Last year we took a look at plant blindness — a phrase used to describe the observation that people are largely unaware of the plants in their surroundings. Botanical illiteracy is more than a topic botanists discuss over dinner. It is a subject with broad-reaching consequences. Dr. Gordon E. Uno of the University of Oklahoma outlines the consequences and offers solutions to this problem in Botanical literacy: What and how should students learn about plants? published in the American Journal of Botany. One of the issues Uno identifies is the fact that the plant sciences are taught less often in school. This contributes to a chain of events involving reductions in research, reductions in funding, fewer students majoring in botany, and fewer students pursuing graduate studies in the plant sciences (Uno, 2009). This paints a very bleak picture for the future. What could the future possibly look like in light of all of this?
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