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What is the last animal you saw? Can you remember its color, size and shape? Could you easily distinguish it from other animals?
Now, what about the last plant that you saw?
If your mental images of animals are sharper than those of plants, you are not alone. Children recognize that animals are living creatures before they can say that plants are also alive. Recall tests also show that study participants retain better animal pictures than plant pictures. For example, an American study tested "flashing attention" – the ability to notice one of two quick-firing images – with the help of plant images, d & # 39; Animals and objects unrelated. This showed that participants detected more accurately animal images than plants.
This trend is so widespread that Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee, a couple of American botanists and biology educators, invented it in 1998: "Blindness of Plants". They described it as "the inability to see or notice plants in their own environment".
Unsurprisingly, plant blindness leads to underestimation of plants and limited interest in plant conservation. Vegetable biology courses around the world are closing at a dizzying speed and public funds devoted to plant science are exhausting. The extent of plant blindness and its evolution over time have not been studied, increasing urbanization and time spent with devices means that the "nature deficit disorder" ( the damage done to man by the alienation of nature) is increasing. And with less exposure to plants, greater plant blindness occurs. As Schussler explained, "humans can only recognize (visually) what they already know."
Plant conservation is important for environmental health. But ultimately, that also counts for human health
This is problematic. Plant conservation is important for environmental health. But that ultimately also counts for human health.
Plant research is essential to many scientific breakthroughs, from food crops that are more resistant to more effective drugs. More than 28,000 plant species are used in medicine, including plant-derived anti-cancer drugs and anticoagulants. (BBC Future recently mentioned a recent example: how mushrooms could help us fight cancer).
The experiment on plants also offers an ethical advantage over some forms of animal experimentation: versatile techniques in areas such as genome editing can be perfected with the help of plants, easy and inexpensive to reproduce and control. For example, sequencing the genome of Arabidopsis, a flowering plant important for biological research, marked a turning point, not only in plant genetics, but also in genome sequencing.
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Given how plants are – and have always been – essential to our survival, how has man become "blind to plants"?
Green light
There are cognitive and cultural reasons that make animals, even animal species not as objectively important to humans as plants, more easily distinguishable.
Part of that is the way we classify the world. "The brain is basically a difference detector," explain Schussler and Wandersee. Since plants barely move, move closer to each other and often have a similar color, our brain tends to group them together. With approximately 10 million bits of visual data per second transmitted by the human retina, the human visual system filters non-threatening elements, such as plants, and groups them together.
This is not limited to humans. A limited attention span can even affect the way blue jays visually fix plants and insects around them.
We then have a preference for biocompromised similarity: as primates, we tend to notice the creatures that resemble us the most. "From my experience with great apes, they are generally more interested in creatures that are more like them," said Fumihiro Kano, a monkey psychologist at the Kyoto Japanese University. As in humans, this visual preference has a social element. "Man-raised monkeys are more interested in human images than non-human images, including their own species," said Kano.
In human societies, the idea that animals are fundamentally more interesting and more visible than plants is constantly reinforced. We name animals and assign them human characteristics. We often use animals as mascots of sports teams. And we are sensitive to individual variations between animals: the personality of a dog, for example, or the unique color pattern of a butterfly.
People are more supportive of conservation efforts of species with human characteristics.
Seeing animals as similar – or more similar – encourages us to empathize. With conservation decisions, that's the key. Most of us feel inspired to want to protect, for example, polar bears, not because we list a rational list of reasons why we need them, but because they are important to us, says the environmental psychologist Kathryn Williams of the University of Melbourne. Even in the field of animal conservation, some charismatic animals (especially large mammals with their eyes turned forward) receive the lion's attention. Indeed, Williams' research has shown that people are more supportive of conservation efforts for species with similar characteristics to humans.
The challenge is magnified for plants. For example, in 2011, plants accounted for 57% of the federal list of endangered species in the United States. But they received less than 4% of federal funding for endangered species.
"Establishing these emotional connections with ecosystems and species and the plant as a whole is crucial for the conservation of the plant," Williams says.
Of course, science is not a zero-sum game where more interest and money in one set of organizations automatically leads to fewer resources elsewhere. But as for any kind of bias, recognizing it is the first step to reduce it.
Become less vegetal
One of the ways to reduce plant blindness is to increase the frequency and variety of ways we see plants. This should start early – as Schussler, a professor of biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, says, "before students start to think they're bored with plants." TreeVersity is a citizen science project that helps to classify plant images from Harvard's Arnold Arboretum.
According to Schussler, daily interactions with plants are the best strategy. She lists discussions about plant conservation in local parks and gardening.
Plants could also be more showcased in the art. Dawn Sanders of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, who has collaborated on environmental art projects at the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, found that images and stories are important for allowing students to connect to plants and start asking questions about their experiences, such as age. the plants get.
Sanders' work also indicates cultural variations. "Plant blindness does not apply to all people in the same way," she says. In comparison with the initial research on American students, she said: "We have found that our Swedish students connect to plants through memory, emotion and beauty, especially with respect to mid-summer and the first days of spring. " For example, vitsippa (wood anemone) is considered a spring herald.
In India, the human-plant link may be more relevant to religion and medicine. Geetanjali Sachdev is studying botany and education at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore. "Their value is certainly felt visceral," she says of plants. "We can not escape because plants are so intertwined in many aspects of Indian cultural life."
In fact, Sachdev documented the omnipresence of plant motifs around Indian cities: from lotus flowers painted on tanker trucks to botanical drawings of kolam (powder) on the ground.
These images extend beyond the flowers, which often dominate memorable encounters with plants in Western countries. "From a mythological point of view, trees, leaves and flowers would all be important, but from the medical point of view of Ayurveda (a form of traditional Indian medicine), many other parts of plants are valuable – leaves, roots, flowers and seeds, "she says. .
Plant blindness is therefore neither universal nor inevitable. "Although our human brains can be connected to plant blindness, we can overcome them with greater awareness," says Schussler.
Williams is also optimistic about increasing empathy for plants. "It's not at all improbable," she says. "It's a matter of imagination." Even imaginary plant characters appear. McPedro, the Scottish-Irish comic of the web comic Web Girls with Slingshots, and the superhero-tree of Marvel Groot, which sparked unusual discussions on biology, are two examples.
The global food supply faces more challenges than ever before, due to population growth, water scarcity, reduced farmland and climate change. Through biofuel research, factories are also important as a potential source of renewable energy. This means that it is essential to be able to detect, learn and innovate with our green friends. Our future depends on it.
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