The Golden Ages of Botanical Discovery: A Complex Legacy of Science, Empire, and Ethics

The history of botanical science is marked by extraordinary periods of discovery that fundamentally transformed human understanding of the plant kingdom. Yet these “golden ages” are inseparable from the colonial enterprises, exploitation, and ethical transgressions that enabled them. This is a story of scientific triumph shadowed by profound moral complexity—one that reveals how the pursuit of knowledge has been entangled with power, profit, and the dispossession of peoples and their ancestral wisdom.

The Age of Exploration (15th-17th Centuries): First Encounters and Colonial Botany

The European “Age of Discovery” initiated the first great wave of botanical exploration that would irrevocably alter global agriculture, medicine, and ecology. Spanish conquistadors, Portuguese navigators, Dutch traders, and British explorers returned with plants that would transform civilizations—tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, maize, cacao, quinine, and countless others that had been unknown to Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Scientific Achievements:

The introduction of New World crops fundamentally reshaped global food systems. The potato would become a staple that sustained population growth across Europe and Asia. Maize transformed African agriculture. Tomatoes became central to Mediterranean cuisine despite being unknown there before Columbus. These exchanges represented genuine scientific and agricultural revolutions, expanding human knowledge of plant diversity exponentially.

Early botanists like Garcia de Orta, who published Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India (1563), and Nicolás Monardes, whose Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (1574) documented medicinal plants from Asia and the Americas, began the systematic study of tropical botany. Botanical gardens emerged as centers of study and acclimatization, with institutions like the Orto Botanico di Padova (1545) and the Hortus Botanicus Leiden (1590) becoming repositories of exotic specimens and centers of learning.

The period also saw the development of increasingly sophisticated techniques for preserving and transporting plant specimens and seeds across vast oceanic distances. Herbarium specimens—dried, pressed plants mounted on paper—became standardized tools for documentation and study. These methods laid the groundwork for all subsequent botanical exploration.

Ethical Complications:

However, this era of botanical discovery was fundamentally enabled by colonial conquest, enslavement, and genocide on a scale almost unimaginable today. The plants Europeans “discovered” had been cultivated, improved, and understood by indigenous peoples for millennia. The potato that saved Europe from famine had been developed over thousands of years by Andean farmers who bred hundreds of varieties adapted to different elevations and climates. Maize had been transformed from a wild grass into a productive crop through indigenous Mexican ingenuity stretching back at least 9,000 years.

Yet these botanical achievements were rarely credited to their true originators. Indigenous knowledge was extracted—often through coercion, enslavement, or violence—and repackaged as European “discovery.” The very vocabulary of exploration erases indigenous presence: Columbus “discovered” lands that had been inhabited for over 15,000 years. European botanists “found” plants that had been named, classified, and utilized within sophisticated indigenous knowledge systems that Europeans rarely bothered to understand or record faithfully.

The Columbian Exchange, while botanically and economically revolutionary, facilitated the destruction of entire civilizations and ecosystems. Diseases introduced from Europe devastated indigenous populations, with some estimates suggesting 90% mortality rates in parts of the Americas. This demographic catastrophe enabled European appropriation of land and resources. Plants became not merely objects of study but tools of empire and exploitation.

Sugar and cotton plantations, established with stolen New World crops, became engines of the Atlantic slave trade. Millions of Africans were enslaved to cultivate these botanically “discovered” species. Tobacco, another indigenous American crop, fueled colonial economies while creating new forms of addiction and agricultural dependency. In Asia, the opium poppy—traded by European colonial powers—became an instrument of imperial control and profit, most notoriously during the Opium Wars that forced China to accept British drug trafficking.

The environmental consequences were equally profound. European colonizers transformed diverse ecosystems into monoculture plantations. Forests that had been carefully managed by indigenous peoples for centuries were cleared for cash crops. The ecological knowledge embedded in indigenous agricultural practices—companion planting, crop rotation adapted to local conditions, preservation of wild relatives—was dismissed as primitive and replaced with extractive European methods.

The Enlightenment and Linnaeus (18th Century): Systematizing Nature, Encoding Empire

The Enlightenment brought botanical science into a new phase of systematic organization and professionalization. Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) and Species Plantarum (1753) introduced binomial nomenclature—the two-name system of genus and species still used universally today. This period saw botany emerge as a rigorous scientific discipline with standardized methods, international communication, and institutional support.

Scientific Achievements:

Linnaeus created a framework that allowed botanists worldwide to communicate precisely about plants. Before Linnaeus, the same plant might be known by different lengthy Latin descriptions in different regions, making scientific exchange cumbersome and error-prone. The binomial system was elegant, practical, and revolutionary. A rose became Rosa canina rather than “Rosa sylvestris vulgaris, flore odorato incarnato” (“common wild rose with fragrant pale-pink flowers”).

This standardization enabled the explosive growth of botanical knowledge. The great expeditions of the 18th century collected tens of thousands of specimens that could now be organized, compared, and studied systematically. Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage (1768-1771), returned with over 30,000 plant specimens representing approximately 3,600 species, about 1,400 previously unknown to Western science. These collections formed the foundation of systematic botany as a global enterprise.

Major botanical institutions were established or expanded during this period. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, under the directorship of Joseph Banks from 1778, became the world’s premier botanical research center. Similar institutions emerged across Europe—the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and numerous university botanical gardens. These institutions not only housed collections but trained the next generation of botanists and plant hunters.

The Enlightenment also saw theoretical advances that contextualized botanical knowledge within broader frameworks. Early ideas about plant geography emerged as botanists noticed patterns in how plants were distributed across climates and regions. The foundations were laid for understanding plant physiology, reproduction, and ecology.

Ethical Complications:

Yet Linnaean taxonomy, for all its scientific utility, embedded European cultural assumptions and power dynamics into the very structure of biological classification. The system erased or subordinated indigenous nomenclature systems that often contained sophisticated ecological and utilitarian information. When a plant received its “official” Linnaean name, indigenous names—sometimes dozens of them, representing different languages and different aspects of the plant’s uses and properties—were relegated to footnotes or ignored entirely.

The binomial system also often commemorated European botanists and patrons while the indigenous peoples who had cultivated and understood these plants remained anonymous. Consider Cinchona (the source of quinine), named for a probably apocryphal Spanish countess, while the indigenous Quechua peoples who had used the bark medicinally for generations went unacknowledged. This pattern repeated thousands of times, encoding colonial hierarchies into scientific nomenclature that persists today.

