Heart And Flowers

PETER RAVEN The World Is His Garden: Better Tread Carefully

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. --Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Think of it!" says Peter Raven, the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, as he stands beside a table in the rare-book room of the garden's library and reads aloud from the final paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species. "All that difference, elaborately constructed, produced by laws!"

Then he rereads the entire paragraph, which gives one chills, partly for Darwin's understatement. What the author deemed "interesting to contemplate" was nothing less than the world's biological structure, which he (and others) had discovered, and which now, at the end of his monumental study, he quietly celebrated in sublime summation. The "tangled bank" he had initially attributed to an unnamed power, but in the third and subsequent editions, he included God in the evolutionary process. The book now ends on this glorious sentence, over which Raven exults: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

The passage is beloved by Raven because it is a celebration of biodiversity, the most elegant since Genesis, and it is the cause of biodiversity--of maintaining endangered plants and preserving the wilderness--that drives all he has done with the Missouri Garden for nearly 30 years. Rather than being merely a place where pretty flowers are on show (though it is that as well), the garden is a microcosm of the wide green world. It is not a zoo for plant life. The last thing Raven wants is to create a repository for the vegetation that has been destroyed outside the garden.

Thus he rails in speeches against the menace of a "sixth extinction," one unlike the prior five extinction spasms, the last of which came 66 million years ago. Those were brought about by natural phenomena. When it occurs, the sixth mass extinction of living organisms will be brought about by people, by a mushrooming population that has doubled in 40 years, to 6 billion, and by human carelessness and commerce. In the 21st century, which Raven would like to see called "the age of biology," he says we must learn to "master the diversity of living organisms and use the properties of those organisms as a kind of palette to build sustainability."