ENJOY YOUR VISIT — Exhibitions

Losing Paradise?
Endangered Plants Here and Around the World

Plants Enrich Our Lives. We Must Save Them

by Peter H. Raven, President, Missouri Botanical Garden

The exhibition presented here, Losing Paradise? Endangered Plants Here and Around the World, delivers a powerful message through its lovely images and the accompanying stories. The careful work of many artists has made it clear that our endangered plants are treasures of such incredible beauty and value that the world will be deprived of a priceless resource if we allow them to be lost. Each is the unique product of billions of years of evolution, a storehouse of properties that we are only beginning to understand, and a source of opportunities for enhancing human life in the future as well as for nurturing our souls.

The artists who produced these works clearly exhibit a love of the natural world and a passion for plants. We share that passion, and also a great concern about their future. Thus we are profoundly grateful to the American Society of Botanical Artists and their members for choosing to use their talents to focus on the need for action to conserve and sustain our priceless plant diversity. Their work helps educate the public about the importance of these issues.

Tetranuris herbacia, North America
Artist: Dianne McElwain

A Specialized Field

Botanical illustration is a specialized field requiring both artistic skill and a knowledge of botany. These artists render amazing lifelike images of plants, incorporating traditional standards and conventions to ensure scientific accuracy in scale, and in details of color and structure. For centuries botanical illustrations have played an important part in educating others about plants and particularly in helping them to acquire skills that were of special importance when plants were our primary source of medicines. Such illustrations remain important scientific records in publications describing and identifying plants. They provide reliable information in reference works about collections of plants that are important for human medicinal, agricultural, horticultural, and cultural uses.

Even in this age of digital photography, an illustration is often the most suitable way to exhibit the characteristics of a particular kind of plant. Scientists value a good illustrator’s help in documentation and publication of their work! Illustrations are flexible enough to incorporate, in a single pleasing work, the characteristics of living plants as viewed from various angles, at different stages of development, and in composite illustrations, from more than one population. Thus illustrations can portray features that often are not preserved in pressed specimens, incorporate details shown at different magnifications, and present structural features (like flowers, fruits, and seeds) that actually appear sequentially through the growing season.

Treasured Artworks

Botanical illustrations are also treasured as artworks. They capture and allow us to share the graceful forms and beauty of plants, conveying our sense of wonder and the intangible aesthetic and spiritual connection that plants and people share. It is this appeal that leads 80 percent of Americans to have a flower garden, and 45 percent to report spending time annually outdoors observing wildflowers and native plants.

The lovely illustrations presented here of so many plants on the verge of extinction remind us not only of our love for them and our appreciation of their beauty, but also of the complex ways in which our activities are progressively limiting their abundance, their diversity, and their very existence. We are completely dependent on plants, directly or indirectly, for our food; most people in the world depend on them for their medicine; and they collectively protect our soils, regulate the natural flow of water, and provide the pollinators that make a high proportion of our crops productive. By capturing a small proportion of the energy from the sun that bombards the earth continuously in enormous amounts and transforming it through the process of photosynthesis into chemical bonds that store energy, they, along with algae and a few kinds of bacteria, provide the basis of life on earth. Particularly at a time when we are still building our knowledge of molecular biology rapidly, we look forward to many unknown but important further uses of plants and their products in the future.

Plants: Key to Our Survival and Prosperity

Wollemia nobilis, Australia
Artist: Beverly Allen

For now, plants and plant products touch our lives in almost everything we do each day, providing as we have said the basic resource for food, fibers, building materials, resins and oils, fuels, fragrance, flowers and pharmaceuticals. Plant breeders depend on the genomes of our wild plants for the traits they need to solve problems, improve crops, and maintain agricultural productivity. Their adaptations and useful compounds, few of which we could hope to invent on our own, are the result of thousands of years of evolutionary development. The Center for Plant Conservation reports that 80 percent of plants that are federally listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act are wild relatives of crops or other economically important plants, which means that they are a part of the genetic bank of traits we need to maintain the economic value of the plants that we use regularly in a time of rapid global change. In addition, plants will be the key elements to be used in revegetating areas that are being cleared now, or in establishing new kinds of communities and ecosystems in the altered climates of the very different world of the future.

