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Q & A/UWP

Q&A UWP is an uncensored roughcut transcript summarizing individual, magazine, newspaper, radio, and television interviews, answers to the frequently asked questions about the Useful Wild Plants, Inc., the BIG publication project, other UWP projects, the mission, and the people involved. Since the questions are still coming, the material here is presented roughly in the order the questions have been asked and answered. Undoubtedly you will find redundancy and possibly worse, but people continue to ask for this piece, even in this roughcut form, so here goes. Be forewarned. And if we haven’t answered your questions, please let us know.

What is so urgent about completing the Useful Wild Plants Project in the near future? You said you think it is important to get it finished in the next six to seven years.

When the Useful Wild Plants Project was kicked off in 1971 as the prototype tool for the comprehensive conservation and management of wild plant resources, my co-author, Marshall Johnston and I believed we had ample time before environmental pressures became too great to complete this work and get it into use as a conservationist’s bible, where it could make a substantial difference in the stewardship of our plants and our planet. After over three decades of work, Marshall Johnston, Lynn Marshall, and I now wonder if we started early enough. Lately, especially among conservationists like Robert Potts of the Nature Conservancy, I’ve heard the phrase “window of opportunity” used to underscore that there is only so much time to salvage precious areas like South Padre Island or the Davis Mountains. In the case of the Useful Wild Plants Project, we are facing an entire wall of “windows of opportunity” that are about to slam shut. And many of them, as I will explain, have to do with people.

First, the expertise needed to accomplish this work is vanishing and it is not being replaced. A whole generation of great botanists who can assist with and enrich this study are dying off. We are losing to age and death not only many of the classically trained botanists of Texas, but also a large group of exceedingly knowledgeable people whose professional and personal lives were lived in the field in the interest of horticulture, environmental protection, education, scientific exploration, and personal passion for the natural world. With their passing, vast libraries of knowledge are lost. Lynn Lowrey, Barton Warnock, and Benny Simpson, to name a few, died in just the past few years. The physical abilities of others such as the Big Thicket’s Geraldine Watson have declined to the point that they have given up field work. We are recording as much of their knowledge as we can and incorporate it in our work. Those who remain are committed to assist us in our work.

Second, the new generation of botanists is not trained in economic botany or field research. Botany has changed significantly since 1971. The new breed of “botanists” is trained in molecular studies and few venture into the field to work with living plants. To them, plants are more an abstraction than a part of the planetary support system. This means that the responsibility of knowing the flora, the plants, their habitats and their uses will increasingly fall to others – to us and to those we can touch through the Useful Wild Plants Project. But without a base of knowledge and without people to teach them and pass on experience and information, these people would have to start from scratch. The Useful Wild Plants Project will fill that void.

Third, even the existing project staff is now middle-aged. No one else can replace our some ninety years of total experience and this knowledge and skill needs to be passed on soon.

Fourth, laypeople, those who gained intimate knowledge of the many uses of plants over many years and from an unbroken line of ancestors, are vanishing. The last generation of those knowledgeable of plant medicines and other commodities are rapidly dying off. Just as it was with Native Americans, who lost untold volumes of knowledge during colonization and absorption into contemporary American culture, pressures in the Third World are forcing subsistence cultures to abandon their plant-based knowledge. This is occurring on a massive scale around the globe even as we talk. In 1996, Useful Wild Plants began the cross-cultural “Save the Human Libraries” project to capture as much of people’s plant information as possible. Students from the University of Texas at Austin have worked with us in this program to interview and record the knowledge of Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Anglo Americans, as well as Native Americans of Texas and northern Mexico.

Fifth, land-use patterns are changing rapidly and resource consumption is accelerating. It is easy to become jaded by the unrelenting media statistics of doom, BUT it is true that plant and animal species ARE being exterminated at an unprecedented rate around the world for a variety of reasons, most of which are a direct result of expanding development—expanding development which makes a clean sweep of all native life forms with a finely honed bulldozer blade backed up by highly potent herbicides and pesticides. The vestigial wild native areas in this region finally come under fire when traditional farming and ranching practices cease providing a sufficient livelihood and landholders and eventually their heirs are forced to sell to developers or “gentleman ranchers,” who often “improve” by bulldozing first and asking questions later. It isn’t enough that they spend their own money to do this—our own government provides incentives. Current U. S. Department of Agriculture programs encourage widespread brush clearing. We’ve seen the results of this in our own family. Wiley Cheatham, deceased in September 2000, who qualified for the USDA program, received enormous subsidies to bulldoze native woods and brush on his ranches in Dewitt County. There are long term problems with this that these land owners fail to anticipate. The trashy brush species like mesquite, false willow, and huisache that take over after the native cover is removed become a perpetual maintenance expense. I think UWP can be a big help in this area by identifying and marketing new alternative crops for diversification from our native flora. Hopefully we can make a difference before the window hits the sill.

What is the most important thing you need to finish the rest of “Useful Wild Plants…” ?

Funding. And well-trained people. And the two go together. When the funding is available the people will follow. We have some wonderful volunteers, but without salaries, people can’t work hard enough long enough to get everything done as fast as it needs to be done. Also, many of the skills that it takes to produce this kind of work require a time consuming learning period before the person is proficient enough to really make a difference. Other similarly scaled projects like The Handbook of Texas, Encyclopedia Britannica, and The Flora of North America have permanent staff members numbering from 20 to 150 or more and they are all paid.

If the work is to be finished within a reasonable time frame, say six to seven years, then it will be important to develop a funding consortium. Since each volume will cost somewhere around 850K, we are looking for several foundations, corporations, and individual donors who can donate the funding for one or several volumes each, presumably spread over several years. We hope that sales and contributions from foundations giving in the smaller donation range and UWP memberships will fill the gaps.

Why hasn’t this kind of study ever been done before? After all these years it just seems like it would have been done by now.

I don’t know and no one else seems to know either. It seems perfectly obvious that it is much needed and should have been done long ago for every region of the world—it may be that few people willingly and deliberately put themselves into a subsistence situation like we did back in 1971. Advanced cultures seem to be, with few exceptions, consistently blind to this enormous body of knowledge. We took the first 30 crops developed for cultivation, said “thank you very much,” and then turned our backs on the earth’s other 275, 000 plant species. There have been a number of small regional ethnobotanical studies, but none of them comprehensive, none that integrate all the uses of a given species. Drury’s The Wealth of India completed in the mid 1940s was a multi-volume treatment but was far from comprehensive. There is a project ongoing now in Sweden that may approach what we’re doing but it is for a very small region. With eleven zones of North American intersecting in Texas, this State represents a substantial part of the flora of the United States and Mexico.

You’ve talked about getting and keeping the right people. Who are the “right people” and why is it so important to keep them through the project?

Because this project requires the integration of several major sciences and thinking in an interdisciplinary style, academicians trained within the limits of one science often are not a good fit on the project team. When we do recruit the “right” people, it is often impossible to keep them because up to this point we have been unable to pay at an acceptable level. We have had several really capable individuals who were willing to work at a lower pay scale and who helped us make significant progress, but we have lost them because we ran out of money. Once laid off these highly skilled and trained people always move on to better-paying jobs and don’t come back. This is a compounded setback to the project because then we lose more time and incur more expenses to find and train the new staff. A major objective after the completion of the next volume is to obtain all the funding required to finish the work before the next hiring phase so we can provide incentives to keep these experienced and well-trained people. For-profit projects don’t go forward until all the funding is in place, and it doesn’t make good sense in this case either to go beyond a certain point without enough money to finish the job.

What is so important about having a regional economic botany reference for this part of the world? Isn’t this too “regional” for all this effort?

