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