Back to the Future: Roots of Ecology, Environmental Studies and Plant Ethics in Seventeenth-Century Plant Studies

Throughout the history of Western philosophy and science, scholars have relegated plants to the background of life on Earth. Two influential Aristotelian assumptions primarily drive this view: (1) that plant life functions independently of other beings, and thus (2) that botany operates separately from the rest of the sciences. These assumptions have pushed botany to the periphery of modern scientific inquiry, slowing its development into a fully-fledged discipline relative to other natural scientific fields. This historical trend perhaps anticipates the current alarm scientists are raising about the future of botany as a discipline today.