First, except for this work, there are no truly comprehensive regional economic botany works anywhere else in the world—at least to our knowledge. There are some multi-volume works such as The Wealth of India published in the 1940s, but nothing the scale of this project. For those who would criticize this work as too localized, this work may seem “regional” at first glance, but it is really the first step in producing a comprehensive worldwide information base. When we treat a plant in this work the treatment is complete on a worldwide scale. We include all uses for each species wherever it occurs, so once complete the work is done for anyone anywhere in the world who wants to apply the data. We believe that once this work is better known it will be used as a prototype to finish out regions throughout the world.

Another important reason for using this region as a prototype is that eleven very different environmental zones intersect in Texas thus representing much of the flora of Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Central America. Many of these zones reach to the edges of the continent, as far north and west as Alaska and as far north and east as Newfoundland. Many Plains plants in this region reach as far north as Canada and plants of the Chihuahuan desert and the Southern Rio Grande Plains extend far into Mexico. A percentage of these plants even reach to the southern portions of South America. Also, many plants of this region are found in the Indies and others have been taken to Eurasia, Australia, and Africa and naturalized and studied and used there. We are confident that this project will jump-start the similar kinds of works in other regions once completed, made available and marketed.

Haven’t the wild plants of North American already been thoroughly studied?

No. We’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to knowing about plants anywhere on Earth. Also, people tend to have a “grass is greener on the other side of the political boundary” mentality, so we tend to think that anything we see every day under our feet can be forgotten or we would already know everything there is to know about it, and that anything in another country used by another group has to be more important and hold more potential. But historically, the vast botanical diversity of North America is one of the major reasons that many of the people came here, whether it was 15,000 years ago across the Bering Straight or 300 years ago across the Atlantic. Unfortunately EuroAmericans, for the most part, took the crop plants already developed by Indian Americans and said “thank you very much;” they blew off the great potential of the remaining flora and proceeded to clear land for crops and cities. We’re still doing the same thing. North America has an incredible array of plant species, and Texas is situated in such a way that it cuts across a dozen major botanical zones. Its position is why Texas is an ideal place to do a pioneering economic botany and ethnobotanical study of the plants of a region. Not only does Texas share zones and plant species with New England, Mexico, the Southeast, the Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southwest, it is the western, eastern, northern, and southern extensions of the ranges of many species; thus many of these populations are adapted to conditions that the larger populations are not, making them very valuable members of the gene pool because they are tolerant of different conditions.

Shouldn’t we be directing all of our attention and funding to threatened rainforests?

We should be directing our attentions to all parts the world with great emphasis on threatened hot spots, but we should not ignore our own flora simply because it doesn’t seem as exotic and mysterious as the plants of a foreign land. A plant you don’t know anything about, a plant that hasn’t been looked at scientifically or for its potential as a new food, a new medicine, a new renewable fiber crop, is just as mysterious even if it is under your own feet. We label things “weeds” if they grow in our own area, but we say they might be the “cure for cancer“ if they grow elsewhere. While we romanticize distant places we ignore massive loss and destruction of species and habitats right around us.

Do we really need to know “that much” about plants?

Well, you can help answer that question. How much do you value every article of goods you possess—your clothes, your shoes, your wrist watch, the chair you are sitting in, even the gas you burned to drive over here. You cannot even form metal to make your car without organic (plant based) compounds or derivatives to provide the heat to melt them. Everything either comes from a plant, is kept alive by plants, or is created with the help of a plant. In short, we are alive because of plants. Without them, obviously, we die. It seems that without this knowledge we are every more rapidly eradicating our biological life support system and in a very real sense racing toward the edge of a very high cliff.

Can’t we get all of this information from other places?

No. If you wanted to get just some of the information contained in Useful Wild Plants… you’d have to visit a hundred libraries, buy several hundred books, delve into people’s private rare books collections, go through a thousand journals, magazines, and newsletters, spend thousands of hours processing plants and doing experiments, drive close to a million miles, and walk across deserts, up and down mountains, and manage not to drop several camera cases in the river. The hardest part of all if you were to try to get this information some other way would be to interview and record all the people we have worked with since 1971 who are now dead, people who spent their lives studying plants, whether it was one county, like Oza Hall of Newton County, Lynn Lowrey, who worked throughout the Southeast and Mexico, or Barton Warnock, who worked over the Trans-Pecos Mountains and Chihuahuan Desert in his 81 years. We’ve interviewed many knowledgeable and experienced people from many cultures and ethnic groups. Most of these folks aren’t going to write down what they know and get it published somewhere, and most of their descendents aren’t learning what these people have spent a lifetime learning. We call this the “Save the Human Libraries Project.”

Why will this be useful to scientists, me, my kids, average folks, anybody?

For the sciences, the encyclopedia contains a synthesis of all the available scientific research on each plant, but the intent of the writing is to reach a wide audience crossing all related sciences as well as the general public. It does contain the experiments of medical science and the latest on chemical components but we try hard to deliver it in a style palatable to any reader. Also, botanical literacy will be essential to the next generation of scientists. The work is brimming with interesting projects and information. It can be used by teachers to work up class projects, it can be used by scientists in many fields to take them in other directions and inspire new research, and it can teach you what the tasty green things in your yard are so you can eat them for dinner instead of mowing your lawn.

What is left to do to finish the “Useful Wild Plants…” encyclopedia project?

Well, it boils down to text, photos, and maps — then of course production jobs like page layout, indexing, editing, and so on, but the BIG project work is in the first three categories, the same thing most authors have to deal with on a smaller scale.

Manuscript: The text for six volumes was completed by 1990 and is being updated just before each one goes into production. Of course Volume 1 was released in 1996, Volume 2 arrived in 2001, and volume 3 and 4 are on the way. That leaves two more of the easier volumes (5 and 6) to produce and publish. The last ones are about 25% done and altogether will need several years of round the clock grind in writing the text, without any distractions, to have ready for the editor. And that’s assuming we can get some funding to build up the staff. The last big writing marathon occurred in the late 1980s and I (Scooter Cheatham) wrote through the alphabet from A to Z, selecting out all the “magnum” genera like oak and yucca and finished them first. Then Lynn Marshall, Jesse Sublett, and I went back through and completed everything else from A to the end of “M” before the funding ran out and Jesse left for Hollywood to become a novelist and screenwriter. Since then we’ve been updating and pushing through production for the whole thing.

Photographs: In 1988 we had photographed 80% of the species we expected to cover, but with the rise in popularity of native landscaping and research in other use areas, the total count of species we are documenting has risen too. It would help a lot to have a couple of photographers working full time for a couple of years to finish this off while Lynn, some writers, and I finish off the last part of the manuscript. Now, because we have to publish a volume or two at a time, Lynn and I race around between other work to pick up the straggler species still to be photographed. We’ll always miss a few, but we did pretty well with Volume 1 — we only missed five or six. Many people don’t realize that a lot of these plants have never been photographed before and that the photographs we have taken are the only ones in existence. We estimate that about 30% of the species have never been photographed before.

Mapping: Although we’ve had some good volunteers over the years who help with research for the draft maps, this work typically goes pretty slow and one of the principals must still go back over most of the maps and make significant changes. What we really need is a couple of trained people who can stay on the job for the years it will take to get the remaining several thousand maps in shape. We got some help on maps for Volume 2 and 3 and the first part of Volume 4 from Independent Studies students from UT Austin, but this also stretched out over several years because the work is very intermittent and students only work for a semester. Maps for Volume 2 and 3 were sent out for review by a dozen botanists throughout the US and Mexico and then they still have to be checked by reviewing herbarium collections and reviewing previously written plant range information in the published works. Most of the map work from Volume 5 on remains to be done, and entails creating the draft maps, having them reviewed by botanists around the U.S. and Mexico, and rendering the final maps in Corel or Illustrator.

What are the jobs on the project that only Lynn and you could do? What do you two have to do to insure that the project could be finished if for some reason you weren’t around?

