Plant awareness disparity: A case for renaming plant blindness

For over a hundred years, botanists and educators alike have lamented the disparities in attention toward plants and animals. Different terms have been given to this phenomenon over the years, but reports of the issue have occurred since 1919 when general biology courses were first being developed (Nichols, 1919). Throughout the development of these courses, professors noticed that the words “biology” and “zoology” seemed to be synonymous, giving disciplines such as botany a more minor role in these curricula (Nichols, 1919). The term “plant blindness” was introduced in 1999 and is defined as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one's own environment—leading to: (a) the inability to recognize the importance of plants in the biosphere, and in human affairs; (b) the inability to appreciate the aesthetic and unique biological features of the life forms belonging to the Plant Kingdom; and (c) the misguided, anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals, leading to the erroneous conclusion that they are unworthy of human consideration” (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999, 2001). The term was rooted in both botany education research and literature on visual attention (e.g., Norretranders, 1998) and originally took the place of another term called zoochauvinism (Bozniak, 1994; Hershey, 1993). Zoochauvinism (also referred to as zoocentrism) is now mostly recognized as a distinct consequence or extension of “plant blindness” (Pany et al., 2019). Some examples of it include prejudice against plants and teaching botany among biology teachers (Hershey, 1993), lack of representation of plants in the media, and even neglecting plant content in biology textbooks (Hershey, 2002). For example, teachers and textbooks often use animal examples of universal biological concepts such as evolution, as many instructors prefer to use more familiar animal-based examples (Schussler, LinkPérez, Weber, & Dollo, 2010). It is worth noting, however, that “plant blindness” as a phenomenon differs across cultures. Most of the research cited here has been done in Euro-centric cultures (such as in Received: 14 July 2020 | Revised: 21 August 2020 | Accepted: 24 August 2020 DOI: 10.1002/ppp3.10153