Plant conservation: about human lives too

Natural healing
Conservation is as much about protecting people's lives as plant diversity, according to a new global strategy at Kew Gardens
Juliette Jowit, The Guardian 8 Oct 08;

With one in five people in South Africa living with HIV and Aids, and most of them poor, by custom and necessity many have turned to traditional medicines, putting intolerable strain on the once bountiful supply of plants. These include the cancer bush, the daisy-like wild cineraria, and the sore eye flower, whose monstrous black bulbs were once used by bushmen to poison their arrows but are also used to stop bleeding and to heal wounds.

The looming loss of plantlife has led to a partnership between traditional healers in urban townships around Grahamstown and the genteel calm of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, west London. The result is Africulture, a pilot project to encourage healers to cultivate the 30 most important plants they use, rather than harvest them in the wild. And so far it's working, says Stephen Hopper, Kew's director. "It alleviates the pressure on the wild services and gives people a way to help themselves."

The scheme embodies the priorities of a new 10-year strategy, the Breathing Planet programme, just published by the world-famous botanical gardens: protection and restoration of habitats, a stronger focus than ever on the threat of climate change, and a clearer emphasis on the fact that ultimately their work is to protect people who are dependent on the plants.

This is less a radical new direction, more a natural evolution of Kew's founding principles in 1759, says Hopper. "Now we're less focused on bringing in the world's plants to Kew and developing economic advantage from that, [and more on] forming partnerships with people throughout the world and working collaboratively with them on the science of plants."

Hopper, a plant biologist from Western Australia, who has "described" for science more than 300 species, has that vaguely teasing knack some scientists have of outlining profoundly exciting ideas with the calm of somebody checking catalogue references. He says: " If you look at your meals today, there's a strong possibility that half of what you consumed was plants. If you look at the medicines, there's a reasonable prospect one-third or up to half are derived from plants.

"The fact that we have got not only clean air to breathe but productive soil and clean water to drink we owe to the services plants provide," he adds.

The questions are: "Will one plant do? Do we need the diversity?" continues Hopper rhetorically. Different species are adapted to different habitats; humans cannot know what species will be important in future.

The twin themes of people and environmental threats are introduced from the very first words of Kew's Breathing Planet programme: "People everywhere strive to improve their quality of life. But we are all living on borrowed time, putting far too much pressure on the natural resources on which we depend." The destruction of forests which absorb carbon dioxide and provide food and oxygen to support living creatures and moderate the climate is now one of the world's biggest environmental disasters, it continues.

Faced with such an entrenched, amorphous global problem it's hard to see how Kew can help, but Hopper insists it can contribute to both mitigating the problem by reducing the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to change.

The first three sections of the Breathing Planet programme are about mitigation. Nearly one-fifth of the build-up of CO² emissions comes from deforestation, so the starting point is supporting conservation programmes. Recent successes included Madagascar, where the government committed to trebling protected national parks, and Cameroon, where scientists realised what was thought to be insignificant rainforest is the richest for plantlife in Africa, prompting the government to pledge new nature parks there .

The second part of the strategy is about adaptation: starting with an ambitious pledge to extend the work of the Millennium Seed Bank to collect examples of one in four of the 220,000-430,000 plant species in the world by 2020. There is also more emphasis on growing "locally appropriate species" whether that's reintroducing traditional crops or the Africulture scheme, run jointly with local organisations Garden Africa and Umthathi.

For the final strand of the strategy Kew had an envious look at its more gregarious cousin, the Eden Project in Cornwall, and wants to become visitor friendly for its 1.5m annual guests, recruiting an "army" of several hundred volunteer guides.

"It's difficult for a lay person to break through all the science jargon and understand the excitement and interesting connections and uses, and the fundamental role plants play in our lives, so there has to be an interpretation of the science ... in an engaging way."