Welcome to A World Unseen, the blog site for our class in Organismal Diversity (EEOB 3320). Here we will be posting essays written by students on topics that consider the richness of life in the context of current events, global concerns, and science as a process. The essays are intended for a general audience, and we welcome comments from readers.
The title of the blog site was inspired by the idea of “plant blindness” introduced by James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler (2001): the tendency of too many of us to ignore the plants around us: what they are, where they’re from, how they function in the environment, what “good” are they, etc. I think that we can extend that to all of life. There are so many wonders to be discovered, if only we had the eyes to see. To paraphrase the intro to the old TV show Naked City: “There are eight million stories in the world around us. These will be just some of them.”
— Norm Johnson
References
- Wandersee, J.H. and E.E. Schussler. 2001. Toward a theory of plant blindness. Plant Science Bulletin 47(1): 2-9.
