Christine Ro* says our ‘plant blindness’ means we underappreciate the flora around us, which can have disastrous consequences for the environment and human health.
Photo: Samantha Gades
What is the last animal you saw?
Can you remember its colour, size and shape?
Could you easily distinguish it from other animals?
Now, how about the last plant you saw?
If your mental images of animals are sharper than those of plants, you’re not alone.
Children recognise that animals are living creatures before they can tell that plants are also alive.
Tests of recall also show that study participants remember pictures of animals better than images of plants.
This tendency is so widespread that Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee, a pair of US botanists and biology educators, coined a term for it in 1998: “plant blindness”.
They described it as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment”.
Plant blindness, not surprisingly, results in an under-appreciation of plants — and in a limited interest in plant conservation.
While studies haven’t been done on the extent of plant blindness and its change over time, increased urbanisation and time spent with devices means that “nature deficit disorder” (the harm caused to humans by being alienated from nature) is on the rise.
And with less exposure to plants comes greater plant blindness.
This is problematic.
Plant conservation matters for environmental health.
But it also matters, ultimately, for human health.
Plant research is critical to many scientific breakthroughs, from hardier food crops to more effective medicines.
More than 28,000 plant species are used medicinally, including plant-derived anti-cancer drugs.
Given how crucial plants are — and always have been — to our very survival, how did humans come to be “plant-blind”?
Seeing green
There are cognitive and cultural reasons that animals are easier to distinguish.
Because plants barely move, grow close to each other, and are often similar in colour, our brains tend to group them together.
With about 10 million bits of visual data per second transmitted by the human retina, the human visual system filters out non-threatening things like plants and clumps them together.
Then there is our preference for biobehavioural similarity: as primates, we tend to notice creatures that are most similar to us.
“From my experience with great apes, they are generally more interested in the creatures more similar to them in appearance,” says Fumihiro Kano, an ape psychologist at Japan’s Kyoto University.
As with humans, there’s a social element to this visual preference.
“Human-reared apes are more interested in human images than non-human images, including their own species,” Kano says.
In human societies, there’s also constant reinforcement of the idea that animals are fundamentally more interesting and visible than plants.
We name animals and assign them human characteristics.
We often use animals as sport team mascots.
And we’re attuned to individual variation among animals: the personality of a dog, say, or the unique colour pattern of a butterfly.
Seeing animals as similar — or more similar — to us encourages our empathy. With conservation decisions, that’s key.
Most of us feel prompted to want to protect, say, polar bears not because we run through a rational list of reasons why we need them, but because they tug on our heart-strings, says environmental psychologist Kathryn Williams of the University of Melbourne.
Even within animal conservation, certain charismatic animals (particularly large mammals with forward-facing eyes) receive the lion’s share of attention.
Indeed, Williams’ research has shown that people are more supportive of conservation efforts for species with human-like characteristics.
The challenge is magnified for plants.
“Building those emotional connections with ecosystems and species and the plant as a whole is crucial for plant conservation,” Williams says.
Of course, science isn’t a zero-sum game where more interest and money in one set of organisms needs to automatically result in fewer resources elsewhere.
But as with any type of bias, acknowledging it is the first step to reducing it.
Becoming less plant blind
One key to reducing plant blindness is increasing the frequency and variety of ways we see plants.
This should start early.
Everyday interaction with plants is the best strategy, says Schussler.
She lists talking about conservation of plants in local parks and gardening.
Dawn Sanders of Sweden’s University of Gothenburg also points to cultural variations.
“Plant blindness is not applicable to all people in the same way,” she says.
Compared to initial research on US students, she says, “we have found our Swedish students connect with plants through memory, emotion and beauty, particularly around things like midsummer and the first days of spring”.
So, plant blindness is neither universal nor inevitable.
“Although our human brains may be wired for plant blindness, we can overcome it with greater awareness,” Schussler says.
Williams is also optimistic about increasing empathy for plants.
“It’s not at all implausible,” she says.
“It’s about imagination.”
Even fictional plant characters are turning up.
Two from the comics world are McPedro, the Scottish-Irish cactus from the web comic Girls with Slingshots, and Marvel’s superhero tree Groot, who has sparked some quirky biology discussions.
The world’s food supply is facing more challenges than ever, due to a combination of population growth, water scarcity, reduced agricultural land, and climate change.
Through research on biofuels, plants are also important as a potential source of renewable energy.
That means it’s critical to be able to detect, learn from, and innovate with our green friends.
Our future depends on it.
* Christine Ro is a freelance writer who works for the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. Her website is www.christinero.com.
This article first appeared at www.bbc.com.