In our increasingly urban society, it is not obvious to many citizens how closely our survival and prosperity are linked to plants, which are the foundation organisms of functional ecosystems. Historically, we have not been giving enough attention to sustaining the plants of the living world on which our own economic prosperity depends. We know that the world is changing rapidly, but we often ignore just how rapidly. From a personal perspective, I am impressed by the tripling of the global population during my own lifetime to its present level of 6.8 billion people, from the mid-1930s to now. At the same time, our levels of consumption have risen very rapidly over the past 75 years, and each person now expects to use a great deal more of what the world produces than was the case when I was born. Of the 6.8 billion people living now, only about 16 percent inhabit industrialized countries. More than 1 billion of us are undernourished, and more than 100 million people are on the verge of staving to death at any point in time. Although the rate of population growth reached its high point in 1971, the base is huge, and 2 billion people are estimated to be added to the world population over the next few decades. On top of these problems with absolute numbers and levels of consumption, we use many kinds of technologies that often seemed truly useful when they were first put in place but now often are seen as highly polluting or troublesome in some other way. To attain a sustainable world in the future, we must attain a steady population size and a level of consumption that will maintain the global commons indefinitely. At the same time, we must invent many new technologies and incorporate them into our lives to help us attain global sustainability.

Protecting the Environment is Essential

Protecting the environment is not a luxury; it is a necessity. As our numbers and desire for enhanced consumption levels have grown, our impact on the environment has grown with it. Thus the visionary World Bank economist Herman Daly argued for economic productivity firmly grounded in sustainable resource management. In Daly’s 1977 book Steady State Economics, he noted, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.” We have only one planetary home, and all of our activities take place within the environmental parameters of that home.

Today it takes the planet one year and four months to regenerate the renewable resources we consume in one year (globalfootprint.org). Habitat destruction is the most obvious sign of our activities, but the increasing concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is also driving global temperatures up rapidly. Of the 16 kinds of greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide is the most important associated with human activities. China is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide today, but historically it has been the United States. Already the average global temperature has risen 0.8°C above the average for the last 400,000 years, and it is estimated that the load of greenhouse gases present today is enough to add another 0.5°C even if additional emissions were to halt now. Myriad consequences of this warming are now being reported, and forecast to increase in the future, including the loss of glaciers and polar ice, rising sea levels and ocean temperatures, more frequent and violent storms, more droughts and wildfires, reduced springtime snowpack, changing river flows, precipitation patterns, and hydrology, among other effects.

In terms of species extinction, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report forecast the extinction of 20 to 40 percent of the world’s species of organisms due to global climate change during the remainder of this century. Since various measures of extinction rate had earlier predicted a loss of the majority of species without taking climate change into account, the serious nature of this additional problem can easily be understood. Particularly at the cooler middle and upper elevations of mountains or at poleward ends of the continents, global warming will ultimately mean that certain habitats cannot continue to exist, with a consequent high probability that the species living in them may become extinct.

Each of Us Can Make a Difference

To achieve such reductions and protect our natural systems, consumption in the United States and European countries (our largest energy consumers) must be reduced by 80 percent during the course of the twenty-first century. Fortunately, this is an area where each of us can make a difference through our own habits of consumption, and in supporting budgets and public policies that will help us achieve these goals. For ideas for your own household, there are a variety of websites and guides available, such as one by the Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov/climatechange/wycd/.

Along with habitat destruction, the spread of alien species of organisms, and the selective gathering of medicinal and other useful plants and animals, global climate change is putting pressure on natural populations to a degree that has not been seen for 65 million years, since the end of the Cretaceous Period, when the last of the dinosaurs disappeared and the whole nature of life on earth changed permanently. Populations of organisms are becoming less diverse genetically, and species are disappearing at an accelerating rate.

Prospects for Survival

What can we say of the prospects for the survival of organisms overall, and of plants in particular, over the course of the twenty-first century? Overall, about 1.7 million species of organisms have been given scientific names, but many more are believed to exist. Because of the relationships between the numbers of species in well-known groups found in different regions, and the limited state of knowledge of many kinds of organisms, scientists have had to resort to estimates. It is projected that, beyond bacteria and viruses, for which such estimates are impossible, more than 12 million kinds of organisms exist today on earth. If the estimates that more than half of all species may disappear during the course of this century are valid, and considering that only about 10,000 species of organisms are being described each year, then most of the organisms that disappear will not even have been given a scientific name before they are lost!

