The problem of plant blindness

21 August 2019

How should we weigh up the preservation of an Indigenous community’s cultural heritage against a slight inconvenience to passing commuters? And how should we assess the value of of unique flora relative to the amenity of an infrastructure upgrade? Does it make sense to attempt such comparative assessments – and are we morally obliged to do so?

Right now, authorities are on the cusp of evicting the Djab Warrung Heritage Protection Embassy in western Victoria. Significant old growth red gums at the site are slated for destruction as part of the planned Western Highway expansion, which would save drivers two or three minutes of driving time – a poor trade-off for the loss of extraordinary heritage landscape.

For the past 14 months, traditional owners and their supporters have been camping out at the Embassy to protect trees that are sacred to the Djab Warrung people and part of a culturally significant ‘songline’ or ‘dreaming track’. The planned tree removal includes hundreds of large old growth trees, including ancient sacred birthing trees which have been significant to the community for over 50 generations. More than 10,000 Djab Warrung babies have been born in the tree hollows, where women retreat in the final stages of labour.

These trees are irreplaceable, not only for the traditional owners of the land, but for the wider community, as they provide habitat for threatened species. It’s shockingly cavalier and insensitive of the Victorian government to destroy a landscape of such profound significance. What could explain this appetite for destruction?

I wonder whether one strand of the explanation could be ‘plant blindness’, a kind of cognitive bias that many of us suffer. We tend to ignore the plants in our own environment – we simply don’t notice them, and we under-rate their importance to human affairs and to the whole biosphere. And this is bad news for the preservation of flora, because – and this will probably come as no surprise – people are less supportive of conservation efforts for species that lack human-like characteristics.

“Seeing animals as similar – or more similar – to us encourages our empathy. With conservation decisions, that’s key. Most of us feel prompted to want to protect, say, polar bears not because we run through a rational list of reasons why we need them, but because they tug on our heart-strings”, writes Christine Ro for the BBC, citing the work of environmental psychologist Kathryn Williams. Even in the sphere of animal conservation, most attention is paid to large mammals with forward-facing eyes, animals we can most readily relate to emotionally. “Building those emotional connections with ecosystems and species and the plant as a whole is crucial for plant conservation,” says Williams.

It turns out that with greater awareness, we can actually overcome plant blindness. Indeed, in certain cultures – particularly Indigenous ones – plants are entwined in so many aspects of cultural life that their value is experienced viscerally.

Perhaps Indigenous people, by virtue of their cultural heritage, are immune to plant blindness. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researcher Jakelin Troy sheds light on human relationships with trees, drawing inspiration from Indigenous philosophies:

“First Peoples worldwide have fundamentally and always understood trees to be community members for us – they are not entities that exist in some biological separateness, given a Linnaean taxonomy and classed with other non-sentient beings. Trees are part of our mob, part of our human world and active members of our communities, with lives, loves and feelings.

In Indigenous philosophies, all elements of the natural world are animated. Every rock, mountain, river, plant and animal all are sentient, having individual personalities and a life force. Trees are also one-stop-shops for all our needs, and sustain us with their generosity. The hard bark creates our houses, soft paperbark wraps our babies, stringy bark twists into fishing lines and cords, water carriers are carved from knots, leaves and fruits are our food and medicine, and roots and branches become tools that make our lives easy…

When we destroy trees, we destroy ourselves. We cannot survive in a treeless world.”

#NoTreesNoTreaty

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