Joseph Banks and the great naval expeditions of the Enlightenment exemplify the inextricable entanglement of botanical science with imperial expansion. Cook’s voyages combined scientific inquiry with strategic mapping, territorial claiming, and assessment of commercial resources. Banks was not merely a scientist but an imperial strategist who advised the British government on colonial policy, seeing botanical knowledge as essential to imperial administration and economic exploitation.

The collections from Australia and the Pacific came at catastrophic cost to indigenous peoples. First contact with Europeans brought disease, violence, and the beginning of dispossession that would devastate Aboriginal Australian and Pacific Islander populations. The botanical “discoveries” were enabled by the same expeditions that initiated colonization. Banks himself later advocated for establishing penal colonies in Australia and moving economically valuable plants between British colonies to maximize imperial profit.

The plant hunters and collectors of this era were advance scouts for empire. Their maps, descriptions, and specimens informed decisions about which territories to colonize, which resources to exploit, and how to restructure indigenous economies to serve European interests. Botanical gardens became institutions of imperial power, places where colonial officials learned which crops might thrive in which colonies, where plants were acclimatized before being transferred between colonial possessions, and where the economic potential of empire was literally cultivated.

The sexual metaphors Linnaeus used in his classification system—categorizing plants by their reproductive organs using terms like “marriage beds” and describing botanical relationships in anthropomorphic, often erotic terms—also reflected 18th-century European cultural attitudes toward gender and sexuality. While botanically accurate in describing plant reproduction, this framing made botany simultaneously more accessible to popular audiences and more culturally laden with European assumptions.

The Victorian Era of Plant Hunting (19th Century): High Imperialism and Botanical Plunder

The 19th century witnessed botanical exploration on an unprecedented scale, driven by imperial competition, commercial ambition, and genuine scientific curiosity. European powers sent collectors to every corner of the globe, seeking ornamental plants, crop species, commercial resources, and scientific prestige. This was the era of the professional “plant hunter”—adventurers who risked (and often lost) their lives in remote regions, sending back specimens that filled European gardens, herbaria, and ultimately transformed global horticulture and agriculture.

Scientific Achievements:

The Victorian plant hunters documented tens of thousands of new species, fundamentally expanding botanical knowledge. Collectors like Robert Fortune (who introduced over 250 species from China and Japan), Joseph Dalton Hooker (who explored India, the Himalayas, and Antarctica), and the Wilson brothers (who collected throughout Asia) sent back plants that revolutionized ornamental horticulture.

Rhododendrons from the Himalayas transformed British gardens, creating the distinctive landscape style still associated with English country estates. Orchids from tropical regions became the most coveted and expensive ornamental plants, spurring technological innovations in greenhouse design and cultivation techniques. The introduction of Asian and South American species created entirely new horticultural industries and transformed European aesthetic preferences in landscape design.

This era also saw major theoretical advances. The development of plant geography as a distinct discipline, pioneered by Alexander von Humboldt and advanced by figures like Joseph Dalton Hooker, revealed patterns in how plants were distributed globally and related to climate, geology, and evolutionary history. These insights were crucial to Charles Darwin’s development of evolutionary theory. Darwin himself was a keen botanist whose observations of plant adaptations, pollination mechanisms, and biogeographical patterns informed On the Origin of Species (1859).

The 19th century also witnessed improvements in techniques for transporting living plants. The Wardian case, invented by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in 1829, was a sealed glass container that created a self-sustaining mini-ecosystem, allowing plants to survive lengthy sea voyages. This invention dramatically increased the success rate of plant transfers and intensified the global movement of botanical specimens.

Botanical illustration reached new heights of accuracy and artistry, with figures like the Hooker family, Ferdinand Bauer, and Marianne North creating stunning visual records that were both scientifically valuable and aesthetically extraordinary. These illustrations made exotic plants accessible to audiences who would never see them in person and contributed to popular enthusiasm for botany.

The professionalization of botany advanced significantly. University positions in botany multiplied, botanical societies formed in cities across Europe and North America, and botanical journals enabled rapid international exchange of discoveries. Women, though often excluded from formal positions, made significant contributions as illustrators, collectors, and writers, though their work was frequently credited to male relatives or colleagues.

Ethical Complications:

This was botanical imperialism at its apex, and the ethical compromises were profound and deliberate. The most infamous example is the theft of rubber tree seeds from Brazil by Henry Wickham in 1876. Rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) was native to the Amazon basin, and Brazil had a natural monopoly on rubber production during a period when rubber was becoming essential for industrialization. Wickham collected approximately 70,000 seeds and smuggled them to England, claiming they were “botanical specimens” to avoid Brazilian export restrictions.

At Kew Gardens, about 2,800 seedlings were successfully germinated. These were sent to British Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and eventually to British Malaya, where they became the foundation of vast plantation systems. Within decades, British colonial rubber plantations had broken Brazil’s monopoly, devastating the Brazilian economy and enriching the British Empire. The rubber plantations relied on brutal forced labor systems. In Malaya, Tamil workers were brought from India under indenture systems that amounted to near-slavery. In the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s rubber extraction caused millions of deaths through violence, starvation, and disease—perhaps the most horrific consequence of the Victorian appetite for economically valuable plants.

Similar stories of botanical theft played out globally. Robert Fortune’s expeditions to China between 1843 and 1860 were explicitly commissioned by the British East India Company to steal tea plants and processing secrets, breaking China’s tea monopoly. Traveling in disguise, Fortune collected tea plants, hired Chinese tea workers (often through deception), and established them in British India. This act of industrial espionage transformed the global tea trade, enriching Britain while undermining Chinese economic power. The tea plantations established in Assam and Ceylon became foundations of imperial wealth, operated through exploitative labor systems that persisted well into the 20th century.

The cinchona tree, source of quinine essential for treating malaria, was smuggled from South America to European colonies in Asia and Africa. While quinine undoubtedly saved European lives and enabled tropical medicine, its theft represented another instance of appropriating indigenous knowledge and resources for imperial benefit. Indigenous South American peoples had used cinchona bark medicinally for generations, knowledge that was extracted and commercialized without compensation.

Plant hunters operated explicitly as agents of empire. Their expeditions were funded by colonial governments, commercial interests, or botanical institutions serving imperial objectives. Their instructions often included gathering intelligence about local resources, populations, and potential for colonization alongside their botanical work. The maps they drew, the reports they filed, and the relationships they established with local populations all served imperial expansion.