For plants in particular, about 300,000 valid species have been described, and it seems likely that 50,000 to 60,000 more await description and naming. Some 20 percent of the world’s species of plants appear to be threatened with extinction, with the number accelerating rapidly. The U.S. flora is estimated to encompass about 20,000 species. Of these, NatureServe estimates that nearly 3,000 U.S. species are in decline and nearly 5,000 are of conservation concern. Habitat destruction and degradation have traditionally been regarded as the leading causes of plant endangerment, but global climate change is now seen as at least equal in importance. Aggressive alien species of plants or animals may have devastating effects on natural populations, as may the introduction of disease-causing, herbivorous, or predatory organisms into areas where they were not present earlier. For example, the tanbark oak of California and neighboring Oregon (Notholithocarpus densiflorus), a unique relict of the earlier evolution of the birch-oak family, Fagaceae, is threatened with extinction following the introduction of a fungus of the genus Phytophthora. Overcollection by enthusiasts for horticulture or other uses can likewise be detrimental to the survival of many kinds of plants in nature.

Most vulnerable plant species have not yet been studied in detail. Only through documentation of them and understanding their biology and ecology can we come to understand the keys to their conservation and develop the sound stewardship practices that will allow us to maintain their populations, partly by understanding the critical ecological processes in their habitats. Understanding and providing stewardship for our plants and their supporting systems in turn is needed to help keep our atmosphere healthy, give us clean air and water, and support the web of life that sustains our whole planet.

Endangered Species Are Everywhere

The numbers and kinds of plant species and the conditions to which they are adapted vary widely around the world. About two-thirds of all plant species occur in the tropics, the remainder in temperate regions. Latin America is home to some 90,000 species, continental Africa to about 45,000 species, and tropical Asia to perhaps 60,000 species. China has about 30,500 species of plants, the U.S. and Canada about 20,000, and Europe about 11,000. The most archaic evolutionary lines among living plants are found on islands or medium elevations in subtropical areas, including especially New Caledonia, South East Asia, and Madagascar. In the Northern Hemisphere, what was a relatively uniform warm temperate forest prior to the middle Miocene Period, some 15 million years ago, is as a result of differential survival best represented today in China and secondarily in the eastern United States. The plant species that occur in deserts and in areas with summer-dry (Mediterranean) climates generally evolved there over the past few million years, although archaic survivors of earlier times also occur in these regions in special habitats.

Although species numbers, threats, and conservation challenges may vary, every region of the United States and the world has critically endangered plants requiring careful stewardship and restoration. Half of the world’s species of organisms occur within the boundaries of a single country, yet all of them are resources of global importance. Conservation “hotspots,” defined as areas with particularly high concentrations of species found nowhere else (endemics), have been identified to highlight areas that may need extra attention in conservation planning. The Center for Plant Conservation has identified five plant diversity hotspots within the U.S. (Hawaii, California, Florida, Texas, and the Appalachians).

Because plant diversity is not evenly distributed across the world, the conservation and management workload faced in different regions is also uneven. The resources needed to address conservation work are not equally available among different nations or jurisdictions. Successful stewardship of our plant diversity will require broad recognition of the stake that we all have in these priceless plants and habitats, with the world’s wealthier nations having to contribute more than the poor ones for this cause in order to preserve as high as possible a portion of our world’s biological riches. International cooperation and public-private partnerships focused on the public good are needed to initiate work and sustain progress.

In order to achieve success in plant conservation, it will be necessary to address the general environmental conditions that are threatening the survival of organisms throughout the world. In the largest sense, the factors responsible for the pressure on populations of organisms are the size of the human population, our levels of consumption, and the kinds of technologies that we have selected for use. These in turn lead to habitat destruction, the spread of alien invasive species (including diseases), and the widespread use of harmful technologies. Now it is evident that global climate change is also a major factor contributing to biological extinction, one that must be addressed for success in preserving species overall.

That Was Then; This Is Now

Before we had become aware of the phenomenon of global climate change and its effect on natural habitats, we devised a strategy for conservation that consisted of building parks and other protected areas and taking steps to protect them. We also had learned that we needed to do what we could to halt the spread of aggressive alien plant and animal species outside of their original areas of distribution. When individual kinds of organisms, and particularly plants, seemed unlikely to survive in nature without human intervention, they were brought into cultivation or seed banks where their dried seeds could be kept at very low temperatures and might be expected to remain viable for one or more centuries. Underlying this practice was always the notion that at some future date the plants would be reintroduced in nature and maintain themselves again. In an age of global climate change, however, it is not clear where the plants can successfully be reintroduced, since the habitats themselves are faced with change so pronounced that the plants might not be able to survive even in their former habitats.

