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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 ...
