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 As
director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, acclaimed conservationist
Peter Raven has sought
to save endangered plant species. He spoke with Alan Alda
recently about the importance of biodiversity and his hopes
for the planet's future.
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EARLY
PLANT LOVER
AA:
How did you develop this intense interest in plants?
PR: I started when I was about 6 years old, with nature. I
grew up in San Francisco and I got into the student section
in the California Academy of Sciences, and they really encouraged
me all along from there on out. It shows how a museum or a
botanical garden or something like that can really encourage
young people in their interests.
AA:
What was the first plant you collected?
PR:
I started collecting caterpillars and growing them into butterflies
and moths and then I started collecting beetles and putting
them in boxes with insect pins and so forth. And then I got
onto plants.
AA:
Your daughter remembers when she was little that you used
to stop the car on family trips and run out to the side of
the road and pick up a plant if you saw a rare one. How can
you see a rare plant traveling at 40-50 miles an hour?
PR:
You get to be observant. You can see little differences in
color, texture. It depends upon how big they are, of course.
If you're interested in a particular kind of plant, you can
see the kinds of places it grows in when you're driving along
in a car.
WEB
OF LIFE
AA:
What is biodiversity? How would you define that?
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The word biodiversity has come to mean 'the web of
life,' or 'all living things interconnected.'
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PR:
The meaning of biodiversity is really interesting. We started
it, in 1987, as a shorthand way of saying 'biological diversity.'
Ed Wilson and I and various people organized a meeting on
biological diversity at the National Academy of Sciences in
Washington, and what we meant by it then was really the collection
of all the plants and animals on Earth. But subsequently,
what it's taken on is a meaning of not only that, but all
the genetic variation, all the variations in character of
those plants and animals, and all the communities and ecosystems
that they make up. In other words, as we start the new century,
the word biodiversity has come to mean something like 'life
on Earth' - 'the web of life,' or 'all living things interconnected.'
AA:
You talked about how that diversity is threatened. What do
you think are the most important threats, the direct threats
to biodiversity now?
PR:
Biodiversity's species become extinct and communities and
ecosystems are lacerated and lose their vitality because of
human pressures, which have to do with consumption. More and
more people wanting more and more. The Reverend Thomas Malthus
at the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1790s said
that the human ability to produce food was going to be outstripped
by human population growth. It wasn't, but the Industrial
Revolution has been fueled by oil, gas and coal and people
have been using energy very rapidly to convert the Earth very
rapidly. When the Reverend Malthus made that statement, there
were about a billion people in the world, and now there are
about 6 billion. The pressure of all those people in changing
the natural forests and prairies and fields and places where
plants and animals live, that conversion of habitats is the
greatest threat to biological diversity.
AA:
Suppose you just run around and collect the seeds and put
them some place, have you done a good enough job?
PR:
The best argument for keeping plants and animals and other
organisms alive where they are is it's by far the least expensive
way of getting the job done. They're maintaining themselves
at basically no cost. Any time you take them out and preserve
them somewhere else, you start spending money. The second
argument is nature is where all of the wonderful interactions
between them occur, about which we can learn so much. Once
you take them out of nature, you may never be able to reconstruct
those interactions.
AA:
That web that they all exist in, it can't be reproduced outside
of nature, can it?
PR:
If we think about a forest, we probably understand 1/1,000th,
if that, of the interactions that are taking place in the
forest. There certainly is no hope of being able to recapitulate
that anywhere else when we don't even understand the principles
that are going on in the first place. The only way we're ever
going to learn about those principles is by studying the forest
where it is, with all the organisms in it, where they are.
Photos:Conservation
International
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