Yet these plant hunters themselves often died young of disease, accident, or violence. The death toll among European collectors was extraordinarily high—tropical diseases, dangerous travel conditions, and sometimes hostile receptions from peoples understandably resentful of foreign intrusion claimed many lives. David Douglas (for whom the Douglas fir is named) died at age 35, gored by a bull in a pit trap in Hawaii. Frank Kingdon-Ward survived numerous near-death experiences during decades of collecting in Asia. The collectors often displayed remarkable courage and endurance.

However, the local guides, porters, translators, and informants who made these expeditions possible rarely received credit and faced even greater dangers. These indigenous experts provided the knowledge that enabled European collectors to find valuable plants, navigate unfamiliar terrain, and survive in challenging environments. Yet they remain largely anonymous in historical records. The “discoveries” attributed to European plant hunters were almost always enabled by local knowledge freely given or coerced from indigenous peoples.

The Victorian obsession with exotic plants also drove unsustainable collection that threatened wild populations. Orchid hunters devastated populations of rare species, sometimes destroying entire forest sections to collect particularly prized specimens while eliminating competitors’ access to the same resources. The commercial orchid trade created artificial scarcity and drove some species toward extinction. Similar dynamics affected other coveted ornamentals, including certain palms, ferns, and flowering plants.

The period also saw the beginning of biological invasions that would have lasting ecological consequences. Plants introduced for ornamental or agricultural purposes sometimes escaped cultivation and became invasive species, displacing native plants and disrupting ecosystems. Victorian botanical enthusiasts rarely considered ecological consequences, viewing nature as something to be conquered and rearranged according to human desires.

The aesthetic preferences that drove Victorian plant hunting also reflected cultural imperialism. European gardens were designed to display mastery over nature, arranging plants from across the globe in compositions that demonstrated wealth, knowledge, and power. Indigenous gardens and landscapes—often more ecologically integrated and sustainable—were dismissed as inferior. The Victorian garden was a celebration of empire, a living demonstration of Britain’s global reach and ability to extract resources from distant lands.

The Early 20th Century: Vavilov and the Origins of Agricultural Biodiversity

The early 20th century saw a shift in botanical exploration priorities, with new attention to understanding crop origins and preserving agricultural biodiversity. Nikolai Vavilov’s work identifying centers of crop diversity during the 1920s and 1930s represented a new kind of botanical mission—one focused on preservation and understanding rather than mere extraction, though still not without its own ethical complexities.

Scientific Achievements:

Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist and geneticist, led expeditions to 64 countries across five continents, collecting seeds and documenting crop varieties. His theory of centers of origin proposed that the regions with the greatest diversity of crop varieties were likely the locations where those crops were originally domesticated. He identified eight primary centers: Central America, South America, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Ethiopia, Central Asia, India, and China.

Vavilov’s collection eventually comprised over 250,000 seed samples, representing the world’s most comprehensive collection of crop genetic diversity. This work laid the foundation for modern plant breeding and crop improvement. Understanding where crops originated and what wild and cultivated relatives existed allowed breeders to identify traits—disease resistance, drought tolerance, yield potential—that could be bred into modern varieties.

Vavilov’s theoretical work also advanced the understanding of plant evolution and domestication. He demonstrated that crop plants had specific geographical origins and that preserving their wild relatives and traditional varieties was essential for future agricultural improvement. This recognition of the value of genetic diversity was decades ahead of its time.

The establishment of seed banks and germplasm collections became a priority during this period. Institutions around the world began systematically collecting and preserving crop varieties, recognizing that traditional agricultural systems were disappearing and that genetic diversity was being lost. These collections would prove invaluable for crop breeding throughout the 20th century.

The period also saw advances in genetics that illuminated how plant characteristics were inherited and how selective breeding could be optimized. The rediscovery of Mendel’s work on heredity, combined with advancing cytology and biochemistry, began to reveal the mechanisms underlying plant traits, enabling more scientific approaches to crop improvement.

Ethical Complications:

Vavilov himself became a victim of political ideology. Joseph Stalin’s embrace of Trofim Lysenko’s pseudoscientific theories—which rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of Lamarckian ideas about acquired characteristics—led to Vavilov’s arrest in 1940. He was imprisoned, tortured, and died of starvation in 1943 in a Soviet gulag. His crime was defending scientific truth against political ideology. The seed collection he built was heroically preserved by his colleagues during the Siege of Leningrad, with several staff members dying of starvation rather than consuming the seeds they protected.

Vavilov’s legacy, however, raises profound questions about ownership of genetic resources and benefit-sharing. Western institutions collected seeds from developing nations—often the centers of crop diversity Vavilov had identified—improved them through breeding, and sometimes patented the results. Farmers in the countries where these crops originated found themselves buying seeds of plants that their ancestors had developed, now “improved” and legally owned by foreign corporations or institutions.

This pattern intensified throughout the 20th century. Gene banks in wealthy nations housed collections gathered from across the developing world. While access to these collections was theoretically available for research, the capacity to utilize them for breeding programs was concentrated in wealthy nations and corporations. Countries that had been the sources of genetic diversity—representing millennia of indigenous agricultural innovation—rarely benefited proportionally from the economic value created.

The green revolution, which followed Vavilov’s work by several decades, exemplified both the benefits and costs of this system. While it prevented famines, it also created new dependencies and inequalities rooted in unequal access to genetic resources and the technologies to utilize them.

The Modern Era: Green Revolution to Present (1960s-2020s): Productivity, Patents, and Persistent Problems

Contemporary botanical science has achieved remarkable advances in genetics, conservation, molecular biology, and agricultural productivity. The past six decades have seen the sequencing of plant genomes, development of genetic modification techniques, revolutionary insights into plant evolution and physiology, and coordinated global efforts to document and preserve plant diversity. Yet this era continues to grapple with ethical challenges, some inherited from previous generations and others newly emerged from novel technologies.

Scientific Achievements:

The Green Revolution, beginning in the 1960s, developed high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice that dramatically increased food production. Norman Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat varieties, which devoted more energy to grain production and were more responsive to fertilizers, are credited with saving hundreds of millions from starvation. Similar improvements in rice, developed at the International Rice Research Institute, transformed food security across Asia. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, recognition that agricultural science could be humanitarian work.