On the encyclopedia proper, some parts of the text couldn’t be done by anyone else because we have experiences that only we can render because of our three decades of research. The rest of the text could be written by others so long as we work closely with them. I’d like to think other photographers could handle most of the photography, but those people haven’t materialized yet. The final volume, which will be a guide to the whole work, will require our input because it will set the tone for the entire project. There are a handful of artists who could produce the drawings and end papers of the remaining volumes. The design and layout are already set with the first couple of volumes. We have also prepared a production notebook intended as a backup in case we are not available for training. We would run better if we were on site to coach new employees and for quality control but the important thing is someone else could do it if it had to be done that way. In other areas of leadership and running the organization, someone else could take over this, but it would take some time. There is also the monumental work of running an organization once the course is set. We have a whole staff in mind for other jobs complete with organizational charts —if we had the funding.

Why aren’t you a for-profit corporation instead of a non-profit corporation?

The high front end costs of producing this kind of archival, comprehensive, educational-research work were prohibitive for the authors as individuals, and much too long a return for investors, and there was the question of whether sales to the current generation of buyers would support the first printing of the work. That is no basis for a for-profit business. When we started the work in 1971, Marshall Johnston and I saw the long range need for this work, but the subject did not have the popular support then that it is beginning to gain now. We believed society would one day embrace the work as a commodities, foods, and pharmaceutical survival reference, but possibly not for a long time, even several decades. I still believe the real audience for this project hasn’t been born yet. So most of the people who will really understand why we need to make better and wiser use of plants will be born in the twenty-first century. But if we don’t collect the knowledge and information into one unified place now, it will disappear and be gone by the time those people come along.

It is more cost effective to produce the encyclopedia quickly or stretch it out over time?

It is much more cost effective to finish the encyclopedia as quickly as possible. Once a production team is trained in very particular ways to prepare the components that are unique to this work, it saves considerable money and time to move from beginning to end. The problem with production at this time and in the past is that there are too few people doing too many things, and it is virtually impossible for two people to gain momentum when they constantly have to switch roles. A team of eight highly skilled staff could get the encyclopedia done in 6 to 7 years for between $8 and 9 million (it was $6 million in 1995—inflation has changed that). At the present rate with only two people working, and pro bono at that, and volunteers putting in time, the project could take another 50 years and cost many times more. So you see, the only feasible way to finish the encyclopedia is to raise a substantial amount of funding and use it to accelerate production.

How are sales going compared to your projections?

Sales are going very well for a reference of this kind, with over 1200 copies of Volume 1 sold by 2001, and that’s without a distributor and with only one direct mail campaign, and by word of mouth. We could increase sales considerably with a consistent marketing effort.

How do you market the book?

The web, several bookstores, word-of-mouth, and one direct mail campaign. For the direct mail campaign we produced all the marketing materials in-house and sent out 25,000 pieces to several carefully targeted mailing lists. We track where our orders come from and figure that this mailing alone has brought in over 600 orders — that’s better than a 2.4% return, which is very high for direct mail, where a 1% return is considered very good. The other purchases have come from booksignings and from having booths at trade shows — we just did the 4th annual Texas Book Festival and sold six copies the first day and then got more orders from it the week after. Word of mouth is good too. A lot of people contact us because somebody told them about it or they saw someone else’s copy. We also have people register their books. They actually fill out a card and send it in with their address. That way, no matter where they buy it, we can get in touch with them and sell them the next volume. We make more money that way. The greatest marketing expense will be getting people to buy Volume 1. The next ones will sell themselves. And so far all of this is done without a distributor.

Why don’t you use a distributor? Wouldn’t you sell more?

Too big a financial loss for this kind of book. Distributors want a 55% discount, which means we’d have to sell it to them at less than what it costs us to print them. They also want to buy a bunch of books and be able to return them for a refund, and then turn around and order more. If we sold through distributors, still charging our retail price of $125, they would expect to pay only $56.25 per unit. That doesn’t cover our costs, and they’d make all the profit. We are charging $125 so that it is affordable by regular people and not just libraries and institutions. If we were to use distributors, we would have to charge a lot more and that would price it out of range of most of our target audience.

Aren’t most of your buyers libraries?

No. Most of our buyers are people. Individuals buy a lot more books than libraries and organizations do, though a lot of sales do come from libraries – some of the better known academic libraries that have it include Harvard, Yale, The University of Texas, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Texas A&M, and Rice. But a lot of the library buyers are high school and middle school libraries. That’s very encouraging, because it means we have the potential of reaching kids and teachers.

What happens to the money you make from book sales?

It all returns to UWP. When UWP is able to launch a real marketing campaign and, by extension, we are able to print and sell more than 5,000 copies, some portion of the proceeds will be assigned to revising and reprinting the next edition of the encyclopedia and to getting the database online. With current print runs the profit margin sits at just over break-even. The first priority is to use the proceeds to establish a revolving printing fund so that the encyclopedia can be updated and a new edition can be printed later.

How much does it cost to create each volume?

In today’s market around $850,000 assuming that we produce all of the volumes on the 6 to 7 year track. Much more if the cost is spread out over many years; the rate of inflation also has to be figured in, and the fluctuation of paper prices has a major impact on production costs.

What are these costs?

By far the largest cost , some 71%, is people—brain power. This includes the people need for completing the writing, mapping, photography, scanning, and page layout; contract production services such as editorial and indexing. Production costs run around 10% (negatives, page proofs, printing binding, and freight). Marketing and adverstising run 5% and equipment and supplies, travel, member services, occupancy, communication, consumables, insurance and fixtures and educational programs make up the remaining part of the budget.

I was a Species Sponsor for your equipment fund drive and I saw in my newsletter that you just bought the drum scanner you were trying to get, and also put in a computer network. What effect will all this equipment have on the production and the project?

A huge effect—a substantial savings in cost and time. Not to mince words, it makes the project feasible. We paid $30,000 for the printer of Volume 1 to scan the slides and print page proofs, and the costs have jumped to $45,000 since Volume 1 was done. Multiply that out and you have a direct cost to the project of at least $45K per volume times eleven, or half a million dollars. That’s not all. In the production of Volume 1, the printer had great difficulty getting the color correctly reproduced. Normally, the publisher needs to see two to three press proofs. It took us eight separate proofs with the printer consistently not following detailed written directions. We lost a year just on proofing. There were other problems that caused printing delays, but at least we can be in control of this issue now and will greatly speed things up once we are up to speed. It is slowing production down right now because we have to learn one more process, but it will pay off in the end. Altogether, when you consider all the productive time we lost with Volume 1, I’m sure we will save at least a million dollars in total costs and get better quality. And thanks for your support. Contributions such as your make a big difference.

I understand that you spent six months on something called “color management” when you were setting up to do the scanning for Volume 2. Won’t this add a lot of time to each volume?

Yes and no. For Volume 2, we did spend six months in setting up our color management workflow because this is something we had never done before, but for the remaining volumes it will mean years of time savings. Because we took this time now, we have fingerprinted the printer’s press and set up our color proofer to match their color. Now we can make color adjustments on the fly as we scan and simulate the printer’s press.

If the printing company were doing the scanning it would have taken them at least six months to scan, print proofs, send them to us for critiquing, get them back and make the changes, and send us second proofs. Volume 1 took eight proofs and more than a year to achieve acceptable scans from the Volume 1 printing company. It wasn’t really a delay then, and in the future we can do the scanning and our proofing in a lot less time. This was a six-month time investment that will pay off in much shorter production times down the road.

How long have you (SC & LM) been working pro bono?

Off and on the whole project—so most of 30 years. We started out pro bono in 1971, received some intermittent grants from 1977 through the mid-1980’s and then went completely pro bono in 1988 so that all funding could be directed to printing and operations.

