10 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
W
e all have blind spots. In our personal and
professional lives, we engage in behav-
iors, adopt attitudes, and practice habits
of which we are completely unaware. Often these are
benign, but sometimes these foibles can cause harm to
ourselves and those around us, human and otherwise.
I recently became aware of one of these patterns in my
own persona: I suffer from plant blindness.
Botanists Elisabeth Schussler and James Wander-
see coined the term more than 20 years ago in a 1999
guest editorial published in The American Biology
Teacher. They cited studies that reported an over-
whelming preference among US students for study-
ing animals over plants. “We consider the current
state of underrepresentation as much more than just
the result of zoocentrism or zoochauvinism,” they
wrote. “That’s why we decided to introduce a new
term, one that emphasizes the perceptual and visual-
cognition bases of why plants are often overlooked
and neglected—not just by biology teachers, but by
humans in general.” The realization that I was one of
these general humans only dawned upon me recently,
while editing this month’s Critic at Large (pg. 12), a
piece on the benefits of curing plant blindness by agri-
cultural geneticist M. Timothy Rabanus-Wallace.
I lapsed into treating a whole kingdom of life like
stage props and set pieces quite by accident. From an
early age, I was fascinated with animals: wild ones, pet
ones, deep-sea ones, mythical ones, etc. I was entranced
by observing their behavior, trying to gain insight into
what was churning away behind their eyes, guessing
at how they sensed and navigated the world we share.
Plants slowly blended into the background, then became
the background. Later, I entered university with the goal
of launching an animal-focused career in wildlife biol-
o g y, then marine biology.
Perhaps what makes the recent realization of
my plant blindness sting all the more is that I did
once have flashes of appreciation for the splendor
of Kingdom Plantae. My undergraduate education
included basic botany courses, and any student of
biology won’t make it very far if they don’t develop
some understanding of photosynthesis, cell walls,
and other features of plant biology. In one class, I
collected plants from the wild and made dried speci-
mens using a press that was probably older than me.I recall this experience engendering
a real feeling of connection to natural-
ists of yore. But the plant taxonomy along
with the botanical biology and biochem-
istry I learned eventually faded, pushed
to the fuzzy edges of my focus, as animal
life shifted to a position squarely in the
crosshairs of my intellectual pursuits.
As I edited and read our annual issue
celebrating plants and the researchers
who study them, I not only became
aware of all this, I decided that it’s
time to get serious about chipping
away at my apparent plant blindness.
And what a perfect collection of stories
to launch me on my journey to reclaim a
robust appreciation of plants. This issue contains
tales of scientists dissecting the neurobiology of how
Venus flytraps capture their animal prey (pg. 47), of
companies navigating difficulties in analyzing the
chemical makeup of cannabis products (pg. 52), and
of the secrets trees hold in their annual growth rings
(pg. 59). A feature story on the ghost forests of North
Carolina (pg. 30) reminds us that becoming “plant
sighted”—if I may coin a term of my own—can’t wait.
According to the International Union for Conserva-
tion of Nature (IUCN), 70 percent of known plant
species are “under threat.”
Rabanus-Wallace recounts the advice of Regis
University’s Catherine Kleier, who suggests learning
plant names as a first step towards curing plant blind-
ness. “Just to be able to s ay, ‘That’s an aster,’ or to tell a
fir from a pine,” Kleier said. And that’s where I’ll start.
The coming weeks and months will see me dusting off
my plant identification guides, getting out into nearby
forests and prairies, and commencing the enjoyable
chore of reconnecting to our photosynthetic friends.
Heck, I may even press a few specimens.Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]For too long I have taken plants for granted.BY BOB GRANTFROM THE EDITORConfessions of the Plant Blind
ANDRZEJ KRAUZE