Mimbres Publishing - Jack L. Carter and Martha A. Carter

Over the past century there has been a steep decline in the knowledge the average citizen has of the green plant. This is at a time when botanical understanding is critical to addressing problems pertaining to climate change, preservation of ecosystems, conservation of threatened species, control of invasive species and increasing food production.

In 1900, 85% of the U. S. population lived in a rural setting and 80% of the total population relied on local agriculture for their food supply. Two-thirds of the U. S. population raised 50% of the food they consumed, or it was raised within a 50-mile radius of their home. Today less than 3% of the nation's population is involved in agriculture, and we import more than a third of our food from foreign countries.

Prior to World War II botany was a required course for graduation, along with zoology, in practically every high school in the country. In 1939 botany was required for graduation in the schools of California. Beyond the teaching of botany, one to three years of agriculture was offered in Kansas and Oklahoma schools. The year I graduated from the eighth grade, 1943, Kansas required students to complete a one-semester course in agriculture. The curriculum required that we identify and examine a number of local weeds, learn to recognize trees of eastern Kansas, study the parts of a seed, and learn planting dates for garden species.

Today fewer than 2% of college graduates complete a course in the plant sciences. In fact, in a recent national survey of universities, the faculty reported that 20% of the universities had eliminated the basic botany course in the past 5-10 years. In the same study, including 1,500 respondents of which 400 were university faculty, a reduction of botanical degrees was reported. In 1988, 72% of the nation's top 50 most-funded universities offered advanced degree programs in botany. Today, more than half of these universities have eliminated their botany programs, and many, if not all, related courses. Statistics from the U. S. Department of Education reveal that undergraduate degrees earned in botany are down 50% and advanced degrees earned in botany are down 41%.

In another part of the study that examined the preparation for the employment of students for federal, private and non-profit agencies, neither students nor faculty were aware of the coursework requirements for employment as a federal botanist — 24 credit hours in botany. The study revealed that due to reductions in plant science course offerings, it is likely that many students considering careers as federal botanists will graduate without meeting coursework requirements. In all sectors of the study, the four most serious shortcomings of students, in rank order, included poor communication skills, poor plant identification skills, limited basic botany and ecology knowledge, and limited field experience.

In 2010 Steve Popovich, Forest Botanist and Rare Plant and Noxious Weeds Program Manager, Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland, was in Silver City, NM, to present a paper in a regional seminar. During and following his lecture questions came up concerning his duties as a Forest Service Botanist. Following the meeting Steve was kind enough to prepare a list of his professional activities and assignments and to send me a copy that I am summarizing in this paper. Not only did Steve's job description become an excellent list of activities that could be distributed to undergraduate biology students seeking careers in botany, it provided a powerful outline of the knowledge, skills and values of the plant sciences necessary for a person assigned the task of managing and protecting the nation's public lands. The following job description is limited to key assignments, but they spell out why this nation needs increased numbers of well-trained botanists in the fields of plant taxonomy and plant ecology.

His assignments include:

Performing threatened, endangered, and rare plant species surveys, and assessing the potential impacts of proposed project activities on plant resources;

Writing botany portions of NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) documents, including specialist reports disclosing full impacts on all plant resources;

Conducting pro-active botanical surveys to help figure out what is rare and not rare on the Forest, and then designing conservation criteria and monitoring plans to ensure the long-term protection of species of viability concern;

Providing public education for botany resources and developing and implementing native plant materials programs;

Be knowledgeable of non-vascular plants including cryptograms, lichens and fungi as they are included in management strategies for populations of threatened, endangered, and rare species;

Serving as noxious weed and invasive plant species specialist for the agency, collaborating with other state and federal agencies in combating noxious weeds and continuously working with the public to share information;

Maintaining a working herbarium to officially voucher plants for the agency and make these collections available to the public;

Acting as a liaison between the agency and organizations such as the Colorado Native Plant Society and the Natural Heritage Program.

This partial list of activities describes the very best reasons why this nation needs literally hundreds of people with the training of Steve Popovich who are prepared to work diligently to conserve and wisely manage our public and private lands. How could our colleges and universities remove the education and training for this career from their curriculum, and at the same time attempt to justify their role in conservation? At the same time, as the need for people with this training has expanded, the numbers graduating has been discontinued.

In the move to study molecular biology we have replaced and neglected the study of the entire plant. Plant studies in systematics, geography, pollination, ecology and the study of the distribution and role of fungi, lichens, algae, bryophytes, ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms have been dropped from the curriculum in most colleges and universities. It would be interesting to know how many graduate students at the Masters or Ph.D. level are being trained in these fields.

The nation's herbaria, our best hope for maintaining historical records of plant distribution and movements over the planet, are being closed and the scientists are being terminated or told to move into molecular biology, where funding from NSF and NIH is much better. This is at a time when ecologists, soil scientists, climatologists, entomologists, mammalogists and other specialists are utilizing herbaria as they attempt to locate information concerning the history of the distribution of plant species, their earlier ranges, and possible shifts in ranges, flowering dates, and ecological variations resulting from the impact of changes in our environment. University administrators are so tied to federal dollars that they have forgotten that protecting the flora and fauna of Colorado is a university responsibility and requires sound organismic science. The tail is waging the dog in the plant sciences, while our system of higher education is dropping out of the study of plant conservation and long-term studies of the environment. Perhaps "dollar wise and pound foolish" best describes the leadership in colleges and universities today.

This idea of discarding large areas of knowledge and skills is not new in the history of American universities. In 1960, the year I completed my Ph.D., the University of Iowa was on the path to eliminating a small, but distinguished botany department, and by 1980 that destruction was complete. This was in favor of developing a much larger department of biology centered on the cell and molecular biology. With the expansion of DNA research, not only were studies in higher plants and cryptogams dropped, but studies in ornithology, mammalogy and invertebrate zoology went by the wayside, especially where field studies were concerned. This is not difficult to understand as retirements take place and new faculty are added to new subsets of biology. Each voting member of a faculty simply votes to expand his or her clone of the science. At the same time, if that is where the huge government dollars reside, the university administration is thrilled to death. And so it goes. For a more complete discussion of this historical transition please read David Ehrenfeld's Beginning Again: People & Nature in the New Millennium (1993).

It is impossible to locate funds and time for education and research in the plant sciences in the curriculum of most universities. These types of inadequacies have developed and continue to increase at a time when forests and prairies are being scraped and the earth is rapidly being covered by asphalt and cement. How can we ever become a nation committed to conservation, while the flora that provides the oxygen we breathe continues to be destroyed, and where the ever-increasing human population can not identify even a small part of the flora that surrounds them in their daily lives? Doesn't science education have a key role to play in addressing these issues?

References and Suggested Readings

In an attempt to address the question, "How prepared is the U.S. to meet future botanical challenges?" the Chicago Botanical Garden and Botanic Gardens Conservation International's U.S. office, in collaboration with the Botanical Society of America produced a 93 page report titled: Assessing Botanical Capacity to Address Grand Challenges in the United States. Based on 1,500 respondents, including faculty and graduate students, to this extensive survey, the study identifies serious gaps and makes recommendations in higher education and research that demands our attention. This report was the source of much of the information included in this paper.