How can you two work this way? Why do you do it?

We take on some outside work, such as landscape design, architecture (I’m [Scooter] also an architect), bio-remediation, and land consultation projects, though it is hard to schedule outside work during the photography season from March through November and when the writing or production is in full force. And when we are writing, we’ll spend 12 to 14 hours a day at the computer. We also live cheap and have a couple family members (Sheryl Cheatham and Jane Marshall) who also believe in the importance of this work. They have been willing to shoulder more than their share of family expenses while we move this project to the next stage. And they both contribute a lot of time in other ways to the project. Sheryl is the UWP treasurer and handles all of the financial reporting. She also does a lot of other volunteer work at UWP, like trade shows, preparing food for our wild foods dinners, and our big mailings. Jane also pitches in whenever we need help, especially when we have a big wild foods dinner coming up, and helps out on anything else that needs doing. She used to be a lot more active at UWP until diabetes damaged her vision and can’t see as well to do close work and had to stop driving.

But you still haven’t answered, “Why do you do it?” Scooter?

Well, it needs to be done. And while the plant kingdom has far too few advocates in our culture, ultimately the need I’m talking about is directed to human interests. History indicates that a repetitive pattern of large civilizations is to forget its roots, overconsume, and crash. Once people are physically disconnected from their commodity base, they, that is the cultural mind, mentally disconnect as well. Since we go to Wal-Mart, Eckerds, Safeway, Macdonald’s, Starbucks, and so on to shop, and not to the back pasture like people did even a few generations ago, most people don’t really know where any of the resources they are devouring come from. Since the resources keep on showing up just like the sun rises every day, there really seems to be no reason to worry. But there is. Or at least there is reason for concern. While some people would argue that paving the landscape obliterates opportunities for “inspirational experiences in the wilderness,” what is even more important is that it saws away at the limb we are sitting on. When you cut deep enough the limb will just fall, as it has for previous civilizations like the people of Chaco Canyon or the Mayans or civilizations of the Middle East. Maybe it is just easier to read about the collapse of other cultures than it is to effect a change in our own patterns. Anyway, I would prefer to be part of a solution and for the last thirty years I’ve been working on this information base—yes, much of the time without financial compensation—so we can better educate ourselves about why we need to keep our plant partners in survival happy, well, and alive on the planet, as well as tap into a massive economic resource for a hundred thousand new commodities.

Lynn?

Without meaning to sound fatalistic, if we keep killing off the plant world, whether it is populations of one species, an entire species, or habitats with many species, we will finally tip the seesaw we are on—the one where we’re on one end and the environment is on the other holding us up—and hit bottom, hard, perhaps permanently. This is what I believe and I’m not a radical environmentalist. I like to drive around in my car, eat good food, wear nice clothes, and watch a good movie as much as the next person. But somewhere in my education, and I’m not sure where, I understood that my survival as a warm-blooded, living, breathing creature depended on a whole bunch of other organisms, and that I needed them to survive a whole lot more than they needed me, and that there is a limit to the amount of change the earth can take before it is changed too much to sustain us humans. I grew up playing outside and digging in the dirt and growing flowers with my grandmother and knowing where things came from. Most kids now grow up with a more urban orientation, even kids growing up in the country, but that doesn’t mean they’re less dependent on the environment for survival, it just means that they don’t know they’re dependent on it and they don’t see where their support system is. If the foundation of your home is hidden from view by siding and shrubbery, it’s still there even if you don’t see it, but then the slab cracks and the house breaks up and the roof leaks and the pipes burst and you still can’t see what caused the problems because you still don’t realize that your house sits on a foundation. Life in the 1990s and the next millennium is the same on a much larger scale. The environment is our foundation and we’re letting it crack apart and there aren’t yet enough people who are doing enough preventive maintenance and enough repairs. So I see environmental education as very important. And plants are one of the most easily ignored parts of environmental education. Pandas are endearing. Elephants are imposing. Bald eagles are patriotic. Baby seals being clubbed for their pelts wrenches your heart. But “plants are everywhere and what good are they anyway?” is still a prevalent attitude, even among people who are in the environmental education field. But plants are the basis of life for everything -- us, animals, other species in the web -- and we can’t ignore their importance. That’s why I got involved in this project and that’s why I stay involved in it.

How fast could the encyclopedia be finished if you had enough money and adequate staff?

6 to 7 years.

I’ve looked at your “Audience Page” that lists all the disciplines and professions that you say your work could be used by. How can so many different people use it? They’re all so different.

Useful Wild Plants covers a lot of different subjects and interests. That’s one of the attributes that makes it unique. All these different disciplines and professions have become very specialized. It isn’t easy for them to draw on the work of people in other professions. Their journals are highly specialized. Their meetings are highly specialized. Their contacts are highly specialized. They don’t have a way to take in information from other professions. This organization emphasizes the productive interaction between and among disciplines. About the time this project was getting started, the term “interdisciplinary” was being bantered around. It means that interaction between disciplines leads to more rapid discoveries and accelerated productivity.

What disciplines of science can use your work to target research projects?

You name it. All the sciences, except perhaps astronomy, and I’m not so sure about that, are involved in economic botany whether they are directly aware of it or not. We have an extensive audience page, if you care to look it over, that lists most of them. Right now, because of current trends, the one people think of first is pharmacy. Undoubtedly plants were the basis of our earliest medicines and still make up many of our most important ones. We’ve barely tapped them as a source of pharmaceutical agents and we have not done much with North American plants either. Most of the work of pharmaceutical companies test only for a narrow range of chemicals so their analyses are typically very superficial.

What commodity manufacturers will be interested in this project for commercial purposes?

If you can name a use there are plants to meet the need. There are really far too many to discuss here—we estimate conservatively that 100,000 new products could be generated from this project. As an example: plants contain oils and waxes that can supplement, and eventually replace, petroleum products. Plants made all the oil in the first place and we really have no choice but to eventually go back to the source. As another example, a cosmetics manufacturer interested in new natural ingredients for lipstick could consult the Alluse Database for wax, oil, and pigment-producing species suitable for further study. More details are provided in the Encyclopedia about annual production, characteristics, and chemical components. Candelilla (Euphorbia antisyphillitica), of West Texas and Mexico, is an example of a plant having such commercial application, and greater commercial potential.

What about landowners? My family has a ranch that we want to restore and improve for wildlife management but we don’t know much about the vegetation. How would your work to help us?

For one thing, it will help you identify what’s there and what else could or should be in the area that you would want to restore. It will be helpful in implementing conservation and population standards, setting seasonal hunting limits and land use, and maintaining the optimum wildlife populations in an area. It would tell you which plants are especially important in the diet of the animals there and which plants are intruders and should be removed. If you have horses or cattle, you would be interested in any potentially toxic plants that your animals might be grazing on, so you could find out what the toxic plants are, the symptoms they cause, and what treatments are used.

Okay, my land is in the arid Trans-Pecos near Fort Stockton and my family has property in the Texas Panhandle north of Amarillo. There’s nothing out there, so there can’t be any native plants with potential benefits for us on our properties, right?

That’s not really true. It is true that you have a different flora from landowners in other parts of the state, but every area has its own unique potential. Right now we are helping Ogallala Down, a company producing alternative anti-allergenic stuffing for pillows, comforters, jackets, and sleeping bags, and a flotation substitute from milkweed down. Herb Knudsen, a former president of Standard Oil, is the owner and runs the operation and has asked us to help the company find off-season floss substitutes The two species Ogallala is using right now, Asclepias speciosa and Asclepias syriaca, are fall fruiting species, so Knudsen has only a fall crop to work with. By the way, we have A. speciosa growing in the Texas Panhandle, so your family could already participate in the economy being passed down to local landowners by Ogallala Down. Knudsen’s problem though, is that he wants to keep up production throughout the year and to do that he needs a spring crop. Well, guess what, because of our incredible diversity here in Texas, we have many spring-fruiting milkweeds and Texas growers could have a unique niche in that market once we get the fibers tested and approved for Knudsen’s product.

