Plant Blindness

[Catherine]

You might be right about the faces. We are drawn to faces and can connect with them. Plants don't have faces so we are not drawn to them.  I liked snap dragons and pansies for the same reasons as you, but I never thought of feeding the snap dragons.

I grew up in the country and we planted a large garden and the property was surrounded by trees that my father planted. I grew up knowing that food came from the things I planted. I understood that the trees were planted to protect us from the weather. I think I had an instinctive understanding of plants and animals and their interconnection. I could tell plants apart because I knew which ones we could eat and which ones were dangerous. We went into the bush every summer and picked wild berries. Nature was essential to my life.

I meet people now who have no knowledge of how the world works. They have very little tolerance for the animals in their world. They don't even see the trees. There are people who hate trees because they have leaves that fall on the ground. If they do grow plants they grow things they can control. These people are definitely plant blind. They don't connect with living things.

I think the article might be on to something. I watch people step on young perennials just coming up and if I mention it they look around and still can't see what I am talking about.

It does explain some of our trouble getting people to take the environment seriously. They need to see the life around them and respect it. Until they do at best they will care about one fuzzy panda at a time and they will never care about the bamboo that they pandas eat. If you don't have the bamboo you don't have the pandas.

I wonder how we can help a person to see all the life around them and to understand their place in it.