Botanists are disappearing – just when the world needs them most
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
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't surprise me!
Of course I have to mention the amazing and great youtube channel "Crime pays but botany doesn't", here's a neat recent video:
Besides beeing a kind of nerdy pokemon go (how many organisms can you collect?) it's also crowd-sourced science.
My latest catch is this guy: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/62060-Palomena-prasina
There's peer pressure too: a neighbour is angry because leaves get stuck on our bushes and blow onto her gravel. People rave about being able to vacuum their garden. It's insane.
Terrace tax can't come soon enough.
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.
I would very much like to make a career switch to something that allows me to spend time in the nature, but I have no idea how that world works.
Nature is gradually turning into a luxury we cannot afford.
That makes no sense. We need nature more than ever.
Then there is the renewable energy production that needs land too. Rivers valleys turn into hydro dams. Grass fields into solar fields.
I know perhaps a dozen people who can walk into an environment and name all the plants, their origins, and growth behavior.
I know companies that employ dozens and dozens of them. They just don't have botany degrees.
The way academia and the job market is set up, it simply doesn'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.
It's like engineering. Lockheed Martin and Boeing don't hire "airplanasists", they hire engineers and scientists that do the things they need to to to build a plane. The airplane part they learn in the job, the building blocks are science. Yes, there are aerospace engineering programs so this analogy only goes so far.
Not on youtube, not on udemy or platforms like that.
So far I’m reading “botany for gardeners” and it’s a noce book, easy to read and to follow. Which is nice, because I wanted something akin to an introduction to botany for people who are not enrolled in an university.
When trying to learn any new discipline, I recommend this strategy. First, identify some competent world-class universities. Second, search for their related programs. Third, obtain a list of textbooks for those courses. Finally, obtain said textbooks (eg. LibGen). However, if you are feeling lazy just search the topic directly (but be sure to use the scientific title) and then order descending by year. Any textbook with three or more editions is probably well regarded. This method would recommend: ISE Stern's Introductory Plant Biology (15th edition), Botany: An Introduction to Plant Biology (6th edition), Botany for gardeners (3rd edition), Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification (6th edition), Laboratory Topics in Botany (8th edition).
Title : "Botanists are disappearing - just when the world needs them most"
Avatar (IIRC): "[...] but when the world needed him most, he vanished [...]"
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?
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.
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.
Back 25-30 years ago, the chasm in pay wasn't as wide, and that was because pre-Internet (or pre-widely utilized Internet I should say), software just wasn't as lucrative. Now, though, I think you're seeing lots of challenges hiring in many professions because tech has become so monstrously dominant. You can say "just pay these folks more", but the money has to come from somewhere, and when big tech can easily afford 300k plus salaries for a position where other industries can't afford half that, it's difficult to see how this will improve.
We need a fundamental reassessment of science funding and our economic priorities, sadly I imagine things will have to get a lot worse before that conversation happens, and frankly the people who got us into this mess have to leave office/die off, as a class they've proven unwilling/unable to adapt to uncomfortable realities.
Programs and market restructured, with more flow into industry. But retargetability of science PhDs to match market need remains a challenge. And today, science programs depend on tech absorbing lots of graduates. With acceptable career opportunity cost, both absolute and relative to other education paths. So what happens if/when tech no longer provides that opportunity? No longer mitigates oversupply back-pressure? Especially with teaching career paths collapsing.
The 1970's oversupply shakeup did some good. Perhaps another might too - perhaps science education might finally get the intensive focus needed to become less of a disaster. But...
> some careers have become exponentially more lucrative, with much less risk, than other careers, even though they require and use the same skill set.
Absent which, studying the sciences might become far less viable, rather than more. Tech is currently allowing society to avoid a great deal of "have a degree, can't find work" difficulty.
Librarians I grant you, though I think the market for librarians continues to be oversaturated with supply. Lots of people like the idea of a career adjacent to reading books.
In this situation the problem is more likely to be over specialization. If botany is a topic that you could somehow pick-up after university with little ease then it would be something more people would do. If there is a programming language that has too few people who know it, why not replace it with a code more easy to pick up by other programmers?
You can, but much like anything else most of the work in botany that pays well requires an accredited qualification in the form of a degree.
I think it’s the other way around. Ever since the late 1990’s IT boom, a lot of money-hungry people have flocked to IT.
Botany is a very different specialty than genetics.
Compared to what?
But there are also proteins nearby -- isn't it worrying how people don't notice those too? With COVID and monkeypox raging around the world, isn't "protein blindness" an even more dire issue? I think the author might be suffering from "protein-blindness blindness," a term coined by US biochemists Elisabeth Simoneer and James Widdershins. In our recent study...
I would bet ‘plant awareness’ tracks pretty well with rural vs urban demographics. That’s not to say rural population somehow magically have built-in knowledge as to the botanical science; they don’t and eduction need to improve across the board. Yet I sometimes feel that these articles are written by urbanites interviewing other urbanites and making sweeping generalizations about ‘our’ view of the world.