Confessing to Plant Blindness

I have taken plants for granted. I pledge to change.

Written byBob Grant

| 4 min read

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We all have blind spots. In our personal and professional lives, we engage in behaviors, 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 Wandersee 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 overwhelming preference among US students for studying 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 ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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