Olivia Vandergriff, a protagonist of Richard Powers’s , spends a semester living in a house in front of which grows a tree—“a living fossil, one of the oldest, strangest things that ever learned the secret of wood.” Yet Olivia doesn’t even know that the tree is there. Though she passes by it every day, she fails to notice its existence.
The tree—unnamed in the novel—is the gingko biloba. And Olivia’s condition—undiagnosed in the chapter—is plant awareness disparity. The ginkgo biloba, a sole survivor of an ancient group of trees that used to cover the earth, is now an endangered species.
Meanwhile, plant awareness disparity (PAD)—which was previously known as plant blindness but renamed to avoid ableism—contributes largely to the widespread indifference to the threat of botanical extinction and a limited interest in plant conservation. PAD on a global scale is dangerous, but on a personal level, it is detrimental as it impoverishes our experience of the surrounding world. So much beauty, so much drama, so much wisdom we miss out on if we fail to connect with plants.
* If by now I’ve got you looking out of the window to check if there’s been a tree there that you haven’t noticed, that’s a good thing. And you shouldn’t blame yourself (too much) if it turns out there’s been a forest growing in your back garden that you didn’t know about. Being able to see plants may not come to us naturally.
According to James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. S.