Molecular genetics revolutionized botanical science. The first plant genome (Arabidopsis thaliana, a small mustard plant) was fully sequenced in 2000, followed by economically important crops like rice, maize, wheat, and soybean. These genomic resources revealed how plants evolved, how traits are controlled genetically, and enabled precision breeding that would have been impossible previously. CRISPR gene editing, developed in the 2010s, allowed targeted modifications to plant genomes with unprecedented accuracy.

Conservation biology emerged as a discipline focused on preserving plant diversity in the face of habitat loss, climate change, and other threats. Major initiatives like the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway created backup repositories of crop and wild plant seeds. Botanical gardens shifted focus from display to conservation, maintaining living collections of endangered species and conducting research on propagation and reintroduction.

Ethnobotany developed as a field documenting and studying how human cultures utilize plants. Researchers worked with indigenous communities to record traditional botanical knowledge, recognizing both its cultural importance and potential applications in medicine and agriculture. This work has documented thousands of plant uses previously unknown to Western science.

Chemical analysis techniques revealed the compounds plants produce and their potential applications. Thousands of pharmaceuticals have plant origins or are modeled on plant compounds—aspirin from willow bark, digoxin from foxglove, taxol from Pacific yew for cancer treatment, and countless others. Plant-derived drugs remain essential to modern medicine.

Climate change research increasingly focuses on how plants respond to changing conditions and how agriculture must adapt. Scientists are identifying heat-tolerant and drought-resistant crop varieties, studying how forests might migrate with changing climate zones, and developing strategies for preserving plant diversity as habitats shift.

Ethical Complications:

Biopiracy and Intellectual Property: The pharmaceutical and agricultural industries have repeatedly patented products derived from traditional plant knowledge without compensating source communities. The neem tree case exemplifies this problem: neem (Azadirachta indica) has been used in India for pest control, medicine, and cosmetics for thousands of years. In the 1990s, several multinational corporations received patents on neem-based products, essentially claiming ownership of applications that were traditional knowledge. After prolonged legal battles, many of these patents were eventually revoked, but the case demonstrated how intellectual property law can enable appropriation of indigenous innovation.

Similar cases involved turmeric (patented by the University of Mississippi for wound healing—a use documented in Indian traditional medicine for millennia, patent later revoked), ayahuasca (a sacred Amazonian plant mixture patented by a U.S. citizen in 1986, patent eventually abandoned), and hoodia (a South African succulent used by San peoples as an appetite suppressant, licensed to pharmaceutical companies without San consent, eventually resulting in a benefit-sharing agreement after activism).

These cases revealed fundamental tensions: Who owns knowledge about plants? How should traditional knowledge be protected? What constitutes invention versus discovery when traditional uses are formalized through Western science? The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and subsequent Nagoya Protocol attempted to address these issues by establishing requirements for prior informed consent and benefit-sharing when accessing genetic resources. However, enforcement remains problematic, and many feel the frameworks are inadequate.

Green Revolution Consequences: While Norman Borlaug’s high-yielding varieties prevented famines, the Green Revolution had significant negative consequences that became apparent over time. The new varieties required substantial inputs—synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and reliable irrigation—that advantaged wealthy farmers who could afford them while marginalizing poor farmers. This contributed to increased inequality in rural areas.

The emphasis on a few high-yielding varieties reduced crop genetic diversity. Traditional varieties, often better adapted to local conditions but lower-yielding, were abandoned. This loss of agricultural biodiversity made food systems more vulnerable to pests, diseases, and climate variation. When a pest or disease affects a major crop variety, the consequences can be catastrophic because genetic uniformity means entire crops are vulnerable.

Environmental consequences included groundwater depletion from intensive irrigation, soil degradation from continuous cropping without adequate rotation, and water pollution from fertilizer and pesticide runoff. The Green Revolution’s focus on yield maximization sometimes came at the cost of nutritional quality and sustainability.

The Green Revolution also largely bypassed Africa and focused primarily on staple grains, leaving many food security problems unaddressed. Critics argue it was a technological fix that avoided confronting underlying issues of poverty, land distribution, and political inequality.

Genetic Modification and Corporate Control: The development of genetically modified (GM) crops in the 1990s intensified debates about plant patents and corporate control of agriculture. Companies like Monsanto (now Bayer), DuPont, and Syngenta developed GM crops with traits like herbicide resistance and insect resistance, patenting both the genetic modifications and often requiring farmers to sign contracts restricting seed saving.

This system marked a fundamental change in agricultural practice. For millennia, farmers saved seeds from each harvest to plant the following season, selecting for desirable traits and adapting crops to local conditions. Patent restrictions on GM seeds prohibited this practice, requiring farmers to purchase new seed each year. Critics argued this created dependencies, threatened farmer autonomy, and concentrated control over global food systems in the hands of a few corporations.

Supporters countered that GM technology required massive research investments that patents make economically viable, that the technology delivers real benefits (reduced pesticide use with insect-resistant crops, higher yields, potential for nutritional enhancement like Golden Rice), and that farmers choose GM seeds because they’re profitable. The debate remains contentious, with legitimate concerns on both sides often obscured by ideological positioning.

Cross-contamination between GM and conventional crops has created additional problems. Organic and conventional farmers have sometimes found their crops contaminated with patented GM genes through pollen drift, leading to legal disputes about liability. Indigenous communities concerned about maintaining genetic purity of traditional crops face particular challenges.

Conservation Colonialism: Well-intentioned conservation efforts sometimes replicate colonial patterns by excluding indigenous peoples from lands they’ve sustainably managed for generations. The “fortress conservation” model—establishing protected areas with minimal human presence—has been applied globally, often dispossessing indigenous peoples who argue their traditional practices maintained the biodiversity conservationists seek to protect.

Examples include the creation of national parks in Africa that displaced pastoral peoples, rainforest reserves that criminalized indigenous hunting and gathering, and protected areas that ignore indigenous land rights. Research increasingly shows that biodiversity is often highest in areas with long-term indigenous presence, suggesting that indigenous management practices may be more effective than exclusionary conservation. However, power dynamics and funding structures continue to favor top-down conservation approaches designed by Western institutions.

Climate Change and Agricultural Adaptation: Climate change presents botanical challenges that intersect with existing inequalities. Developing nations, particularly in tropical regions, face the greatest agricultural disruption from changing temperatures and rainfall patterns, yet have the least capacity to develop and deploy adaptive technologies. Access to climate-resilient crop varieties, to drought-tolerant seeds, to agricultural technologies that reduce emissions—all these are unevenly distributed, threatening to worsen global inequalities.