Now back to your area in West Texas. Another limitation with Knudson’s milkweed crops from Asclepias speciosa and Asclepias syriaca is that the morphology of the plant limits the amount of floss that can be produced on one acre. Both species mushroom out at the top and require quite a bit of space, even though they both put up a single stem. In these two species, the pods are distributed outward along the branches over a wide area. There is, however, a species of milkweed Asclepias latifolia that grows in West Texas and produces its pods vertically along a single stem, so that it yields more pods for less square footage than the canopied milkweeds. Given the same amount of area, you could produce at least twice as much floss per acre as someone growing the species being cropped now. For the barren areas of West Texas this plant has exciting potential. Of course, there are problems to solve, like the fact that milkweeds are hosts to butterflies and clustering the plants as a crop will probably generate the need for innovative pest control. Also, neighboring landowners who are locked into archaic ideas about growing only a few conventional crops may see your milkweed crop as nothing more than a weed that could spread to their property. In Nebraska, where all this started, disapproving farm neighbors changed their minds when they found out what the milkweed farmers were making. Within a few years whole counties were growing milkweed floss for production.

Even with these concerns, this is certainly a diversification exercise worth pursuing. Ogallala Down has been in business for about fifteen years, has expanded rapidly in this market, and would be a sure bet as a market for a floss crop. Knudsen told me in one of our visits that milkweed farmers exceed the profits of traditional corn, wheat, and sorghum by about one and a half.

How many copies of each volume do you have to sell to break even?

Break-even from the cost of printing is 3,500 copies sold, given the current price of the volume and the current inflation rate over the next several years. This figure does not include the pro bono time and donations outside to the organization outside of the printing costs.

Why can’t you make enough money through sales to do the whole twelve volumes without other funding?

While the first volume is a steady seller, and we expect most satisfied customers who bought Volume 1 will also buy the other volumes, these sales will take place over a lengthy period of time – years in fact. Much of the revenue will come in later, too late to help in the completion of the actual project. Another factor is that like most encyclopedias, this is a backlist item, or long term seller, versus a frontlist item, or quick seller like fiction items on the New York best-seller list. Front list items are pushed for a few months and the leftover stock ends up on the sales tables by the checkout counter at the bookstores.

How does this project compare to other multi-volume works in cost, manpower, and quality?

Higher quality, lower cost, more color, better maps, and fewer people doing the actual work. Based on a summary of contributed time and the costs of producing Volume 1, the estimated budget for completing the 14 volume encyclopedia within a seven year period is about $8 million. Given the rate of inflation in Austin over the past decade, this is comparable in cost to the 6-volume black-and-white Handbook of Texas published in 1995 and far less than the budget of Encyclopedia Britannica and The Flora of North America.

Why bother producing an encyclopedia when there is so much interest in digital products and the internet? And wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to skip the printed format and put everything on the web?

Good question. There is a segment of the population that seems to think that CD ROM and the internet are taking over the world. The hard evidence shows that they are not. We talk to other publishers on a regular basis — their big works on CD-ROM don’t sell very well, contrary to this year’s “conventional wisdom.” Besides, electronic media is transitory and the medium itself becomes outdated very quickly. We’ve been working with this material (text, graphics, and database) on computers since 1983. Today’s computers and software can’t access anything we stored in 1989, much less in 1985. You have to keep moving the digitized files from one format to the next, which introduces errors and causes layout disasters. And people who buy a work in one format can’t do that, they’re locked in, so when their hardware changes they’re likely to end up with some inaccessible and useless materials not too long down the road. So we decided a long time ago that this material is too important to rely solely on an unstable media. People think that books are ephemeral because they’re printed on paper; electronic media are even more ephemeral. If you wave a magnet over a book nothing will happen except that you will look silly; wave it over a computer disk and years of hard work rearrange themselves.

There are many advantages to books as well. You don’t get carpal tunnel from a book. You can read a book in the bathtub. You can read a book if the electricity goes off. Try doing that with a computer. And you aren’t limited to a 2-hour battery life—books don’t run down in the field like a laptop does. You can have several books open at once. With a computer version you are limited to a very small screen. And for certain types of learning and information transfer, books have yet to be improved on. We have seen a couple of copies of Volume 1 that had been damaged, one in a fire (the pages were still readable) and one was chewed up by a dog. A CD wouldn’t survive either of those misfortunes either. After having said that, we have planned from the beginning for this work to be available in a variety of electronic forms, including text and databases, by way of the internet, and by CD ROM.

As to the cost of printing books versus putting things on the web, the actual printing isn’t where the bigger costs are anyway. Putting it on the web doesn’t eliminate any of the front-end people-intensive stages or take away the need to get the information, process the information, assess the information, understand the information, and put the information together in ways that say something about the subject. It more or less breaks down like this:

Book Internet

Research and preparation of text $5,000,000 $5,000,000

Photography $450,000 $450,000

Mapping $30,000 $30,000

Layout (volumes)/website building (internet) $15,000 $35,000

Printing (volumes)/webmaster and site hosting $60,000/vol. $55,000/yr.

It isn’t so much whether the information is available in a book that you hold in your hand or on a screen on your desk, it is making sense of the information in the first place that takes the time. If we put it all on the internet, we still have to go through all the same steps. And the pictures look better in print than they do on a computer screen. The resolution is much higher and the color is much more accurate.

How does UWP compare to other large botany and plant organizations already in existence?

There are several organizations providing significant services to the botany community and to the rest of the world, and Texas is home to several of those organizations. However, though no group in North America or the world, for that matter, is organized to accomplish what Useful Wild Plants, Inc. has set out to do. Useful Wild Plants (UWP) is creating the prototype for a comprehensive species by species understanding of how each plant contributes to civilization. Hopefully, it will inspire others to carry on this kind of work region by region until, the entire world of plants is better understood. No organization has ever accomplished this on an equally comprehensive scale. The earliest comparable work is Drury’s The Wealth of India, a six volume work—yet it is not comprehensive. The Royal Botanical Gardens at KEW has a database for the collection data on plants of dry regions of the world—and it is not comprehensive and it does not focus on a particular region. Further, with our rock solid research base, UWP is set up to provide equally solid programs in education, research, conservation, land use diversification, plant product marketing, and plant product development—and we are already well underway in providing services that no one else can provide in these areas. More about that later.

As a basis of comparison, Texas also has some tremendous well funded and flourishing organizations set up to do particular things. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center has increased the popularity of plants for millions through their promotional work. Texas is also home of several great botanical gardens that provide public services including The San Antonio Botanical Garden, The Houston Arboretum, Moody Gardens, The Dallas Arboretum, The Fort Worth Botanical Gardens, and The Valley Nature Center. The greatest service to the science of botany in Texas, outside of academic botany, is being performed by the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT). BRIT was originally set up to rescue the SMU (Southern Methodist University) herbarium from oblivion. SMU administrators, failing to see the long range importance of the State’s second largest herbarium, sought to relocate it at some other school or to sell it. A small group of fervent believers set up the organization for the continued use of the this research treasure and are now receiving other herbariums being jettisoned by other institutions. For example, BRIT recently obtained the Vanderbuilt herbarium collection. The newly revised Shinner’s manual on the flora of North Central Texas was prepared by three colleagues who work out of BRIT and there is a similar work underway on an East Texas flora based on an unpublished manuscript by botanist Elray Nixon. Of course this just scratches the surface, but Texas is very lucky to have these organizations. We’re putting out “Useful Wild Plants…” Outside of Texas two other groups are putting out excellent multi-volume publications, the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Flora of North America and the New York Botanical Garden’s Encyclopedia of Gardening. The two floras mentioned are technical in their orientation, with thumbnail references to landscape value. Plant species are represented with high-quality line drawings.

