Plant Blindness

I recently came across a term that has me thinking. It’s plant blindness. Do you know this term, Grant?

Yeah, I think that’s when sunflowers don’t know which way to turn to find the sun.

For heliotropism?

Yeah, for heliotropism. No, that is not the meaning of it. I just made that up.

Tell me about plant blindness, Martha.

Well, it’s a term that was invented by botanists in the 1990s to refer to the inability to see or notice plants in one’s own environment, because that leads to the inability to recognize the importance of plants in the biosphere and how they affect us.

And I’ve seen this term used more and more. You know, we just, there are studies that show that if people are rapidly presented pictures of animals and plants, they will focus on the animals and not the plants. And in fact, little kids learn early in their lives that humans and animals are living beings, but they take a lot longer to recognize that plants are also alive. And so plant blindness is a term that refers to our sort of tuning them out, I guess.

Yeah, we have a bias for other mammals, don’t we? Our biophilia leans more towards other things that have faces and eyes.

I wonder if my son is experiencing plant blindness when he doesn’t notice that he should put some salad on his plate at the dinner table. He goes straight for the pasta and meatballs and just like reaches around the green stuff.

Right. And it just sits there.

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