Plant Blindness and “Seeing” Vegetal Timescales

This essay on the concept of “plant blindness” and how the arts can help us appreciate the timescales and the ways of being of plants is part of the Troubling Time series, which interrogates environmental ideas, spaces, processes, and problems through the lens of temporality. Series editors: Rebecca Laurent, Rudy Molinek, Samm Newton, Prerna Rana, and Weishun Lu.

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Plants often seem to be relegated to the sidelines in our lives, particularly in urban settings. Walking along the streets in Washington D.C., I pass trees (and sometimes an out-of-place prickly pear cactus) confined to small squares of soil, hemmed in by pavement and stone, their provision of shade and greenery is often taken for granted. But birds, dogs, the occasional cat—these catch people’s eyes. 

This tendency to ignore plants has been noticed for a while. In 1999, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler coined the term “plant blindness” to highlight and name a phenomenon they had observed in American education: biology students preferred to study animals over plants.

Although over two decades have passed, plant blindness continues today. Compared to endangered animal species such as pandas and polar bears, the loss of plant diversity is under-examined in mainstream media and other outlets. Conservation initiatives continue to be heavily biased in favor of animals—particularly towards those that are aesthetically appealing. In 2011, despite constituting a majority of the federal endangered species list (57 percent), plants received less than 3.86 percent of the federal endangered species expenditures. Although plant blindness may not be the only reason for this bias, it might be a significant one.

Since Wandersee and Schussler’s paper was published in 1999, empirical research has corroborated the phenomenon of plant blindness. Plants are often “not seen” because they are generally immobile, grow close together, and typically have a uniform color, thus blending together visually. Confirming this, research has shown that our inability to “see” plants may be related to a visibility bias—the visual homogeneity of plants with a lack of clearly defined edges means that the human eye and brain tends to view them as a homogeneous wall of green when viewed in a hurry. Research on visual memory has also shown that participants who were presented images in a rapid sequence were less able to recall having seen a plant than an animal. As an alternative explanation, evolutionary psychologists have also suggested that our bias towards animals may be related to their importance for human survival.

Given the pervasiveness of plant blindness, it is an uphill task to help us see, to notice, and to care for plants.

Understanding Timescales and Agency in Plant Lives

There are several indicators or “symptoms” through which individuals can assess their plant blindness, such as not showing interest in or paying attention to plants, or not noticing that plants are essential to their daily routine. One particular indicator may be especially useful in understanding why plants are often overlooked—namely, the misunderstanding of the timescales of plant and human activity, and their mismatched nature.

Some plants live much longer than humans, with timescales of activity that outstretch human perception. Walking through the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, many of the Saguaro cacti that I saw only had half of their famous silhouette: their first arm often takes up to fifty to seventy-five years to grow. Similarly, Giant Sequoias can live up to 3000 years, significantly outlasting the longest of human lives. Closer to home, at a glance, I’m unable to witness the movement of my morning glory vines. However, when I come out in the morning to take a look, they’ve often twined themselves around a new fence post overnight.

Due to our vastly different timescales and rhythms of living, the growth, movement, and activity of plants is often invisible to the human eye unless observed with a great deal of patience and documented over time. Often, people’s attention towards plants is only captured when their (over)growth becomes inescapable and starts to creep into our lives—when tree branches trip on power lines, or when the weeds in the yard start attracting pests and crowding out other plants.

This inability to easily witness plants’ movement gains significance when understood in the context of mind attribution. When trying to infer the minds of others, we often use our own selves as a reference point, making it more likely that we would attribute minds to entities that moved at speeds similar to our own.

At the receiving end of this negative bias are plants, given that they neither physically resemble humans nor move at human-like speeds. Plants appear to lack movement when observed briefly. Although their movements can be guided by a goal—such as seeking sunlight—their motions and growth are so imperceptible and slight that humans may not attribute mental states such as planning and intention to them. In other words, one potential reason that humans may tend to ignore plants (or deem plants as unworthy of our attention) is because they do not move at a speed or in a way that indicates the presence of a mind.

The inability to attribute minds to plants makes it difficult for humans to anthropomorphize, or attribute human characteristics to, them. Anthropomorphism is commonly brought up in discussions about conservation and protection strategies as a method to help foster and encourage appreciation of flora and fauna, with people’s tendency to anthropomorphize nature predicting moral care to nonhuman entities in nature and connectedness to nature. This difficulty in anthropomorphizing plants may then be detrimental to their preservation and protection.

Overcoming Plant Blindness through Art

Despite its slow pace, plant movement often twines its way into our attention through surprising mediums.

In his novel The Overstory, Richard Powers describes the growth of a chestnut tree over several generations of the Hoel family. Starting in 1903, each generation of the Hoel family continued a project of photographing the chestnut tree growing in their farm once every month from the same position. Progress remained invisible year-on-year to the photographers. However, in 1990, when the latest generation of Hoels flipped through the hundreds of photographs accumulated —essentially creating a flipbook—they were able to see the remarkable growth and spread of the tree toward the sky.