Botanical Gardens as Bridges to the Future

Increasingly, botanical gardens may have to be viewed as bridges to the future, looking for appropriate venues for reestablishment when climates have become stable enough to make the reestablishment possible. More than 100,000 of the 300,000 estimated species of plants are currently held in several thousand botanical gardens around the world, but often as samples so limited that they may fall victim to inbreeding in the future. The botanical gardens themselves may not be able to continue to maintain the populations of plants they are cultivating. Thus for the U.S., the National Arbor Day Foundation has shown a northward movement of the nine major horticultural zones (as defined by the numbers and intensity of subfreezing temperatures each winter) of more than 100 miles from 1990 to 2006. In nature, we have recorded changes in blooming times for species and the shift of species ranges to higher latitudes and higher elevations. Linkages between species that are codependant, such as between plants and their pollinators, are showing some disruptions as well. Clearly we are experiencing greater instability and fluctuations in weather patterns that will stress many species. We will see dramatic changes in coastal habitats and the loss of much of our alpine, subalpine, and tundra habitats in North America, and analogous changes in habitats and plant community composition in many other areas.

Global climate change will require changes in our approach to conservation. For example, our concepts of preserve design and management will have to be adjusted to the new realities as they develop. Conservation areas may require more intensive management to maintain the maximum biodiversity possible. Some areas established as conservation reserves may not continue to provide suitable habitat for all of the species currently supported there. Habitat fragmentation will present obstacles to the free movement of species and their ability to shift their geographic range. Some specialized species dependant on restricted, uncommon habitat conditions may be unable to persist where they now occur, although other areas may provide or develop suitable conditions for them.

While challenging, none of these situations by themselves make extinction inevitable for our plant species. What is clear is that we will have to be more strategic and proactive to maintain as many species as possible. We will have to take a much less passive role, and prepare to more directly manage plant diversity and plant communities as we navigate through periods of instability and are able to understand where things may stabilize in the future.

Good Science Has Never Been More Important

We must prepare to act on behalf of plant diversity, and all that it supports. Good science has never been more important, and all botanical disciplines, including systematics, population biology, and ecology have a significant role. We must learn as much as we can about these species and their communities, to understand their basic biology, including their reproductive systems, germination requirements, associated species that maintain essential conditions, pollinators, and seed dispersers. Fortunately most of these species are still accessible and well represented for study.

While great challenges are ahead of us, we are not totally unprepared. Much of the work needed is a continuation of activities already underway in addressing current conservation challenges. Now we must extend and accelerate it dramatically, both at the individual species and the ecosystem level. While the next few decades are critical, if we respond appropriately they also promise to very exciting, expanding the very frontiers of science, our understanding of life on earth, and our ability to sustainably manage it. Doing so is critical to ensuring our own future as a species.

The science of Conservation Biology emerged along with the environmental movement in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It has provided a good foundation in studying natural systems, and integrating multiple scientific disciplines to develop effective restoration approaches. We must continue current restoration efforts, carefully considered within the context of predicted changes in habitat conditions, because robust and healthy species and communities have the greatest chance of adapting and surviving on their own. As we continue to gain experience and information, we will also be more successful in areas where we find we must be more proactive and consciously intervene.

The role of ex-situ conservation will continue to be critical in managing plant diversity. Initiatives such as the Center for Plant Conservation’s National Collection of Endangered Plants, our federal Seeds of Success Program, and the collecting program of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank are already well underway, providing a safety net against interim losses in the wild and living material for future restoration work of both species and habitats. These efforts must be expanded. The cultivation of material suitable for use in restoration or reintroduction in the wild will be helpful, and is giving rise to a new specialty in conservation horticulture. Current research developing techniques for reintroduction into the wild will be invaluable in situations where we must relocate species or fill the gaps of habitat fragmentation to mediate species survival and movements.

Now Is the Time for Action

Now, more than at any time in human history, we are seeing a need for focused action on behalf of our environment, and particularly for plant diversity. There is a convergence of the need for good science and practice, and good stewardship. Scientists and public agencies can provide the information and develop the practices needed. Partnerships of many kinds are needed, between scientists and managers, between governments, and between public and private organizations.

The commitment to stewardship, for both our public and private lands, must come from our citizens. They provide the leadership and consensus building needed to identify shared objectives, establish public priorities, and provide the resources needed for us and for other nations.

Education is fundamental to success in saving our plants and the planet. We must make the wonder and the importance of plant diversity accessible and understandable to the public, whose values and actions will ultimately decide our success or failure.

In this context, botanical art informs on many levels, from the technical to the spiritual and aesthetic. This exhibition illustrates and interprets the power and value of our endangered plants, and will touch and stimulate the concern of many. I commend The American Society of Botanical Artists for their success in having mounted such an important effort and by making the beauty of these endangered plants so evident, helping to enlist many in the important task of preserving the plants that nurture us.

Top banner artwork: Cycas seemannii, Australia, by Rita Parkinson