How do you hope to convey your message to the larger population of the United States when it seems like that most people aren’t interested in anything but computers, sports, and buying the next “must-have” consumer product?

A challenge, but not an impossible challenge, especially with the most polished marketing system in the world at our disposal. The other 98% of the plant kingdom that exists unexplored and barely researched has not been a priority of 20th century western civilization, but it will have to be soon, and we hope to help turn this idea into action. Each generation that moves beyond direct and intimate contact with the land becomes further removed from the information essential to survival of humans as a species. Many who believe that steak comes wrapped in packages and that vegetables and fruits just keep popping up on shelves in the produce section are isolated from the resources that sustain them. Much has already been said about this and there has been much lamenting about our overutilization of resources but nothing has happened in a serious way to arouse responsible and accountable behavior to restore the balance that keeps the whole scheme working. One of the big jobs of this or any other environmental organization is to educate, educate, educate, and persuade, persuade, persuade. The United States has the most sophisticated marketing system in the world, a system that can convince people to by $12 million worth of pet rocks at $5 each. The system for education is already in place. We, like everyone else, must figure out how to use that system.

I’ve been hearing from some people that you all are mostly a plant conservation organization, but I’ve also been hearing from other people that you are a business development organization. Which is it? What is it you really do?

I think the real problem here is that conservation and business development are seen as mutually exclusive—polar opposites if you will. The problem really is, is that one won’t work without the other. As long as people are alive there will be business. As long as there are two people alive at the same time there be commerce. We just don’t want our way of doing business to destroy our quality of life and drive us off the planet. Unfortunately, there is a mental blind spot about the direct relationship of plant resources and our quality of life. People forget that every commodity that they carry into their homes is either plant in origin or created through processes that require plants or plant products. Plant resources are a limit case. If enough of us blindly abuse the resource base long enough…the outcome would be pretty bleak.

What is the “Save the Human Libraries Project?”

Saving the Human Libraries is based on the saying most of us have heard by now, a cultural wisdom of uncertain origin, that “When someone dies it’s like burning a whole library.” It implies rightly that people are precious reservoirs of information, information that is often lost in our culture when our loved ones die. Unlike cultures that pass wisdom by oral tradition we tend to let the wisdom of each generation slip away. All of us have done it, those things our grandparents said or knew about that we wish we could ask them now. Too late. Threatened human knowledge about plants is no less important than the threatened plants themselves. With the shift from rural life to the city over this century people have lost intimate contact with the plant kingdom and these skills and observations are not being passed on. To that end we are recording the lifetime knowledge of many people in Texas and surrounding states and Mexico, most of them over seventy, and there isn’t much time. Within the next 5 to 15 years a whole generation who know about our native flora will pass away.

Of course, we’ve been interviewing since the project started in the early 1970s. Some of our information collecting occurs in a serendipitous way, in the field. We ask lots of questions of the people who are helping us and take lots of notes. Some fascinating things come out, most of which will be lost if we don’t get it now. We’re also doing more formal interviews and taping the conversations, but this still isn’t enough and we alone cannot begin to cover the ground. A new division to our Independent Studies program with the University of Texas at Austin will help with this. This summer we have three students who are finding and interviewing people about native plants, some locally, some in East Texas, and some in northern Mexico. For example, one student will probably be working with the Black Seminole living in Eagle Pass, Texas, and northern Mexico. This is an ethnic group never before studied for their plant knowledge. Each of these students will perform 30 hours of interviews, travel with their informants to the field, and make herbarium collections of each plant discussed by the informant for food, medicine, or commodities. We will confirm the identification of each plant and work with the students and several Texas herbaria to have their voucher specimens accessioned into the collections. Most interviewees do not know botanical names for the plants they use and common names, without herbarium specimens, are insufficient for accurate identification. This will be good experience for these students because they will be learning a variety of anthropological and botanical skills.

There are also several Independent Studies students from the departments of botany, ecology, and environmental sciences focusing on herbarium research and distribution maps. Students receive hands-on research experience, contribute significantly to a major botanical project, and get course credit. This program is expanding as more professors and students find out about it. There’s a lot of interest from the university community in this, and not just from The University of Texas, but from other schools such as Texas A & M University and Sam Houston State as well.

Why do Volumes 1 and 2 cost so much?

Have you checked the price of color works lately? $125-135 per volume is low—many comparable works in color now retail for over $300 and black-and-white works sell for $225. And if you are a member of UWP, and memberships start at $25, you can buy Volume 2 for $105.00 for the first copy, and if you buy a second copy of Volume 2 you get a 10% discount off the $135 price, so it’s still only $121.50. And when you examine the archival quality of the production and the fact that it is a rather low press run, 5000 copies, and that the cost of paper and printing have greatly escalated in the last decade, you may realize that it is being sold for the lowest cost possible. The fact is, we are selling Volumes 1 and 2 at slightly above “break-even.” Once a market is established and the press run can be increased, UWP will gain some ground in profits. But right now you are getting the book at the best possible cost. Besides, you are getting Volume 2 for $135 per copy –considering all the unpaid time and personal resources that Lynn Marshall and I have put in the last 30 plus years, each volume will cost us personally about $500,000.

Can you explain the six-part diagram that represents the multi-level project scope of UWP?

This is explained better other places but in short, the six part diagram with six circles around the central circle of UWP represent the major constituents who we expect to use the organization and the information base. Research, Education, Conservation are academic in content, context, and in the manner in which they are usually funded; Diversification, Marketing, and Product Development areas are set in the for-profit economic context. It is our hope that UWP can be a common context and common language for both academic and economic interests

Some examples may help.

Research:

Imagine the next G. W. Carver, skilled in genetic, horticulture, an chemistry, improving the hydrocarbon yield from one or several oil-producing species identified in this work for use in lubricating machinery or producing an alternative fuel base. In other words this area of focus refers to the sophisticated scientific examination that would result from new connections made by the synthesis of the UWP project. A major objective of the project is to establish a benchmark for the next generation of research. This is very exciting when you think about it.

Education

Picture students in a lab, each with a different experiment involving native plants. Some are making perfumes from desert acacia; others are examining the protein makeup and content of prickly pear seeds; others are studying the insecticide properties of cottonwood leaves; others are making paper from red yucca fibers; and so on. Most of us were not exposed to the vast economic possibilities yet unexplored in the plant kingdom in our own region. If we value our G. W. Carvers we have to provide a learning environment to promote their development. Another objective of UWP is to begin opening up the unknown world of useful wild plants to students of all ages, K-12, higher institutions, and lay people who have intense but unrealized interests in native and naturalize plants. UWP has developed teaching modules for K-12 that will introduce our next generation to these possibilities.

Conservation:

Now visualize Communities in Schools (CIS) students assisting UWP with the planting of unusual and in some cases rare useful plants of the Edwards Plateau at a Native Plant Sanctuary in Zilker Park. Students in this field class are given specific instructions about the growing conditions for each species and its preferred community. This planting will be a new nature trail for school children and Austinites to see for the first time many plants impossible to see otherwise. Plants occurring infrequently or rarely in the wild will be preserved in this setting for future study and research. UWP is in the process now of developing a joint program with the Zilker Garden Council and Austin CIS to teach students about their environment as part of the installation of the Zilker Sanctuary Project, now in development. Perhaps the most important focus of UWP is in the development of sanctuaries in each of the eleven different regions of the state and surrounding states of the U. S. and Mexico. UWP has been participating in the development of three other native plant sanctuaries across the state for over ten years and there are several others on the drawing boards. It is important, we think, to begin environmental education about conservation at a very early age. If you believe something is important, stewardship begins to take on its own energy. When more staff are available UWP also plans to expand consultation services for conservationists and landowners so that they can evaluate their plant resources to establish appropriate stewardship practices.

