The Scientist - 03.2020

12 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com

MARY-ANN BLÄTKE, IPK GATERSLEBEN

T

he Great Chain of Being is an

ancient and intuitive idea. Just

as we naturally order a rack of

screwdrivers according to size, head type,

and magnetism, Platonic philosophers

imposed an order on things found in

the natural world. They used properties

such as being alive, possessing a soul, and

moving around to arrange all living and

non living things into a divinely ordained

hierarchy. In the various scala naturae

that have been contrived, plants always

linger somewhere just above rocks. Plato’s

star pupil Aristotle once counseled Alex-

ander the Great to deal with barbarians

as though they were plants. Neither, he

believed, had much of a soul to speak of.

A modern Aristotle, navigating the

transition from papyrus to Twitter, might

well be diagnosed with “plant blindness.”

This handy neologism, coined in 1999 by

researchers Elisabeth Schussler and James

Wandersee, describes the tendency of people

to simply edit plants out of their daily obser-

vations. An average person spying a forest

meadow blanketed with a hundred grass

and herb species, bordered by megatons of

forest trees, sedges in the rivers, ferns in the

undergrowth, and moss pillows creaking as

they give way underfoot, is painfully liable

to remark only on the solitary gray pigeon

sleeping on a distant branch.

This complaint, coming from a bota-

nist, might be unfair to ornithologists, who

see in that pigeon a wealth of fascination:

the bioengineering challenge of powering

flight alone is gloriously met as only evo-

lution can, the bird’s hyper-efficient heart

and air intake systems supercharging its

flight muscles with oxygen while simulta-

neously providing convection cooling for

the whole mechanism. Incidentally, the

forest trees meet a similar fluid transport

challenge, as they lift several hundred kilo-

grams of water 10 or more stories up from

the soil to the canopy each day without the

aid of moving parts. Evolution’s solution in

this case consists of tiny, unbroken tubes

of immense strength that run the entire

vertical length of the trunk. Water at the

top evaporates, and the capillary effect

Opinion: The Perils of Plant Blindness

In the plant awareness revolution, scientists are taking a back seat to hipster gardeners

and slam poets—and that’s a good thing.

BY M. TIMOTHY RABANUS-WALLACE

CRITIC AT LARGE