Plant conservation Was: Rare plants & seed trade ethics
meneice@att.net (Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:44:47 PDT)

Jim, can I point you to the Center for Plant Conservation headquartered at
the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. Their address is P.O. Box 299,
St. Louis, Mo 63166-0299. Email: http://www.centerforplantconservation.org/. They
will agree with you that this is a terribly complicated problem, but they
and their participating institutions have some very positive results to
report after almost a quarter of a century of effort. Kathryn Kennedy is
the Executive Director and an articulate speaker for the conservation of
plants in peril. Why don't you check it out.
Shirley Meneice, who is prejudiced because she's on their Board.

-----Original Message-----
From: pbs-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:pbs-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org]
On Behalf Of J.E. Shields
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 2:58 PM
To: Pacific Bulb Society
Subject: [pbs] Plant conservation Was: Rare plants & seed trade ethics

I always enjoy reading the discussions about conservation. As Iain and
others point out, it is a terribly complicated problem. Reintroduction of
rare plant species from cultivation into the wild is rarely successful, at
least from the stories I have heard.

If anyone knows any exceptions, I'd certainly like to hear about them.

However, preserving wild habitat, 'in situ' conservation, is also
complicated and expensive. It is by far the most desirable approach -- but
it is only going to succeed in rare, isolated cases. The current high
price of gasoline is being used as an excuse by many politicians (at least
in the USA) for opening nature and ocean preserves to oil drilling. This
is staggeringly short-sighted of them (but they are after all
politicians!) But it shows which way the wind is blowing.

However we go about it, I am absolutely convinced that, in the long run, no
wild plant and animal species (except rats, cockroaches, and dandelions)
will survive without direct human intervention to oversee and manage their
preservation. I am sure it will take every conceivable approach we can
think of to accomplish even a little bit of this.

There is also to be considered the fact that rare species are not
successful species in evolutionary terms, and that humanity continues to
drastically change the evolutionary equation while we discuss this. Even
if humanity were not aggressively attacking the remaining wild areas on
this planet, nature would not preserve all of the genetic diversity we can
still see around us. Biology is change. We are not going to save them
all! An incredible, broad genome project might do some of that, to at
least preserve their memory for as long as computer data files can be
preserved.

I do think we need an intelligent, carefully thought out, approach to
preserving plant life. the big organizations like The Nature Conservancy
and the WWF succeed only by "saving" pandas, tigers, and elephants. The
general public of the world could scarcely care less about the fate of some
odd small bulbs in Chile, even though it is of real importance to us in
this and similar groups.

There is a huge amount of work to do in the area of botanical
conservation. It won't happen on the scale of the well-publicized (and
apparently not succeeding, as far as I can see) campaigns to save tigers in
Siberia and India, for instance.

Arguing over 'in situ' vs. 'ex situ' conservation is a 100% sure way to
save almost nothing! The fact that well-meaning but ignorant people can
screw up proves nothing except that it is all going to be a very, very
difficult job to do well.

Jim Shields

*************************************************
Jim Shields USDA Zone 5 Shields Gardens, Ltd.
P.O. Box 92 WWW: http://www.shieldsgardens.com/
Westfield, Indiana 46074, USA
Tel. ++1-317-867-3344 or toll-free 1-866-449-3344 in USA

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