Diversification

Imagine that you are Jim Johnson, a landowner near Columbus, Texas, whose cattle sales and agricultural efforts barely cover taxes. You have large tracts of “brush” that may have potential value, but you have no idea what plants are on your property other than oaks, hackberries, and mesquites, yet you are curious if you have something that can be harvested and sold. We know many landowners who can no longer profit from ranching or traditional agriculture who are looking for new ways to earn income from their land. There are already many businesses making use of native plants for commodities and most Texas landowners are not yet participating in these profits. An objective of UWP in this area is to assist landowners in each region to identify appropriate crop plants and to begin to participate in these new economies.

As more and more native and naturalized plant products are developed and marketed more resources can be identified for sale by land owners. With more staff UWP hopes expand this service of assisting with diversification efforts.

Marketing

Another landowner near Leaky, Texas, Barbara Caspar, notices for the first time that her pinyons (Pinus remota) are bearing. She’s heard that pinyon nuts sell for good profits, but she doesn’t know how to harvest them, process them, store them, or where to sell them. UWP can provide that information. There is no service at present to link landowners with developing businesses that rely in plant resources. A future objective of UWP is to assist in the role of linking resource providers with product manufacturers. Marketing also refers to the use of the media system to get more native plant products into the commodities market and this organization plans to play a role in using of all forms of media to promote plant products and resources.

Product development

A scientist, Bill McIntyre, working in a pharmaceutical company has tackled the challenge of finding a replacement rubber for latex because many health care staff have developed severe allergies to the latex in prophylactic gloves. Bill turns to UWP, either the volumes or Alluse database, for a list of plants with the appropriate chemical profile for a new rubber. Product developers like Bill McIntyre are the people that bring us the next perfume, a new soda-pop, a new pain-reliever, new dyes, and almost any commodity that can be identified. A major objective of UWP is to get make this information available to product developers searching for ideas.

What do you mean by phases 1, 2, and 3 of UWP?

Phase 1 is the preparation and the production of the information base which includes thousands of experiments that promise new products. It is the cornerstone for Phases 2 and 3. The results of Phase 1 are information products including the encyclopedia in printed form, the encyclopedia in CD ROM form, the Alluse Database, and higher profit spin-off publications from the cornerstone project.

Phase 2 of the UWP goal set is putting all this information to work in the development of new products, new crops, new marketing strategies, new directions for research, education modules to bring everyone in the education system up to speed regarding the possibilities of this vast resource base, and in identifying resources and educating landowners and the public about the importance of preserving and protecting the plants that are our very umbilical cord to the planet. The results of Phase 2 are people doing things: learning new careers in economic botany, selling harvests from broomweed, growing plants for native landscaping, purchasing and setting aside sanctuaries, creating new products, discovering new chemical structures, selling new plant products.

Phase 3 refers to the stage of the work in which it becomes necessary to house these activities in a more permanent space. In the beginning most of the “hands-on” activities we’ve talked about can be handled in available spaces in schools, universities labs, and private green houses, or in the field on private and public lands. But when this program takes off, though, it will be necessary to build a center. The result of Phase 3 is architecture complete with spaces where the activities of Phase 2 can be carried out in an integrated way. It would be an incredible learning environment—unlike anything preceding it.

Why doesn’t UWP raise money to build a center now? Wouldn’t it give identity to the organization?

It’s true, it would give another form of identity to the organization. But we’ve seen a number of other organizations, including some botanical organizations, spend their energies raising money to build elaborate complexes and then have very little content for what happens in those buildings. This lack of content can set a cause back if people visit the buildings and there is not enough for them to learn or do -- they get the idea that the subject itself has little content, not that that particular expression of the subject was poorly conceived.

UWP is built around the idea that its most important to develop the information base first and then to put into place education, conservation, research, product development, marketing, and diversification programs, and demonstrate viability. Once there are enough people involved with these programs the architecture will become necessary. With a relatively small core group, it is very important to expend your energy judiciously and so far we have elected not to invest our time in architecture, but rather invest our time in a quality product and quality programs. You don’t need a building to teach about plants--you need to take the people to the plants.

Are there really any hands-on applications for your information?

A hundred thousand plus. For almost any use you can think of there is a plant from each region that can deliver a solution.

What will it take to get to the hands-on applications and to get products developed?

Right now most of our energies are going into producing the encyclopedia and other media forms. With more staff we could be freed up to develop markets for those products. Some people think we should develop the product part of the business now and drop the encyclopedia, but we think that it is more important to finish the information baser first so that more people can benefit from these resources, especially future generations. If we stop now to try to create a self-sustaining income base it may be very difficult to return to and finish the encyclopedia project, which is something other people will need to do other work – the information base will seed the work of others.

If you convince people that they should be interested in all the wild plant resources won’t they just go out and really destroy the remaining environment? Won’t wild plants just turn into another way to get rich and dominate the planet?

Undoubtedly that is a dilemma we have wrestled with often, but, at the end of every discussion, we always conclude that pressing forward with this information platform is an acceptable risk given the circumstances. Human excesses are already destroying the environment at such a rate that some believe that a worldwide cataclysm is inevitable. So it is a calculated risk that education and involvement will bring about a survival consciousnes that will alter our course. Historically many civilized cultures fail to self-correct until it is too late—until they have obliterated their natural resource support system. Many of the great ancient civilizations that were not conquered by others have fallen this way. This self-destructive cycle has been repeated over and over. There were probably groups similar to yours and ours who tried the brakes and no one listened. On the other hand, every living creature consumes to survive and the more people understand the importance of these resources the greater chance we think we have to convince them to conserve. And there you have the purpose of the Useful Wild Plants Project.

Why has it taken so long to get this far with the encyclopedia? Some of us are afraid we’re going to die before it’s finished!

The answer is in part that a comprehensive work of this nature takes years, even decades to complete. The second part of the answer is simple—funding. Lynn and I, functioning fully pro bono, are driving a project that needs a bigger staff to finish. It would be like trying to build the Empire State Building with just two people. It might actually be possible, but difficult to accomplish in a lifetime. This, like other large-scale projects, is funding driven. Budget equals books. So the project can be finished in six to seven years with a full budget of 8 to 9 million dollars or it can take another fifty years (this is beyond our lifetime) and cost 30 plus million. If you really want to speed it up get behind the project and help spread the word.

Why don’t you do this project through a university like The University of Texas or Texas A & M University? Wouldn’t it be easier if they helped you or sponsored you?

First, we need to clear up a myth about universities – they themselves don’t sponsor or fund projects like this. Most of their money has to come from the outside and much of that money is already earmarked or restricted to a particular use when they get it. A university is also required by state law to collect overhead on grant funds that are raised for a specific purpose; when we had some grants given for this project through UT the overhead rate was 57%. That was one of the reasons our board recommended leaving the university setting – as a non-profit organization we could use all of any grant for the intended purpose, not just half of it. Universities are research institutions. Many of our programs are public awareness, outreach, and general education programs geared to K-12, so a purely academic research setting such as UT was no longer the right place for it. We needed more flexibility, not only in seeking funding support, but in providing educational programs, increasing volunteer involvement, and public outreach. But we’ve always had strong ties with several major academic institutions.

I’ve read the newsletter and your trips to take pictures sound like a lot of fun. Do you sometimes take assistants—people like me?

