“On Plant Blindness”

Hello and welcome! I am Melissa Petruzzello, the plant and environmental science editor for Encyclopedia Britannica. Part of my job at Britannica is to help inspire curiosity. You might even say that’s my entire job.

But my subject area is a bit tricky. I’m in charge of plants, fungi, and algae (among other topics), and these three branches of the tree of life do not get a lot of love. But I love them! And I’m looking forward over the next few episodes to introducing you to some amazing organisms and adaptations from this part of the evolutionary tree. But in this, my inaugural episode, I wanted to talk about plant blindness, which is a phenomenon I hope to help remedy in some small way with this podcast series.

Plant blindness is a familiar concept to us botanist types, and it is the inability to notice plants in one’s environment. It is really common in modern society, as so many of us are really detached from nature. Although a person would be hard-pressed to go a day without easily passing 100 plant species of plants and a huge number of plant products, it is hard for plants to penetrate the consciousness of many people. Do some introspection here, my dear listener. Do you know the name of the trees that line the streets outside? Can you identify those common wildflowers you see as you zip along the highway? Most people cannot.

Houseplants, those have burgeoned in popularity in recent years, which means more and more people are at least noticing the plants inside! That’s awesome! But even with houseplants, I’m sure their names are not as immediate for most people as are the names of common animals. Most of us can rattle off at least a handful of dog breeds, but really, how many houseplants can you jot down in a minute? And with wild plants, meaning those outside, in nature, uncultivated by humans for landscaping or food, many of those just exist invisibly to folks. Only the most showy displays of fall foliage or spring flowers manage to attract attention, otherwise people are often obliviously to the diverse, exuberant, life-giving diversity that fills every spare inch of soil on Earth.

There are almost 400,000 plants known to science, compared with the puny 45,000 species of vertebrate animals (most folks don’t really care about invertebrates so I didn’t include them. That’s another topic.). But anyway, given that there’s almost 10 times as many plants as vertebrate animals, why don’t we see our leafy brethren?

There are several theories about the causes of plant blindness, and I imagine all are true to some extent. The first goes back to ancient humanity and the way our brains are wired to see. It is argued that humans and other apes are hard-wired to notice animals as potential predators or prey. Given that animals could literally mean life or death, it makes sense that the brain prioritizes visual cues that have movement, bright patterns, and other indications of animal life. The brain can only handle so much of the visual information that it is constantly bombarded with so plants are often relegated to “background,” or so the argument goes. It has even been claimed that “plant blindness is the human default condition,” but I think that might be taking it too far.

As a botanist who has adored plants since childhood, I don’t think it is very difficult for humankind to overcome this prehistoric wiring, especially in an age when very few of us actually hunt or are hunted by animals on a regular basis. And of course, as a counterpoint to the argument in general, many native peoples, some of whom actually live with a real threat of animal attack, are among the most botanically informed humans on the planet. People that are directly dependent on nature are without fail more intimately familiar with the plants that fill and sustain their lives. So, the argument that our brains literally tune out plants because of survival, it only goes so far. And it is certainly not hard to visually shift plants from “leafy background” to a stimulating cacophony of diversity in the forefront of our perception.

More compelling to me are the various social and educational biases that foster plant blindness. Educators at all levels tend to use animals to teach biological concepts, a phenomenon referred to as “zoochauvenism”. Survival of the fittest, for example, is a fundamental principal that is nearly always illustrated with animals, such as a predator picking off the weak from a herd. Plant evolution is identically shaped by these forces, but I suspect that many teachers would be hard-pressed to quickly give a good example. Not only are general concepts taught with animals, but plant biology in general gets very little time in the classroom compared to zoology and human biology. My own high school biology class had a very brief section on plants at the very end of the school year, and my advanced high school biology class had nothing about plants at all! Even in college, I had to seek out unusual electives, usually off-campus, to get a robust botanical background. And many botanists suspect that plant blindness is an important factor in the ongoing declines of university botany programs around the world.

