I suspect the habit of underestimating them has its roots in our self-centered definition of what constitutes complexity or sophistication. We prize think like self-consciousness or abstract reasoning or language simply because they have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey - the particular tools we evolved to help us cope with living on this earth. Yet the plants have been evolving even longer than we have, evolving their own tools for living, and these are easily as sophisticated as ours, just different. So while we were working hard on locomotion and consciousness, they were getting really, really good at biochemistry, up to and including their mastery of the astonishing trick of eating sunlight and turning it into food.
86 percent of all plant and animal species on land, and up to 91 percent in the seas, remain unnamed.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the sound of a chainsaw, the harsh shouting of men, the shuddering, the creaking and groaning, of the assaulted tree. I tried to imagine the horrifying crash it would make as it fell, the harm that would be inflicted on the other trees in its path, and the terror of the countless creatures who had made their homes in its trunk and branches.
Even when the plants were in good positions on deck, seamen sloshed water against boxes when cleaning. The sailors were supposed to lift the lid of each box for a while each day to let in some air, but often they did not. Moreover, in bad storms the plants were often jettisoned to lighten the weight. Not surprisingly the plant hunters, who had suffered so much to obtain their specimens, frequently handed out generous bribes to captain, officers, and crew in the hope that the plants would make it home.
I got close to seeds again at Gombe when, in the early days of the chimpanzee study, I would carefully extract them from samples of chimpanzee dung to check on what the elusive apes had been eating.
The visitor is attracted in several ways - the most successful species offer nectar as a reward.
And then there are the cheats. Their flowers mimic, for example, the female of their specific insect pollinator: when the male tries to mate with this fake female, he unknowingly enhances the orchid’s reproductive success - but not his own! The best known of these cheats is the bee orchid - the flower looks and feels like a female bee and even has the same pheromones. I hope, for the bee’s sake, that he has an enjoyable, though futile, experience.
Dealing in orchids is the most lucrative flower business worldwide, involving some $44B per year in legal business, in addition to what is garnered though illegal dealings.
It was because of the small amount of quinine found in tonic water that “gin and tonic” became the drink of choice for expats and others living in the tropics.
But before these trees could mature and provide a new source of quinine, hundreds of thousands of US troops died in Africa and the South Pacific due to lack of the drug. Indeed, it is said that there were more deaths from malaria than from all the bullets and bombs combined.
I used to fantasize about the dimly lit opium dens where intellectual young men lay around smoking pipes and translating their extraordinary experiences into writing. I wondered whether my imagination, stimulated by opium, would produce wonderful and original poetry.
Many studies were made in France of the effect on users of smoking the drug, particularly on a groups of writers and poets who maintained that cannabis was “a route to aestheticism and self-realization.”
By the 1700s physicians in England began prescribing laudanum - an alcoholic herbal preparation containing varying amounts of opium - for almost every condition under the sun. Because it was prescribed so frequently, and for such a plethora of ailments, many people became addicted.
The Incas believed that coca was of divine origin.
At one time tobacco was called “green gold.”
It was the conditions for slaves working on the North American rice plantations of the 18th century that were the most horrific of all.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the whole GMO situation is that the concerns of scientists and others are ignored, trivialized, or ridiculed. Misinformation is put out by companies with multimillion-dollar budgets for PR, and governments of developing countries are pressured to introduce GM crops into their agriculture. From 1999 to 2009, biotech firms spent over $547M on lobbying Congress, and from 1999 to 2010, $22M was spent for political campaigns.
And this means that many of the ingredients you find in packaged foods are made from GM crops. But you don’t know because it’s not indicated on the packaging.
So while it is true that humans have been exploiting forests for hundreds of years, the situation is now infinitely more challenging. We must strive, on the one hand, to alleviate poverty and help billions of peasants to find environmentally sustainable lifestyles, and, on the other hand, we must encourage the growing well-to-do societies to do well with less, for it is this “consumer society,” with its desire for ever more “stuff,” that gives such power to the big corporations.
And make no mistake, this is the hardest battle - fighting vested business interests, powerful and unscrupulous multinationals, and corruption.
It was easy to get attention of the media at that time, and newspapers ran photos of people chaining themselves to bulldozers or climbing up the trees that were in their path. But gradually the public lost interest in these images - or, as John puts it, “societies developed antibodies” against such actions.
I have often heard the saying “We have not inherited this planet from our parents - we have borrowed it from our children.” Unfortunately, this is no longer true. We have not borrowed it but stolen it. We are still stealing their future.
If a work of Man is destroyed, it is called vandalism, but if a work of nature, of God, is destroyed it is often called progress.
In 1819 it was reckoned that up to 1000 plants sent to England from China were lost for every one that survived the voyage and germinated.
That, of course, is the method chosen by many plants to disperse their seeds — by surrounding them with delicious fruit and thus persuading a variety of animals to transport them, in stomach and gut, throughout their home range.
To provide protection for the precious germ of life within, the seed case is often very tough and hard. But while this helps to protect against chewing teeth, it also makes germination difficult and some seeds actually rely on the digestive juices of particular fruit-eating creatures to partly dissolve their protective covering. There are other seeds that need fire before they can germinate, and others the abrasive effect of wind and sand.
Is it not amazing that a small germ of life can be kept alive — sometimes for hundreds of years — inside a protective case, where it waits, patiently, for the right conditions to germinate? Is it not stretching the imagination when we are told of a seed that germinated after 2000-year sleep?