The potential for “gene drives”—genetic modifications that spread through wild populations—raises profound ethical questions about deliberately altering natural ecosystems, who has the authority to make such decisions, and what unforeseen consequences might result.

Herbaria, Museums, and Repatriation: Major botanical collections in European and North American institutions contain millions of specimens collected during colonial periods. These collections are scientifically invaluable—they document species distributions over centuries, preserve extinct or endangered species, and enable research on everything from climate change to evolution. However, they also represent accumulated appropriation of botanical material from colonized lands.

Current debates center on several questions: Should specimens be physically repatriated to their countries of origin? Or is digital access and collaborative research sufficient? How should labels and databases acknowledge the exploitative contexts of historical collection? Should institutions return specimens of culturally significant plants to indigenous communities? What about specimens of extinct species where the source country may lack preservation facilities?

Some institutions are undertaking “decolonization” initiatives—reexamining collections, revising interpretive materials, establishing partnerships with source communities, and acknowledging colonial histories. However, critics argue these efforts are often superficial and that fundamental power structures remain unchanged. The institutions housing the world’s largest botanical collections, benefiting from colonial accumulation, remain concentrated in former colonial powers.

Bioprospecting and Pharmaceutical Development: Modern pharmaceutical bioprospecting continues to raise ethical issues. Companies screen plants for medically useful compounds, often beginning with traditional knowledge about medicinal uses. When successful drugs are developed, enormous profits may result, but source communities typically receive minimal benefit. The development of legal frameworks for benefit-sharing has improved the situation, but enforcement is inconsistent and benefits often flow more to national governments than to local communities whose knowledge enabled the discoveries.

Invasive Species and Ecological Disruption: The accelerating global movement of plants—for horticulture, agriculture, and accidentally through trade—continues to generate ecological problems. Invasive species displace native plants, alter ecosystems, and cause billions of dollars in damage. While current biosecurity efforts are more sophisticated than in the past, horticultural demand for novel ornamental plants and the volume of global trade make controlling plant movement extremely difficult.

Traditional Knowledge and Scientific Publishing: Even when scientists work ethically with indigenous communities, publishing research in international journals can make traditional knowledge globally accessible, potentially enabling others to exploit it commercially. Balancing open scientific communication with protecting indigenous knowledge rights remains unresolved.

Toward a More Ethical Future: Principles and Practices for 21st Century Botany

Contemporary botanical science increasingly recognizes these complicated legacies and works toward more equitable practices, though progress is uneven and challenges remain formidable.

Benefit-Sharing and Access Frameworks: The Nagoya Protocol (2014) requires prior informed consent for accessing genetic resources and mandates benefit-sharing when those resources are commercialized. While imperfect and unevenly enforced, it represents progress toward recognizing source communities’ rights. Some agreements have resulted in meaningful benefits—royalties, infrastructure investments, capacity building—though many indigenous advocates argue current frameworks remain inadequate.

Collaborative and Participatory Research: Increasingly, botanical research involves indigenous communities as partners rather than merely subjects. Collaborative projects establish shared research goals, involve communities in decision-making, respect traditional protocols, and ensure communities benefit from results. The field of “community-based conservation” emphasizes local control and traditional knowledge rather than external management.

Open-Access Science: Movements toward open-access publishing and open genetic databases aim to democratize botanical information. Projects like the Open Source Seed Initiative promote seeds that are free for anyone to use, breed, and share, explicitly opposing restrictive patents. Digital herbarium initiatives make specimen images freely available online, reducing researchers’ need to travel to major institutions in wealthy nations.

Decolonizing Botanical Institutions: Museums, botanical gardens, and universities are undertaking efforts to acknowledge and address colonial histories. This includes reexamining collections and how they were acquired, revising labels and exhibitions to provide historical context, creating positions for indigenous scholars, returning sacred or culturally significant items, and establishing meaningful partnerships with source communities. Critics note these efforts vary widely in depth and sincerity, with some institutions undertaking genuine structural change while others engage in superficial gesturing.

Ethnobotanical Ethics: Contemporary ethnobotanical research emphasizes informed consent, cultural sensitivity, and benefit-sharing. Researchers work to ensure communities understand how their knowledge will be used, have veto power over publication of sensitive information, and receive appropriate credit and benefit. Some ethnobotanists advocate for communities retaining intellectual property rights over traditional knowledge.

Indigenous-Led Conservation: Recognition is growing that indigenous peoples often maintain biodiversity more effectively than state-managed protected areas. Supporting indigenous land rights and management may be more effective conservation than exclusionary approaches. This requires funding mechanisms that support indigenous conservation, legal recognition of indigenous land tenure, and genuine respect for indigenous decision-making authority.

Rethinking Agricultural Development: Alternatives to industrial agriculture are gaining attention, including agroecology (which incorporates traditional farming wisdom with ecological science), support for farmer seed-saving and local variety development, and food sovereignty movements emphasizing local control over food systems rather than global commodity chains.

Transparency in Research Funding and Partnerships: Increased transparency about who funds botanical research, what commercial interests may be involved, and how benefits will be distributed helps identify potential conflicts and ensures communities can make informed decisions about participation.

Protecting Traditional Knowledge: Legal and technical mechanisms are being developed to protect traditional knowledge from exploitation, including traditional knowledge databases accessible only with indigenous consent, defensive publication strategies that prevent patenting, and stronger indigenous intellectual property rights.

Climate Justice in Agricultural Development: Recognition that climate change impacts are unevenly distributed necessitates ensuring that agricultural adaptation technologies are accessible to those most affected. This includes investment in public sector agricultural research focused on crops and regions of greatest need rather than commercial profitability.

Conclusion: Science, Power, and the Politics of Plants

The golden ages of botanical discovery produced genuine scientific breakthroughs that expanded human knowledge and delivered real benefits. The potatoes, vaccines, understanding of evolution, and conservation of endangered species that resulted from botanical exploration have improved countless lives. The challenge is acknowledging that much of this progress was built on exploitation, theft, erasure, and violence—and committing to different principles going forward.

The plants themselves are neutral—they photosynthesize and reproduce regardless of human politics. But the systems we’ve built around studying, naming, owning, profiting from, and controlling them remain deeply shaped by their imperial origins. When we use a plant’s scientific name, we invoke a nomenclatural system that systematically privileged European knowledge over indigenous understanding. When we visit botanical gardens, we walk through institutions that were once engines of empire. When we develop drugs from plants, we participate in supply chains that may not fairly compensate source communities.