It’s really not too much to conclude that such repeated exposure to an anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals leads to the erroneous conclusion that they are unworthy of human consideration. By and large, society in tends to dismiss plants as “boring.” I know this personally from experience with my job. Plants certainly don’t move or interact with us the same way that animals can. Few people empathize with plants, and really, humanity tends to favor things with faces. Plants operate at a completely different time scale than day-to-day human activity, and in a fast-paced world with ever decreasing attention spans, well, who has time for that? Especially if you’ve never been taught why you should make time for plants. Or how to see them.

And that’s a real shame, plant blindness leads to the chronic inability to appreciate plants in human affairs, and we absolutely owe our existence to plants. They provide us with oxygen, food, fiber, pharmaceuticals, endless beauty. Plants help store greenhouse gases, purify our water, and they create the ecosystems and food chains that sustain our beloved animals (and ourselves of course). The list goes on and on.

I recently saw on Twitter that Dr. Shawn Krosnick, a botany professor at Tennessee Tech, challenged her students to go a day without a plant, and they live tweeted how that went. Breakfast was difficult, as plants are responsible for coffee, tea, bread, cereal, fruits (obviously). The students’ books, paper, pencils, those were all off limits. Only wool or synthetic clothing was permitted, since cotton and linen come from plants. She wisely gave her students five unlimited freebies, which included toilet paper. And at the end of the day, one student even complained that he couldn’t go out for drinks because all alcohols are made with plants. I loved reading through their tweets, and thought this was a really eye-opening way to take on plant blindness in day to day life. I think if we really took the time to appreciate the immense role of plants in human life, I’m sure humans would be much more awed by and thankful for this incredible organisms.

Beyond appreciating useful plants, addressing plant blindness is vitally important for the conservation of the thousands of other botanical friends we share this planet with. In the United States, there are around 700 species of animals that are federally protected endangered species. You might know some of them: the California condor, the Florida panther, the rusty patched bumblebee. But did you know that most of the endangered species in the United States are plants? And actually, that holds true for all of the world’s endangered species – endangered plant species greatly outnumber endangered animals. Introspection time: can you name a single endangered plant species? Even though plants make up the majority of our threatened and endangered species, in the United States less than 4% of the government money for endangered species has historically been spent to protect plants. And that also holds true globally.

There are many reasons for that dramatic inequality, but how much people care is a big factor. People have been very vocal in the protection of bald eagles and panda bears. But many plant species can just quietly disappear forever without us even knowing they were there? How sad is that? Extinction is forever. We tend to only protect the things we care about, and we only care about the things we know and love. If we don’t know and love the plants that fill our beautiful planet, then how can they possibly get the protections they deserve?

Further, plant blindness threatens us. Plants are magnificent carbon-storing machines. Protecting forests and grasslands, and restoring these ecosystems, is proving to be a vital strategy in our existential fight against climate change. The wild cousins of crop species may hold the key in adapting our food crops to the drought, flooding, extreme heat, and other challenges we will likely face in world of unmitigated carbon emissions. Our wildlands and biodiversity hotspots, such as the Amazon, offer untold pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Perhaps there is a rare plant out there, staring down a bulldozer, that has the chemicals we’ve been looking for to cure cancer. If we don’t consider plants, we really have a lot to lose.

So, we’ve talked about plant blindness, how it happens, and touched a bit on why it matters. I wanted to discuss this topic today, because, as a science communicator and plant enthusiast, I hope that this podcast series can help address plant blindness and inspire curiosity about plants and other overlooked organisms. In the following episodes, I’m gonna highlight some amazing plants, their adaptations, and talk about some fascinating ecosystems and ecological dynamics, which will hopefully excite you about the botanical world and to care about our non-animal friends out there.

Beyond this podcast, if you feel like plants are a bit of a blind spot in your knowledge, be sure to check out Britannica’s articles, lists, and other stories about plants. There’s a lot of cool content out there (a lot of which I’m made myself), and it can get you going down a really fun path! And also, get outside. Plants have a great way of encouraging mindfulness and slow living if we make the time to see them. It’s totally worthwhile, you won’t regret it.

For Britannica’s Botanize podcast series, I’m Melissa Petruzzello. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, On Plant Blindness, which was produced by Kurt Heintz. Until next time, stay curious!