Are humans really blind to plants?

Abstract

People tend to see plants as the background to life on Earth, but they are essential to our very existence in many ways. In 1999 two botanist-educators from the United States coined the term “plant blindness” to describe this condition, and to draw attention to the decreasing focus on plants in education. Here I argue that disregard for any organism that is not a vertebrate (like us) is the more pervasive problem, but that combatting plant blindness is a good place to start to improve education, awareness, and care for the other organisms with which we share planet Earth. Summary: The concept of “plant blindness” was coined in 1999 to highlight the phenomenon seen in American (United States) education in which animals are perceived as more important than plants. Symptoms were lack of recognition of plants as important components of ecosystems, lack of understanding of how plants affect our everyday lives, anthropocentric ratings of animals as more worthy of care than plants, and inability to “see” that plants are more than background. I argue here that the deeper problem is not with animals versus plants, but with “animals with eyes like ours and backbones” versus everything else. Cockroaches, worms, and spiders are animals too, and without them the planet would be as barren as if there were no plants. So combatting the more pervasive issue needs to be at the background of our thinking as we move forward in combatting plant blindness. I here review the symptoms of plant blindness and relate this to ways in which we might begin to think about using recognition of plant blindness as a way to increase awareness and care for all of life on Earth.