True progress requires more than acknowledging these histories—it demands structural change in how botanical science is conducted, funded, and governed. This means:

• Redistributing power: Ensuring indigenous peoples and communities in biodiverse regions have real authority over research conducted in their territories and with their knowledge, not merely consultative roles.
  
• Rethinking ownership: Challenging patent and intellectual property frameworks that enable appropriation of biological resources and traditional knowledge while restricting access and benefit.
  
• Decentering Western institutions: Building scientific capacity in regions of biodiversity rather than concentrating research infrastructure in wealthy nations; ensuring that botanical science serves local needs, not only external interests.
  
• Confronting current extraction: Recognizing that botanical exploitation isn’t merely historical but continues through bioprospecting, agricultural development schemes, and conservation projects that disregard local sovereignty.
  
• Embedding justice in science: Making equity, benefit-sharing, and respect for indigenous rights central to botanical research, not afterthoughts.
  

The plants that have traveled the world over the past 500 years carry complex stories—of survival and adaptation, of human ingenuity and cruelty, of connections forged and cultures destroyed. As climate change, biodiversity loss, and food security challenges intensify, botanical science will be more important than ever. The question is whether we can learn from past failures to create a botanical science that serves all humanity equitably, respects diverse knowledge systems, and operates with genuine humility about the limits of Western scientific authority.

The future of botanical discovery should be characterized not by extraction and appropriation, but by reciprocity and respect. This requires acknowledging that indigenous and traditional peoples are not merely informants or subjects, but knowledge-holders and innovators in their own right—that the quinoa varieties developed over millennia in the Andes, the rice systems perfected across Asia, the forest gardens maintained in Amazonia, represent botanical achievements as sophisticated as anything produced in European laboratories.

Contemporary Flashpoints: Ongoing Ethical Struggles

Several current controversies illustrate how historical patterns persist and how the botanical community continues to grapple with its ethical obligations.

The Enola Bean Case: In 1999, a U.S. businessman received a patent on a yellow bean variety he claimed to have discovered in Mexico, naming it “Enola.” The bean was virtually identical to mayocoba beans that Mexican farmers had grown for generations. The patent allowed him to demand royalties from Mexican farmers exporting their own traditional beans to the United States. After years of challenge from international agricultural organizations, the patent was eventually invalidated in 2009. The case demonstrated how patent systems can be weaponized against the very communities that developed crop varieties, and how lengthy and expensive legal battles are necessary to overturn such appropriations.

Cannabis and Indigenous Knowledge: As cannabis legalization spreads across North America and Europe, creating a massive commercial industry, indigenous peoples who have used cannabis medicinally and ceremonially for generations are largely excluded from legal markets. Licensing requirements, capitalization needs, and legal complexities favor corporate entities, while indigenous growers—who preserved cannabis genetics and knowledge through prohibition—face barriers to participation. This represents another instance where legal frameworks enable wealthy outsiders to profit from plants and knowledge developed by marginalized communities.

Quinoa Boom and Bust: When quinoa became fashionable in wealthy nations during the 2000s and 2010s, prices skyrocketed. Initially celebrated as benefiting Andean farmers, the boom had complex consequences. High prices made quinoa unaffordable for local populations who had relied on it as a staple. Increased cultivation led to soil degradation in some areas. When prices eventually crashed, farmers who had abandoned other crops for quinoa monoculture faced economic hardship. The episode illustrated how external demand can disrupt traditional agricultural systems, create boom-bust cycles, and transform culturally significant crops into global commodities subject to market volatility.

The Fight Over Basmati: Basmati rice, developed over centuries in the Indian subcontinent, has been subject to numerous patent applications by foreign entities attempting to claim ownership of varieties or the name itself. A 1997 U.S. patent on “basmati rice lines and grains” granted to a Texas company (RiceTec) provoked international outcry, with Indian advocacy groups arguing that basmati’s characteristics resulted from specific growing regions and traditional farming practices that couldn’t be replicated elsewhere or “invented” by a foreign corporation. After pressure, some patent claims were withdrawn, but disputes over geographic indicators, genetic ownership, and traditional crop names continue.

Biopiracy in Traditional Medicine: The traditional medicine systems of China, India (Ayurveda), and other regions represent thousands of years of botanical experimentation and knowledge accumulation. Pharmaceutical companies regularly screen compounds from traditionally used plants, and when successful drugs result, questions arise about whether traditional knowledge holders should be compensated. The development of artemisinin from Artemisia annua (sweet wormwood) for malaria treatment is illustrative: the plant had been used in traditional Chinese medicine for over a thousand years, but when a pharmaceutical was developed, benefit-sharing with Chinese communities or traditional medicine practitioners was minimal. The researcher who isolated the active compound won a Nobel Prize, but the traditional knowledge that pointed to the plant’s antimalarial properties received no formal recognition.

African Biocolonialism: African nations, home to extraordinary plant diversity, continue to experience bioprospecting without adequate benefit-sharing. The devil’s claw (Harpagophytum) case from southern Africa exemplifies the pattern: the plant has been used traditionally for pain and inflammation, European pharmaceutical companies developed products generating hundreds of millions in revenue, yet San and other indigenous peoples who stewarded the plant and knowledge received minimal compensation. While benefit-sharing agreements eventually emerged, they came only after sustained activism, and many feel the agreements remain inadequate.

Seed Libraries and Corporate Opposition: Community seed libraries—where gardeners save and share seeds freely—have faced legal challenges in some regions from seed industry representatives arguing they violate seed regulations designed for commercial seed sales. While typically resolved in favor of seed libraries, these conflicts reveal tensions between community seed-sharing traditions and commercial interests seeking to expand patent protections and market control. Some see seed libraries as preserving agricultural biodiversity and traditional practices; others see them as threats to intellectual property frameworks.

Structural Barriers to Ethical Botanical Science

Beyond specific cases, several structural features of contemporary botanical science and related industries create ongoing ethical problems:

Publication Paywalls: Much botanical research remains behind expensive paywalls that effectively exclude researchers and communities from developing nations. A farmer in Peru cannot afford to access research about potatoes—which their ancestors domesticated—published in journals costing thousands of dollars annually. This creates knowledge asymmetries where information extracted from biodiversity-rich but economically poor regions is locked away, accessible primarily to wealthy institutions.

