Tag: lessons

In college I had a Botany professor who ended all her exams with a question: Have you thanked a plant today? That always made me smile. As I said a silent “Thank you” to the chlorophyll-laden species of the world, I thought about how the world will not function without plants. For starters, the energy from the sun will not be harnessed to enter living systems. There will be significantly less oxygen and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The planet’s temperature will be higher. Water will not cycle.

Plants have been in our midst ever since we have gained consciousness as a species. Sometime in the Quaternary, one of our ancestors plucked a healthy-looking leaf and started chewing on it, and thus began a relationship—a dependence, really—with them. Plants have since been present in every aspect of our existence: in food, clothing (your favorite sweater is probably cotton), medicine (some potent ones are derived from plant chemicals), and even romance (that rose bouquet you gave last Valentine’s Day.)

As an ecologist who studies plants and their interaction with one another and their environment, I reflect on the existence of these sturdy beings. Though seemingly benign, there is exciting movement in them. We fail to see this because they live in a timescale much slower than ours. The longer you observe them, the more you’ll see how they respond to the same stimuli that we do. There are parallelisms in our actions, but a difference in reactions.