Posts tagged with “native plants”
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Could Plants Become Extinct?

Did you know there were so many issues with plants? Plants for agriculture, medicine, industry, and maintaining the environment for all life on Earth. All the same issues again for wildlife, animals. Nature is a circle that relies on itself. When something breaks it may never be able to function again. Luck and timing are so important with nature, plants and animals. It can be just luck that evolution finds a way but evolution takes a lot of time to get there. People need to stop abusing what we have and appreciate it a lot more.

The biggest factors threatening plant species with extinction are the destruction of habitats for farming (31%) - such as palm oil production and cattle ranching, deforestation for timber (21%) and construction of buildings and infrastructure (13%).

Climate change is currently a smaller factor - 4% - but is likely to grow. “I suspect we won’t actually see the full impact until 30 years down the line as it takes so long for plants, especially trees, to produce their offspring,” said Willis. One important crop that is already suffering is coffee, as rising temperatures make the beans impossible to grow and increase diseases in key countries such as Ethiopia.

Genetic diversity in our foods is becoming poorer and poorer.

Many important crops have been bred over thousands of years to produce high yields, but have lost genes that help fight pests and cope with changes in climate. Bananas, sorghum and aubergines are among those with very little genetic diversity, making them highly vulnerable to new threats. Finding wild relatives of such crops means new, more robust varieties can be bred.

“Now, with the global challenges [of] population size, land-use change, plant diseases and pests, there is an increasing urgency to find and conserve crop wild relatives,” said the report. “Having access to this large and diverse genetic pool is essential if we are to furnish crops with the valuable traits that enable resilience to climate change, pests and diseases, and ultimately underpin global food security.”

The importance of plants for the development of new medicines was revealed in the report, which found that 57% of the 31,000 species with known uses were those from which drugs were derived. More than 5,500 are human foods, while there are 2,500 poisons and 1,400 with “social uses”, such as tobacco and cannabis.

However, when plants are transplanted into alien environments they can cause great damage and become invasive. “The costs of invasive species have been estimated at nearly 5% of the world economy and their impact on the UK economy alone is approximately £1.7bn every year,” said the report.

The illegal trade in threatened plants is also a problem, the report found. At Heathrow, one of the the world’s busiest airports, officers made at least one seizure every day on average, with 42% of the finds being orchids.

Source: One in five of world's plant species at risk of extinction | The Guardian

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We are part of the natural world, but we as a species are unique in that…

We are part of the natural world, but we as a species are unique in that we have the ability to be aware of how we fit into things. We can intervene. That may be our blessing and our curse – to live with the duality that we are somehow both natural and unnatural.

I will admit my human interest – I’d be happier knowing I lived in a country where beavers swam in the rivers and far north, a few lynx and wolves padded through the recovering woods of the highlands. I’d like the crayfish infestations to be controlled, and I’d like to see species other than green parakeets flocking over my street.

Some mistakes of the past can be put right; the effects of invasive species can be negated, and long-absent species that were once part of Britain’s natural world can be reintroduced. I don’t advocate causing human suffering for the sake of giving nature a leg-up back to where it may once have been; but I do believe there is a way to mediate between the needs of those with competing interests for the land, to instill what’s left of nature with a bit more diversity, and the knock-on effect from that, excitement.

Then it’s a case of seeing what happens when we allow this ambiguity in.

And perhaps I’ll just have to learn to live with the parakeets.

via Parakeets and Purity | The Learned Pig.

How adaptable is nature and should we think we can allow nature to fix or heal from our decisions? I think the idea that endangered species should be left to fade is valid, but not completely. It depends on whether the danger is natural, or man-made. We should not re-create the planet to suit ourselves and expect nature to cater to our needs alone. Nature may make changes, adapt and struggle but we should be part of that - not set ourselves above it.