Linguistic Imperialism: Scientific publication overwhelmingly occurs in English, requiring researchers from non-Anglophone regions to work in a second language while English-speaking researchers face no equivalent burden. Traditional knowledge encoded in indigenous languages is often “translated” into English for scientific publication, a process that inevitably loses nuance and embeds Western conceptual frameworks. Indigenous names for plants, which often convey ecological or utilitarian information, are subordinated to Latinate binomials.

Funding Structures: Research funding disproportionately comes from wealthy nations and focuses on their priorities—commercial crops, ornamental horticulture for wealthy markets, pharmaceutical development for profitable diseases rather than neglected tropical diseases. Agricultural research funding for subsistence crops crucial to food security in developing nations is comparatively minimal. This funding geography determines what botanical knowledge is produced and whose interests it serves.

Institutional Geography: The world’s major herbaria, seed banks, botanical gardens, and research institutions are concentrated in former colonial powers. This means specimens, seeds, and research capacity are far from their origins. A Kenyan botanist studying East African plants may need to travel to Kew Gardens in London to access the most comprehensive collection of specimens from their own region. This geographical disconnect perpetuates colonial-era resource concentration.

Capacity Asymmetries: Many biodiversity-rich nations lack the scientific infrastructure, funding, and trained personnel to fully inventory, study, and manage their own botanical resources. This creates dependencies on foreign researchers and institutions, unequal partnerships where external entities provide expertise and resources but also extract knowledge and material. While capacity-building is a stated goal of international agreements, progress is slow and funding inadequate.

Market Incentives: Commercial botanical applications—pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, horticultural varieties—are developed primarily for profitable markets. This creates incentive structures that favor serving wealthy consumers over addressing pressing needs in developing nations. Diseases affecting the poor attract minimal pharmaceutical investment; subsistence crops receive less breeding attention than luxury ornamentals; traditional varieties without patent potential are neglected.

Conservation Funding Geography: International conservation funding, while essential for protecting biodiversity, is controlled primarily by organizations based in wealthy nations. These organizations set priorities, determine methodologies, and evaluate success—often with limited input from local communities. Even when well-intentioned, this structure can impose external values and create dependencies that undermine local agency.

What Genuine Reform Would Require

Moving toward truly ethical botanical science requires systemic changes that many institutions and individuals resist because they threaten established privileges and power structures. Meaningful reform would include:

Reparative Benefit-Sharing: Establishing mechanisms to provide benefits to communities whose botanical knowledge and resources have been exploited historically, not only prospectively. This might include royalties on pharmaceuticals derived from traditional medicine, funding for indigenous botanical research and education, or repatriation of benefits from agricultural varieties developed from traditionally bred crops. Such arrangements would acknowledge that historical appropriation created continuing advantages and disadvantages that merit redress.

Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Recognizing indigenous peoples’ right to control data and specimens from their territories, including determining what information can be published, who can access collections, and how benefits are distributed. This would fundamentally alter current practices where researchers collect material and data that become accessible globally according to scientific norms emphasizing openness, without indigenous veto power.

Restructuring Intellectual Property: Challenging patent systems that enable appropriation of biological resources and traditional knowledge. This might include excluding plants and traditional knowledge from patentability, creating alternative frameworks recognizing collective indigenous ownership, or requiring demonstration that claimed innovations represent genuine novelty rather than documentation of existing knowledge or naturally occurring variation.

Mandatory Co-Authorship and Revenue Sharing: Requiring that community knowledge-holders be recognized as co-authors on publications utilizing their knowledge, and that revenues from commercial applications be shared equitably. Current practices often relegate indigenous contributors to acknowledgments while primary credit goes to university-affiliated researchers.

Democratizing Research Institutions: Transforming governance of major botanical institutions to include meaningful representation from indigenous peoples, source countries, and Global South researchers. This would shift decision-making power about research priorities, collection policies, and benefit-sharing from traditional Western scientific elites to more diverse stakeholders.

Truth and Reconciliation Processes: Botanical institutions undertaking comprehensive examinations of their colonial-era activities, acknowledging harms, and making commitments to redress. This would parallel truth and reconciliation processes in other contexts, requiring honest confrontation with uncomfortable histories rather than euphemistic narratives of scientific progress.

Funded Capacity Building: Substantial, sustained investment in building scientific capacity in biodiversity-rich regions, including training programs, research infrastructure, herbaria, seed banks, and universities. This requires funding at scales that would genuinely enable self-sufficiency rather than token programs that maintain dependencies.

Language Equity: Supporting scientific publication and education in multiple languages, valuing indigenous nomenclature and knowledge systems as equally valid to Western scientific frameworks, and ending linguistic imperialism that privileges English and treats other languages as deficient.

Community-Controlled Research: Enabling indigenous communities and local populations to conduct botanical research according to their own priorities and methodologies, with funding not contingent on partnerships with Western institutions or adherence to Western scientific protocols. This would recognize diverse ways of knowing as legitimate and valuable rather than requiring validation through Western scientific frameworks.

Liability for Historical Collections: Recognizing that major botanical collections were often assembled through theft, coercion, or exploitation, and that current holders have obligations beyond simple possession. This might include repatriation of certain materials, payment for digitization access, or other forms of accountability.

The Psychological and Cultural Dimensions

Beyond structural and legal reforms, ethical botanical science requires shifts in attitudes, assumptions, and cultural practices within the scientific community:

Epistemic Humility: Recognizing that Western scientific botany is one knowledge system among many, not inherently superior to indigenous botanical knowledge systems that have sustained human populations for millennia. This means valuing traditional ecological knowledge as genuine expertise, not merely “folklore” to be validated or corrected by science.

Acknowledging Complicity: Individual botanists and institutions recognizing their participation in ongoing systems of extraction and appropriation, even when individual intentions are benevolent. Well-meaning researchers can perpetuate harmful systems; good intentions don’t exempt anyone from responsibility for consequences.

Interrogating Motivations: Honest examination of what drives botanical research. Is it genuine desire to benefit humanity equitably? Advancement of scientific knowledge for its own sake? Career advancement and publication records? Commercial applications and profit? Different motivations suggest different ethical frameworks and obligations.

Centering Affected Communities: Ensuring that research serves the needs and priorities of communities who steward plants and hold botanical knowledge, not merely external scientific or commercial interests. This requires genuine listening, not merely extractive consultation where decisions have already been made.