Time-lapse videos offer a similar, technology-facilitated window in the activities of plants by speeding up their movements until they match the rhythms of human consciousness. Upon watching a time lapse video of plant growth, many might think that a plant does seem to grow with intention, desiring sunlight, or a place to grasp onto.

Michael Pollan, writing on the idea of intelligent plants, described watching a time-lapse video of plant growth as being “shown a window onto a dimension of time in which these formerly inert beings come astonishingly to life, seemingly conscious individuals with intentions.” With mediums like time-lapse photography that bring the movements of plants to a more human-like and visible pace, it is more likely that human will attribute minds to plants and thereby notice them more intentionally.

Yet, by speeding up the movements of plants to match our own rhythms, technologies like time-lapse videos and flipbooks inevitably impose our timescales onto that of plants. Is there a way humans can meet plants where they stand—immobile, or in biology, “sessile?” Can we slow ourselves down, instead of speeding them up?

The performance arts present a pathway for humans to overcome our plant blindness by aligning ourselves with plant timescales. Akin to time-lapse videos, this medium also offers a venue to observe the growth and movements of plants. However, instead of attempting to fit the rhythms and timescales of plants into that of humans, through the performance arts we can relinquish our control and join their form of growth. In short, it is an attempt to listen to what plants tell us in their own modes of expression. 

Mathilde Roussel’s exhibition Lives of Grass is a particularly relevant example. Featuring life-sized human figures filled with soil and wheat grass seeds, the figures appeared even more human as the grass began to grow. Yet, with no outside interference, the grass gradually swallowed and enveloped the human shape. Watching Lives of Grass, I think of how plants can leave their own distinctive mark upon us, through their slow yet ever-changing movements. Such pieces, highlighting the intersections of differing timescales between humans and plants, can prompt us to pay attention to plant growth instead of overlooking or imposing our own meanings on them.

Similarly, Annette Arlander explores ways to create actions with plants and to collaborate with non-human entities through artistic experiments. Through her work Performing with Plants, Arlander prompts us to “realize that the surrounding world consists of creatures, life forms and material phenomena with differing degrees of volition, needs, and agency.” Her performances of Resting with Pines are examples of pieces that include and emulate plants.

Visual pieces can also draw attention to the life cycle and impermanence of plants. In what he calls a  “co-authorship with Nature” photographer and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy created ephemeral, site-specific works using stones, leaves, sticks, and ice. One work, Red Leaf Patch, composed of red leaves on a background of decaying brown autumn ones, drew attention to the constant state of change that nature is always in. All things might eventually be one day reclaimed by nature. Goldsworthy’s pieces emphasize this eventual reclamation and help raise awareness of the differing timescales in which plants exist while simultaneously acknowledging their impermanence and mortality.

Works like Roussel’s, Arlander’s, and Goldsworthy’s offer unique models of how humans can pay attention to plants on their own timescales, without imposing our rhythms onto them. Instead of overcoming plant blindness by speeding up their movements to match ours, perhaps we can start to learn about their movements and slow ourselves down to observe them.

Becoming One with Plant Rhythm

Returning to my garden, new morning glory vines still appear every morning without my noticing, their growth only apparent when something significant has changed from my perspective. But what would the “vegetalization”—the adoption of the characteristics of plants—of our timescales look like?

Although the arts offer one way to overcome plant blindness, the tendency to not anthropomorphize plants is not universal. Relationships with and conceptions of plants vary greatly between different cultures. In one study, the Indigenous Ngöbe adults from Panama inferred that plants engage in goal-directed action and were more likely to attribute intention to the actions of plants. This is unlike college students from the United States, who did not conceptualize plants as agents at all.

Worldviews that place plants low on the animacy hierarchy hinder attributions of minds to plants. Viewing ourselves and nature as part of an extended ecological family—as Indigenous peoples’ philosophies such as the Ngöbe often do—and considering plants as sovereign beings with agency and animacy may facilitate further attributions of mind and, in turn, the development of more caring relationships with plants.

The prevalence of plant blindness in our everyday lives can be undone by learning from artistic practices and other worldviews that conceptualize human-plant relationships differently. Artistic pieces centering plants help uncover similarities between plant lives and human lives beyond timescale differences, and can guide us in forging deeper mutual connections.

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Featured image: Person standing in front of tree at Sequoia National Park, United States. Photo by Vitto Sommella, 2018.

Katherine Cheung is an incoming PhD student in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University and is affiliated with the Hub at Oxford for Psychedelic Ethics (HOPE). Her work focuses on topics within psychedelic bioethics and philosophy, including the value of the acute subjective experience, the place of meaningfulness in medicine, and how psychedelics might impact conceptions of wellbeing. Website. Twitter. Contact.