding how a plant grows and what it needs to survive and not knowing how they fit into the scheme of life on Earth. The implications for such a mindset are vast and significant. Without an eye to how plants grow we ignore the entire foundation for animal and human life. As the basis for the life cycle, plants capture and convert light energy into chemical energy which is used by animals to survive, not to mention the fact that plants supply our oxygen to breathe.

Plant blindness can produce serious repercussions in how we choose to live. If we are blind to the integral role plants play in the ecosystem we might begin to create policies that are contrary to the well-being of the environment and the plants within it. Since plants are the underpinning of all life, the lack of consideration of them in the biosphere could cause detrimental effects in the future.

Since Wandersee and Schussler first wrote about plant blindness in 1999 many others, in the sciences and in education, have described their unique experiences with plant blindness and offered possible solutions to cure it. How do we challenge the default condition of our own plant blindness? How do we teach ourselves to see?

A group of high school science teachers (J.K. Frisch et al.) describe ways in which we can combat plant blindness using specific classroom activities in their 2010 article in a journal for environmental education. J.K. Frisch et al. highlight programs like Project Learning Tree and Project WET that are focused on teaching students about ecology and the environment (and yes, plants) through games and interactive activities. Also of particular import is the need to connect students to their local environment. They explain how engaging the students in their own community will not only give them ownership over their surroundings and community but also instill a sense of place in the students. They will begin to see their unique place in the environment and appreciate the intricate web of interactions between all organisms within it.

Cacti and succulents beautifully illustrate the various strategies plants use to deal without consistent water and high heat common in their native habitats.

Wandersee and Schussler also assert that part of the solution is having a “plant mentor”—a person who is dedicated to connecting a student to the world of plants through hands-on, personal experiences. This could be as simple as a parent teaching their child how to tend plants in a home garden, giving a kid the responsibility of caring for a houseplant, taking walks in neighboring parks. Sometimes the best way to enlist interest in a subject is to be interested yourself. Engaging students in the plant world early is an essential component to inspiring interest in the future. Balanced education between animal and plant life is also important to building a more complete picture of how different life forms and strategies of living fit together to create a whole ecosystem.

Bhavani Prakash wrote in a blog post in 2010 that promoting plant perception and appreciation necessitates physical interaction between plants and people. Visiting botanical gardens like the one where Ernesto works, for example, makes the plants that we use every day real. Seeing a coffee tree and vanilla in the plant form gives us a new perspective on how active a role plants play in our lives. Plants just aren’t that showy about it.

Ernesto was always curious about plants having grown up working for his family’s landscaping company. Spending many days planting, pruning and mowing gave him an appreciation for how to care for them, an interest he fully realized by studying botany in college. Now as the curator of the conservatory he spends his days surrounded by thousands of species of plants from all other the world. He thinks the best way to combat plant blindness is through personal connection and storytelling. Every plant has a story of how it was discovered, how it got its name, an interesting quirk of how it grows. Ernesto is more of a librarian of plant stories than a curator of a greenhouse collection. He gives tours through the living library of plants and gives visitors the cliff notes of each species that they encounter. You can touch the sori on the underbelly of the fern leaves. You can peer inside the pitcher plants and look for the bugs nourishing the plant. You can put the pop-rock like seeds of Wisteria in your mouth and wait for the pop of the seed coat to explode on your tongue. You can walk past a chocolate tree or smell the vanilla orchid. Ernesto makes plants real for people by appealing to the senses and our thirst for stories. He hopes that by walking through the various rooms housing carnivorous plants, desert plants and tropical plants and interacting with them that people will leave feeling less of a separation from our photosynthetic costars.

Articles cited and sources:

Allen, William. Plant Blindness. BioScience October 2003 Vol. 53. No. 10.

Frisch, J.K, Unwin, M.M., Saunders, G.W. Name that Plant! Overcoming Plant Blindness and Developing a Sense of Place Using Science and Environmental Education. The Inclusion of Environmental Education in Science Teach Education. 2010.

Wandersee, J.H. and Schussler, E.E. Preventing Plant Blindness. The American Biology Teacher. Feb. 1999. Vol. 61. No. 2.

Interview with Jose Ernesto Sandoval (curator of UC Davis Botanical Conservatory). September 2019. Davis, CA.