Adults and Conflicting Messages About Plants
Last week we learned from Jim Folsom, the creator and host of @BotanyInContext, a fun and informative TikTok channel about the plants we encounter in daily life. If you've already listened to the conversation Jim and I had, I am sure you'll agree that Jim's enthusiasm for plants is infectious.
People have an interesting relationship with plants. Logically they know plants exist in the world. However, they don't truly see them or notice them. Some people are all-in when it comes to the botanical world, while others hardly notice plants are there.
In 1998, James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler coined a phrase to describe peoples' apparent indifference towards plants. They coined the phrase "plant blindness," and it has been used in botany and science education literature for years. That is, until now. Last year Dr. Kathryn Parsely, researcher and botany educator, proposed that plant awareness disparity replace plant blindness. Dr. Parsley and I discussed this change in a conversation with Dr. Elisabeth Schussler, one of the botanists who coined the phrase plant blindness almost 25 years ago.
I bring this up because an article written by professor Lynda Schneekloth in 1989 has particular relevance today as we address various environmental issues. In this article, Schneekloth points out how adults can influence what children think about plants.
In the paper, Where did you go? The forest. What did you see? Nothing., Schneekloth discusses how adults send conflicting messages about plants to children and how the dominant message they send is that vegetation can be categorized as "nothing" (Schneekloth 1989). Examples of conflicting messages adults send to children are "vegetables are good for you, eat them…..we need to build something here, bulldoze the trees" (Schneekloth 1989).
How did plants become invisible?
Schneekloth presents three factors contributing to plants' unfortunate status. One contributing factor is the abundance of plants in our world. They are so present in the background that people no longer notice them. Because they are so prominent in the environment, plants make what is different from them appear to be more important (Schneekloth 1989). What appears as "different" in front of a plant-filled background?
Animals.
The fact that people tend to notice animals more than plants is one of the hallmarks of plant awareness disparity.
Another contributing factor, according to Schneekloth, is how people experience plants in their real lives compared to what they know about them on a scientific level. She explains that regardless of how we've come to know plants scientifically, plants exist only to serve us (Schneekloth 1989). This reality contributes to the third issue making plants invisible, and this is the posture "it's all about us."
Because humans have come to know plants so well through research, Schneekloth says this has led us to feel superior, preventing us from seeing how much we are dependent upon plants. She explains that our ability to make plants grow and appear in ways that suit us has created a "false sense of security" (Schneekloth 1989) and has made us feel in control of our world.
So if plants exist only in the background and if humans have a mostly anthropomorphic view of the world, how do humans perceive plants?
Schneekloth investigated this question. She asked two groups of individuals, one group with environmental educators and the other with graduate students studying architecture -- to draw a picture of "an experience, place or activity" (Schneekloth 1989) key to their relationship with nature. You can read the details of this investigation in her paper. The big takeaway from this exercise was this — when participants drew their nature experience, they placed humans in a scene with vegetation; when they talked about their experience in nature, the actions taken by humans were the focus. Schneekloth observed that the act of drawing gave plants a presence, while language made plants invisible. She observed that plants are "something" (Schneekloth 1989) in a drawing because they are given form.
In her article, Schneekloth explores humans’ attitudes towards plants and how they might influence how children perceive plants. Here is the big question Schneekloth presents to us:
How can adults help children experience plants differently before they teach them that they are insignificant?
Literature Cited
Schneekloth, L. H. (1989). “Where did you go?” "The forest.’’ “What did you see?” “Nothing.” Children’s Environments Quarterly, 6(1), 14–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41515229
Social Media Photo by Slava Saveljeva on Unsplash
