While not a new phenomenon, the term "plant blindness" is beginning to bubble up in conversations beyond the scientific community, which first heard it in 1998. It was coined by two botanists, Elisabeth E. Schussler, now at Ohio's Miami University, and the late James H. Wandersee, of Louisiana State University, who defined it as "the inability to see or notice the plants in one's own environment" and the "misguided, anthropocentric" tendency to rank plants as inferior to animals, rendering them the biological equivalent of wallpaper.