He already has a demanding day job, running the oldest botanic garden in the US. But for Dr Peter Raven, saving our ecosystems - and, with them, our planet - is the key task, reports Paddy Woodworth, in Missouri
smWhat is a US botanic garden doing in Vietnam? Or Madagascar? Or Kazakhstan? The easy answer might be "collecting plants". But Missouri Botanical Garden, based in St Louis, is much too complex an institution for that answer to tell the whole story. Its involvement in other countries goes deep as well as wide, involving sensitive issues such as sustainable development and the welfare of indigenous peoples. What are you, I ask the garden's director, Dr Peter Raven, some kind of biological multinational? "I think you could use the term," he says. "Like a good multinational, we are an aggregate of people working for the benefit of the individual countries, in synchrony with what they do. We are helping the overall picture in a way that could not be done in any other way."
The overall picture, the really big one, is Raven's great concern. He likes to talk in terms of the whole planet, because, as he sees it, we are all going to sink or swim together over the next century. "The earth is all real estate, and if we are managing it we had better manage it well." The "we" refers not to Americans in particular, about whose world-management abilities he is rather sceptical, but to humanity in general. And although his passions are botany and conservation, he sees people as an essential part of the ecosystem. "There are also a few things, like social justice and global sustainability, that will have to be attended to," he adds wryly.
Raven, who is 69, has been dubbed "a hero for the planet" by Time magazine. He has a very sophisticated mind - Google his 450-plus publications in science journals if you don't take that on trust - but he likes to put things baldly. He wants to get his message across quickly, because he believes we are running out of time and managing our planet pretty badly at the moment.
"We are using up the capacity of the earth faster than it can be replenished," he says. He likes to quote the estimate that, if everyone in the world lived at the standard of industrialised countries, we would already need two more planets to support ourselves.
If Raven were a plant, he might be classified as larger than life, robust and rather florid. He has a rich, honeyed voice that shifts rapidly from humour to hurt and pained irritation at the folly of Homo sapiens. "We continue to depend on a series of ancient, genetically and socially determined habits and attitudes, many of which seem to have been more suitable for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We must adopt new ways of thinking that will serve our descendants well in a world that is crowded beyond imagining."
He argues passionately that this is a unique moment, that decisions taken over the next decade will have an unprecedented effect on the future of life on earth. "What we do now will determine its final state; it can only produce so much. What we are really doing is deciding what the world will look like at that point."
He can marshal an army of statistics to show that our current model of economic development is exterminating species and destroying habitats at a terrifying and accelerating rate. He scathingly dismisses purveyors of "false ecological optimism", such as Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, who insists that, in every sphere of life, "things are getting better".
"Lomborg frequently misrepresents the views of many of the scientists who have analysed these areas. He blithely attacks a series of straw men that he resurrects from the past literature or simply constructs, and then repeatedly exposes his ignorance of facts and critical analyses," Raven wrote in his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2002.
While recognising that Lomborg is right to question the exaggerated claims of some green doomsayers, Raven believes that the evidence for an escalating collapse of biodiversity is very strong indeed. "Two-thirds of the world's fisheries are being harvested beyond sustainability. Over the past half-century we have lost a fifth of the world's topsoil, a fifth of its agricultural land and a third of its forests," he continued in his address, which is shortly to be republished in revised form in Science magazine. He has seen no evidence that changes his analysis over the past three years.
Despite this bleak scenario, he still defines himself as an optimist, because he believes our management style can change for the better. He sees more and more individuals and groups around the world "doing the right thing". But he returns immediately to his theme of urgency: "For better or worse we're in charge, and we only have a certain amount of time."
Raven's commitment to save the world is all the more striking because he has a rather demanding day job. Most botanists would be content, indeed overjoyed, just to run Missouri Botanical Garden, the oldest botanic garden in the US and one of the jewels of its city. Walk around it and you will find a wealth of delightful experiences. There is an extensive and exquisitely calm "wet strolling garden", based on a style dominant in 19th-century Japan. Tucked away beside it is a more intimate Chinese garden, in which the subtle use of rocks, flowing water and trees suggests awesome landscapes in miniature.
Close by, but hidden by the undulating landscape and mature trees, is the Climatron, a big geodesic dome that houses a humid rainforest environment. A cleverly winding path makes it seem larger than it is. You can find cascades and carnivorous flowers, a buttress tree, a talipot palm, an ant plant, a banyan tree and a thicket of cycads. Silver-beaked tanagers and Chinese painted quails feed nonchalantly in the vegetation; a selection of poison dart frogs, in vividly patterned psychedelic colours, are safely confined to an ecological exhibition centre next door.
At the domestic end of the spectrum, there is a centre for home gardening, with 23 sections demonstrating options for homes large and small in the Midwest. If you have a plant with a problem, you can bring it in and discuss it with the staff.
There is an English garden, fine stands of bald cypress and the rare dawn redwood, a neoclassical lily pond and a boxwood maze, a butterfly house and an out-of-town nature reserve. Everything, that is, that you would expect in a front-rank botanic garden.
