Plants are our lifeline – but we’re letting them die

[G_j]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/10/plants-wild-plant-species-kew?CMP=share_btn_fb

Plants are our lifeline – but we’re letting them die,
Michael McCarthy

There seem to have been no national ceremonies to mark the end of botany. A discipline that had flourished in our universities for centuries – the first Oxford professor of botany, Robert Morison, was awarded his chair in 1669 – slipped away quietly into oblivion in 2013, with the graduation of the last students on the last undergraduate botany course, at Bristol. You can’t do a botany degree in Britain any more. A once familiar element of life has simply disappeared, quite unremarked upon. Like the disappearance of hitchhiking, you might say.

Of course, people still engage in the study of plants, and a handful of universities offer first degrees in plant science, but the vanishing of the B-word signifies much more than a shift in nomenclature. The plant sciences degrees now being offered focus on genetics, molecular studies and biotechnology, and barely touch on taxonomy and identification, which were at botany’s heart. It is possible to complete one, a leading botanist told me recently, without being able to identify a single British wild flower. Yet even more, the disappearance of botany as a subject is symbolic of a general lessening of interest in the plant kingdom, a lessening of the felt relevance of plants to modern lives, throughout society.

For instance, there seems now to be an entire disconnect in people’s minds between plants and our utter dependence on them. It is perhaps understandable that the general public may not understand the concept of primary production, the plant manufacture of sugars and other organic compounds via photosynthesis, which lies at the basis of life on Earth. But it’s less so that most of us just don’t get the fact that all human existence – even now, with our smartphones and our daily chat about what is cool and what is not – is ultimately dependent on a suite of about 30 crop plants, and that without them we are dead.

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A fifth of the world’s 391,000 wild plant species are now thought to be threatened with extinction; more than 10% of the world’s vegetable land cover has changed just in the past decade; and our disregard of the plant kingdom continues apace. This disregard needs to be countered. Plants need friends; plants need advocates; plants need, in fact, a champion, and on Monday they may at last have found one, with a groundbreaking publication from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.


..more..

[lastever]

1. save em

SAVE THE PLANTS!

[lonestarnot]

2. Ruling class doesn't give a shat about anything but dough.

[Bayard]

3. Its not straight botany

But I would hope some of the loss is being made up by environmentalists.

[democrank]

4. I appreciate this post very much. Thank you.

Long ago I decided to learn more about plants that some called "weeds" because I thought everything is here for a reason.While at a yard sale in the wilds of Vermont, I found several old booklets about how Native Americans made good use of many plants we now call weeds.

At this same yard sale I found a book, FAMILIAR FEATURES OF THE ROADSIDE, written by F. Schuyler Mathews in 1897. That book contains both critters and plants, but I love Mathews` drawing and description of the skunk cabbage which he calls The Pioneer of Spring.

It`s fascinating out there in Plant World!

[Fast Walker 52]

5. sad.

plants are amazing...

[madinmaryland]

6. What about Kudzu?? It's going places.