Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: Wall Street Journal Reports on Implications and Risks of
Plant BlindnessAugust 16, 2018
Plant blindness is the phenomena of people not understanding or appreciating plants. This lack of understanding translates into inadequate laws, staffing and funding for plant conservation. These in turn contribute to the critical
imperilment of at least 20% of the planet's flora.
The Journal article covered some of the problems resulting from Plant Blindness:
- Botanists with expertise specific to their regions developed over decades are retiring from the federal government and are not being replaced. Today, there is roughly one botanist on the federal payroll for every 20 million acres of land, according to the Chicago Botanic Garden.
- Not only are there fewer university botany programs but those who graduate from them may not be well versed in plant identification.
- The cutting edge of plant science, which has commercial applications, is molecular. Students and universities are following the significant money - away from botany and plant ecology.
- “zoochauvinistic introductory biology instructors” use “zoocentric examples” to teach basic biological concepts to stack the deck against plants.
- schools are getting rid of herbaria, the sometimes vast collection of plants that form the spine of a botanist’s education. In the past 30 years, [NPCC Affiliate] the New York Botanical Garden alone has absorbed collections from 15 colleges and universities that no longer have space, budget or interest in maintaining it. Barbara M. Thiers, who directs the herbarium at the Garden, estimates about a quarter of the world’s 3,200 herbaria are at risk because of physical threats such as hurricanes or administrative apathy.