All this variety, however, is dwarfed by a vast collection of plants away from public gaze, filed away between sheets of paper in Missouri Botanical Garden's herbarium. Between five million and six million specimens, usually including leaves, fruits and seeds, are identified, documented and stored here. About 150,000 more are being added annually. A simple drying process in use for centuries means the specimens will last longer than the paper that enfolds them and the ink that records their details. The latter are now, of course, being digitised.
This is the heart of the garden's research endeavour, receiving and processing new botanical information from around the world. Increasingly, this information has already been lost in its home place. For example, 93 per cent of Madagascar's upland forests have been destroyed over the past half-century. The fragments that remain contain only a fraction of this ecosystem's unique biodiversity.
This means no "reference forest" is left to guide ecologists as to how this devastated region might be authentically restored. The only way they would know what kind of plant communities would be fully appropriate would be to study these records, which list not only botanical detail but also exactly where the tree, plant or moss in question was found. "The reference forest for Madagascar is here," says Jim Miller, the senior curator, gesturing down a long corridor lined with files. "It's not out there in Madagascar any more."
Even as the forests are vanishing, new species arebeing discovered, hundreds every year. If Raven is right about extinction rates and the loss of biodiversity, many of them may soon exist in a Missouri filing cabinet only. In any case, they all contribute to the massive studies undertaken by the garden, such as the monumental Flora of Panama, published in 1987 after 50-odd years of research, or the forthcoming Flora of China, in partnership with Chinese botanists.
Raven insists on the practical applications of this immense academic endeavour. "I don't say we save it to study; that seems very trivial. We save it because biodiversity informs human possibilities for the future." He also keeps his researchers focused on the possibilities of the present. At an early stage of his directorship, "for some reason, almost intuitive, I began to say that if people were working in Peru they might as well live in Peru, which immediately set us apart from most other institutions". So it is not uncommon for a garden staffer to spend 10 years, or even double that, in the same place, becoming intimately acquainted not only with local flora but also with local social conditions. It became evident to many of them that rare plants could be saved only if conservationists tapped into the knowledge of indigenous peoples and supported their right to continue traditional activities on lands targeted for logging and other ecologically disruptive developments.
Decades of experience led Missouri Botanical Garden to establish a center for conservation and sustainable development, which includes among its goals "building capacity by training local people in conservation science" and developing "community programmes aimed at sound local management of natural resources". Its director, Olga Marta Montiel, is a distinguished botanical author (and a former member of the Sandinista cabinet in her native Nicaragua). "We cannot succeed in scientific or conservation aims if we do not help improve the lives of local people," she says. This policy means that most of the garden's staff abroad have been trained on the spot, and many of them have gone on to become leaders in the field in their own countries.
Raven takes tremendous satisfaction in the garden's focus abroad, but he remains concerned about whether his fellow citizens get his message. "I worry about whether people in the US really care about any of this, anything really outside their own circle, their own country."
Nevertheless, Raven has been very successful in persuading rich and influential Americans to donate large sums to support his programmes.
Does he note any change in mindset as he networks in these corridors of power? "Not really, nowhere near what there should be. They need a feeling for the world, other countries. But most Americans have no feeling for the poor people living right in this community, and if you don't have that, if your compassion and your love stop with your family, what hope is there? Zero."
He refuses to end the interview on such a pessimistic note, launching into an anecdote about how his outreach programme to poor inner-city schools in St Louis became the model for the greening of education in post-apartheid Cape Town. Then he rushes off, talking as goes, to catch up with representatives of the Mellon Foundation, whom he has invited to the garden with a view to raising more funds to save the planet.
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IN PRAISE OF GM FOODS
It comes as a surprise to hear a passionate advocate of environmental conservation and biodiversity unequivocally defend the use of biotechnology and genetically modified (GM) food. Peter Raven insists, however, that opposition to the development of GM crops is "emotional, personal, and political".
He argues that there is no scientific evidence that either GM crops or the transmission of their genetic modifications to wild species threatens human health or ecosystems.
Starvation, he says, is the real threat to human health. The scale of this threat creates a moral imperative to increase agricultural productivity. He claims that the resultant rise in yields per acre will mean we can reduce the amount of land dedicated to agriculture. Biodiversity could then flourish in land restored to wild habitat.
He attributes his dual commitment to the environment and to feeding the world to values inculcated "by my Irish Catholic mother". In 2004, he told a conference at the Vatican: "The efforts of organisations such as Greenpeace to block efforts to feed people adequately, by battling biotechnology, are outrageous, scientifically unfounded and should be rejected out of hand by any moral person."
The Irish environmental writer Fr Sean McDonagh SSC, who also attended the conference, argues equally robustly that "our knowledge of the natural world is so poor that we have to be extremely cautious where biotechnology is concerned. And patenting living organisms is immoral. It could be a recipe for famine and disaster". Fr McDonagh points out that assurances from scientists about safety in this field have been repeatedly undermined by new evidence. And he points to major sponsorship of Missouri Botanical Garden by the local biotechnology giant Monsanto as an indication of corporate influence on these questions.
Raven takes the Monsanto reference in his stride: "Every cultural institution in St Louis gets gifts from Monsanto," he says. "There are no strings attached . . . I am against anything which would lead to increasing dependence by the poor on corporations, but many things from GM research can benefit the poor."
Confused? As Fr McDonagh says, even the Vatican is undecided on this issue.