Botanists are disappearing – just when the world needs them most

I feel like part of this is a lack of gardening. I used to love gardening and watching plants grow as a child in my grandmother&#x27;s garden. Carrots, beets, berries, onions, etc. All pretty easy, as long as you aren&#x27;t worried about having too many! Even though I don&#x27;t have a lot of knowledge about plants, I do certainly have more of an appreciation.<p>I was just looking at a house yesterday and spied a garden growing in the side yard and remarked I think those are onions! Of course the agent had no idea apparently what an onion plant looks like, which kind of surprised me. But then after a bit, it also didn&#x27;t surprise me!<p>Of course I have to mention the amazing and great youtube channel &quot;Crime pays but botany doesn&#x27;t&quot;, here&#x27;s a neat recent video:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ThU0SUcf6Ws" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ThU0SUcf6Ws</a>

I am a researcher &#x2F; explorer of Arecaceae species and pay the bills with cybersecurity work, this article definitely struck a chord. It is very difficult to get anyone to care about even the rare and beautiful species these days, let alone help the efforts in conservation.<p>I am working on a website that helps links people wanting to help learn and protect forests with the people with the background knowledge and those who are getting their fingers in the dirt, please reach out if you are interested in participating.

There is no shortage of botanists, they just have biology or other degrees.<p>I know perhaps a dozen people who can walk into an environment and name all the plants, their origins, and growth behavior.<p>I know companies that employ dozens and dozens of them. They just don&#x27;t have botany degrees.<p>The way academia and the job market is set up, it simply doesn&#x27;t make sense to get a highly specialized degree when most of the botanical knowledge can be picked up on the job and further enhanced once you settle into that career.

My mom got her degree in botany. Couldn&#x27;t find a job. Switched to software design.

Can anyone recommend online courses in botany?

If that title isn&#x27;t a cheeky reference to &quot;Avatar: The Last Airbender&quot;s opening sequence, I don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s real anymore.<p>Title : &quot;Botanists are <i>disappearing - just when the world needs them most</i>&quot;<p>Avatar (IIRC): &quot;[...] <i>but when the world needed him most, he vanished</i> [...]&quot;

Then raise the wages, and raise the budgets for that research.<p>Do people that write this drivel think college students read it? And even if they did, do they think the students will just turn their lives around into doing something else just because someone online is complaining about not enough people doing it?<p>I think these pieces miss a crucial point about skepticism. In a highly competitive capitalist landscape, if there’s not a lot of people entering then it’s safe to assume there’s a good enough reason. Without googling, I’d be willing to bet there’s fewer people becoming librarians lately, and fewer becoming actuaries, etc. These jobs are often passion-related and I think collectively the young people are realizing that following your passion leads to an increased risk of poverty and hardship.<p>The last time I heard someone talk about botany was when *I* was in college several decades ago. Back then, there wasn’t people around me talking about machine learning very much either but that’s probably half of what I hear recent graduates in my industry talking about.

Reminds me of the fact that American universities graduate literally double the number of petroleum engineers each year than ecologists

They should recruit on Mars. I hear they have some good Botanists there.

The paradox is this is at a time when the population has never been more numerous and the economy more prosperous. There should be more specialists in all kinds of areas, not fewer. Instead capitalism is reducing people&#x27;s horizons and impoverishing their choices of vocation and lifestyle, destroying the landbase while simultaneously driving the people that try to maintain the landbase and natural systems out of work, and in many cases into prison slave labor. It is a self-destructive cycle steering us into civilizational collapse.

Meanwhile my Caladiums are growing nicely

... in UK

But nowadays we have smartphone apps that you can point at a plant and it will give you its place in the phylogenetic tree.

&gt; Most people suffer from what is commonly known as “plant blindness”, a term coined by US botanists Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee. They described it as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment”. Unless taught, people don’t tend to see plants – despite the fact that at any given moment, there is likely to be a plant – or something made by plants – nearby.<p>But there are also proteins nearby -- isn&#x27;t it worrying how people don&#x27;t notice those too? With COVID and monkeypox raging around the world, isn&#x27;t &quot;protein blindness&quot; an even more dire issue? I think the author might be suffering from &quot;protein-blindness blindness,&quot; a term coined by US biochemists Elisabeth Simoneer and James Widdershins. In our recent study...