Accepting Limitations on Research: Recognizing that some knowledge may not be appropriately shared, some research may not be worth conducting if it cannot be done ethically, and some plants or places may be off-limits to outside researchers. The principle that scientific inquiry should be unlimited collides with indigenous rights and community sovereignty.

Unlearning Superiority: Confronting deep-seated assumptions that trained scientists know better than traditional practitioners, that modern agriculture is superior to traditional systems, that Western management is more effective than indigenous stewardship, and that literacy and formal education are prerequisites for botanical expertise.

Cultivating Reciprocity: Moving from extractive research relationships toward genuine reciprocity where researchers give as much as they receive, where communities benefit immediately and substantially from research, and where long-term relationships of mutual respect replace transactional interactions.

Case Studies in Ethical Practice

While systemic problems persist, some initiatives demonstrate more ethical approaches:

The Honey Bee Project (South Africa): The San peoples of southern Africa organized to challenge biopiracy of their traditional knowledge about hoodia. They formed representative councils, engaged legal support, negotiated benefit-sharing agreements with corporations developing hoodia-based appetite suppressants, and established protocols for how their traditional knowledge should be accessed. While imperfect, the project demonstrated indigenous agency in asserting rights over traditional knowledge.

The Potato Park (Peru): Quechua communities in the Andes established the Potato Park, an indigenous biocultural heritage area protecting 1,200+ potato varieties. The park operates under indigenous governance, preserves traditional agricultural practices, conducts participatory research with outside scientists under community-established protocols, and maintains control over genetic resources. It represents indigenous-led conservation that integrates traditional knowledge with scientific research on indigenous terms.

Participatory Plant Breeding: Some agricultural research organizations have adopted participatory plant breeding where farmers are active partners throughout the breeding process—setting priorities, making selections, testing varieties, and sharing results. This approach acknowledges farmer expertise and ensures varieties meet real needs rather than external assumptions about what farmers require.

Traditional Knowledge Databases with Indigenous Control: Some indigenous groups have created databases documenting their traditional botanical knowledge with access strictly controlled by the community. This enables preservation and intergenerational transmission while preventing external exploitation. The databases exist but aren’t publicly accessible, challenging the scientific norm of open data while protecting indigenous intellectual property.

Benefit-Sharing Funds: Some bioprospecting agreements have established funds that provide sustained benefits to source communities beyond one-time payments. These include funding for education, healthcare, conservation, or community-determined priorities, creating lasting benefits rather than mere token payments.

Museum Decolonization Initiatives: Some institutions have undertaken substantial decolonization efforts—returning specimens of sacred plants to indigenous communities, establishing co-curation arrangements where indigenous representatives have authority over how their cultural materials are displayed and interpreted, creating positions for indigenous scholars, and conducting comprehensive research into colonial-era collecting practices with results made public.

Looking Forward: Botanical Science in an Era of Crisis

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity create unprecedented challenges requiring botanical expertise. The coming decades will demand massive efforts to develop climate-resilient crops, preserve endangered species, restore degraded ecosystems, and ensure food security for growing populations. Botanical science has never been more important.

Yet these challenges must be addressed in ways that don’t replicate historical exploitation. Climate adaptation strategies that dispossess indigenous peoples, conservation that excludes local communities, agricultural development that enriches corporations while impoverishing farmers, genetic resource collection that extracts without compensating—these approaches may deliver short-term results while perpetuating injustice and building resentment.

The alternative is botanical science reimagined as collaborative, equitable, and genuinely global—not merely conducted globally but controlled and benefiting people globally. This means:

Climate Justice in Botanical Research: Prioritizing research on crops and ecosystems crucial to vulnerable populations, ensuring adaptation technologies are freely accessible, supporting indigenous climate adaptation strategies alongside Western scientific approaches, and acknowledging that wealthy nations’ emissions created problems that poorer nations now face.

Conservation as Partnership: Working with indigenous peoples as leaders in conservation, supporting their land rights and management authority, funding community-led conservation rather than imposing external models, and acknowledging that the best-preserved ecosystems are often those under indigenous stewardship.

Food Sovereignty: Supporting farmer seed-saving and local variety development, resisting the concentration of seed control in corporate hands, preserving agricultural biodiversity through farmer-led initiatives, and ensuring agricultural research serves small-scale farmers and local food systems, not only industrial agriculture.

Open Science with Protection: Making botanical research freely accessible while protecting traditional knowledge from exploitation, developing technologies and frameworks that enable sharing scientific information without enabling appropriation of indigenous knowledge, and respecting communities’ rights to control information from their territories.

Acknowledging Complexity: Recognizing that simple narratives—whether of unalloyed scientific progress or categorical condemnation—fail to capture reality. Individual botanists often worked with genuine good faith; systematic exploitation occurred nonetheless. Scientific discoveries improved lives; they also enabled oppression. Progress and harm coexisted, and reckoning with this complexity is necessary for moving forward.

Florist viewpoint: The Work Ahead

The golden ages of botanical discovery left a complicated legacy. We have encyclopedic knowledge of plant diversity, crops that feed billions, medicines that save lives, and understanding of how life evolved and adapts. We also have systems of inequality built on appropriation of indigenous knowledge and resources, conservation approaches that replicate colonialism, corporate control of seeds threatening food sovereignty, and institutions housing collections assembled through exploitation.

Moving forward requires more than acknowledging historical wrongs. It demands structural transformation of how botanical science operates—who controls research, who benefits from discoveries, whose knowledge is valued, and whose interests are served. This work is difficult because it requires those who currently hold power—major institutions, established researchers, wealthy nations—to voluntarily relinquish advantages they’ve accumulated.

Yet the imperative is clear. If botanical science is to fulfill its potential to address humanity’s challenges equitably, it must become genuinely inclusive and just. The plants that will feed future generations, the ecosystems that must be preserved, the traditional knowledge that holds solutions to modern problems—these are global heritage, not the possession of any single culture or institution.

The botanists of the 18th and 19th centuries couldn’t have fully understood the consequences of their actions or the systems they participated in. We have no such excuse. We know the history, we see the ongoing inequalities, and we have opportunities to choose different paths. Whether we do so will determine not only the ethics of botanical science but its effectiveness in addressing the crises ahead.

The plants remain, growing and adapting as they have for millions of years. The question is whether human institutions built around studying them can adapt as well—can shed inherited patterns of exploitation and embrace genuinely collaborative, equitable, and just practices. The future of botanical discovery depends on answering that question honestly and acting on the answer courageously.