Ha! Probably not. We’ve tried it several times and it just didn’t work out. We’ve lost friends that way. No, the writing in the newsletter is cast for the reader’s enjoyment—the actual trips don’t play out the way those stories read. They are actually more like grueling endurance tests—not like our courses, which are paced for enjoyment. A lot of Weedfeed graduates insist they want to tag along on one of these marathons and once in a while we take someone, but it has always been a mistake. You can tell people the trips are rough and give them all the gory details, but they don’t really believe it until two or three days into a two week trip, and then you can’t stop the trip and take them back home and they’re miserable for the rest of the time.

There really isn’t that much time spent in the field and we don’t stop to smell the daisies or anything else. The trips are intended to collect and photo as many plants as possible from first daylight to dusk and sometimes beyond; we even photo by flashlight when we are really desperate. Usually, getting the most plants means lots of road time in cramped conditions. Typically we finish photographing in one area and then drive through the night to the next location so we can get started early again the next day. For example we might finish work in the Big Bend area, then drive to Canyon, Texas to set up by the next morning. Not a leisure trip, right? We don’t stay in motels unless absolutely necessary and we often don’t take time to change clothes or shower regularly unless we are floor sleeping. Oh, yeah floor sleeping. We have spots around the state and surrounding states, people’s homes where we floor sleep on air mattresses. We’re up quick and we don’t create much muss or fuss for our hosts. Occasionally we sleep in guest beds but not that often. So no we don’t take “helpers” anymore. Lynn is the only person I know that can take that kind of trip and keep on smiling—at least now and then. Strangely enough though, for us it can be rejuvenating. It’s simple, there is only one hat to wear on these trips instead of the 50 plus back at the office; it’s get the plant and keep moving. Then you do get the secondary rewards of nice pictures and you get to strike another “wanted” off the list.

Why don’t you put plants on the cover of your newsletters? So far since I’ve been a member I’ve seen boots, rockets, a musician, a detective, and a guy in a wheelchair on the cover, but only one plant.

We do use plants on the cover, but indirectly in the sense that most familiar plant-based goods come packaged in a way that separates us from their plant-origins. For example, a rocket taking off is burning liquid plants—fossil fuel created millions of years ago, but of plant origin nevertheless. The saxophone player on the cover derives his melodious notes with a cane reed from Arundo donax—invisible to the reader yet essential to the workings of the saxophone that belts out our favorite tunes.

Aren’t you really just taking over where Euell Gibbons left off?

No. Euell Gibbons was an important inspiration to everyone who ever wondered about using wild plants for food and medicine. He broke the ice for the uninitiated with enjoyable anecdotes about his own experience—but Gibbons’ work did not embrace the magnitude of importance of plant resources or the vast scope of their potential long range value to humans and other living creatures. We hope this project and this organization can accomplish that.

How do you get your photographs?

By going where the plants are when they’re in the right stage to be photographed. Sometimes that means driving all day to get to one plant, sometimes it means staying in the field for a week rounding up forty or fifty species. We’ve climbed mountains, risked our necks and cameras crossing boulder fields, slogged through muck in roadside ditches, and baked ourselves in the desert. We’ve grown species in the backyard, and even rehumidified a few dried grasses that people have mailed to us. We work closely with nearly a hundred people we call “spotters.” They watch for things and let us know when the plants are ready and we go. Other people contribute slides too, though we’re down to the really hard to find plants now, not the pretty wildflowers most people want to take pictures of.

Do you sell plants?

Yes. We sell native plants at certain fundraising events, but we don’t run a year around nursery or retail outlet. Once the information base is completed, expanding plant sales is on the drawing board.

I’d like to cook with some of these wild foods you talk about. Do you have recipes?

Yes. We’ll put out a recipe book at some point, but we’re going to get the major work out first so people can identify the plants that go in the recipes. There are a lot of wild foods recipe books out and they don’t sell well because people don’t have the background in plant identification they need to feel secure in their identifications.

How often do you produce your newsletters? How do you get on the list to get them?

You get newsletters when you become a paid-up UWP member. The newsletter comes out somewhat irregularly because of the demands of the plant photography and manuscript work. So instead of saying it is quarterly, we tell people that they’ll get 4 issues before their membership is up. Once we can staff up we’ll revise this schedule.

I keep hearing about different groups that are part of UWP like members, volunteers, Grassburs, Weedfeeders, and board members. Who are these different groups and how is UWP structured?

The Grassburs are the UWP volunteer group. To be a part of that, all you have to do is be somewhat active in volunteer work for UWP, and that’s just about anything from proofreading to staffing an educational booth to labeling slides. Quite a few Grassburs were instrumental in getting Volume 1 out. Weedfeeders are people who have taken a Weedfeed class. Members are people who pay membership dues; if you are a member you get discounts on UWP products, such as the books. If you are a Species Sponsor it means you have made a contribution at the species sponsorship level and you get your name in the next volume and a copy of the volume. If you are a board member you have fundraising, legal, and financial responsibilities about running the organization and raising money.

Is the organization based on the production of an encyclopedia?

Yes and no. It is in the sense that the organization—and the region—need an information platform as a starting point. The information platform is the cornerstone for all other UWP projects. After the information base is in hand then the hands on applications in education, research, conservation, diversification, marketing, and product development have a reason to exist. These six components have already been explained in the answer to another question.

What does UWP do besides the encyclopedia. I keep hearing about other projects like Saving the Human Libraries, the UWP seed bank, Botanical Literacy, Plug into Your Planet Education Project, and the Footsteps of LaSalle Project?

These are all Phase 2 projects (Conservation, Diversification, Marketing, Product Development, Research and Education) and several are active but that’s too long a topic for this conversation. That’s all explained on a handout complete with a diagram. Be sure to remind me to give you a copy as long as you’re willing to make notes. We would like some feedback on that too.

Who is your publisher?

Useful Wild Plants, Inc. is its own publisher.

Why don’t you use a regular commercial publisher?

In about 1993, after attempting to work with several major presses, including two academic presses, we decided UWP was better off going on its own—and we are very happy with that choice. We compared how much money the various publishers were going to require in the form of a subsidy, what royalty they would pay, and what else they would require us to supply and it didn’t take long to decide we were much better off financially, for quality control, and for reaching a large audience by doing it ourselves. Being the publisher made a lot of business sense then and now. We consistently ran into several problems with other publishing houses, both academic and commercial. They all demanded a large subsidy for a very small return. They all were going to degrade the quality of the design and the materials. And their marketing efforts were pathetic. One well-respected university press that we had met with a number of times had their marketing department do a projection of sales. In one of our meetings with them the director very solemnly said “Our marketing department can’t figure out how to sell more than 300 copies of this work.” At our first booksigning we sold 150 and now have sold almost 1000 copies of Volume 1, and sales are steady. They’d increase a lot if we could do consistent marketing but again, we run into the same problem. If Lynn and I do the marketing, we’re not working on the next volume.

Another thing that made us decide to publish it ourselves is that every one of the publishers interested in the project required a “vanity press” subsidy of at least $40,000. The best royalty offer was for 10% based on retail; the worst was 4.5% based on net. Editorial quality control and poor craftsmanship caused the termination of several potential publisher relationships. In one instance the publisher failed to provide an editor for chemical and scientific terminology and there would have been expensive add-on costs and delays to accomplish a complete editing job. Lots of publishers now require that authors have their work mostly edited and give it to the publisher ready to go, with only a cursory editing by the publisher. In the first place, that makes for a lot of sloppy books and we figured if they were going to edit poorly we were going to have to hire our own editor anyway, they weren’t providing anything there. The specifications and designs that they offered frequently indicated that the subsidy was not being used to maintain quality standards that we had agreed on early in our negotiations.

Marketing was another unsatisfactory issue. Based on experiences reported to us by many of our colleagues, marketing efforts by publishing houses last less than a year, even for very popular titles, and any subsequent significant market efforts were having to be carried out by the authors on their own. Also, every publisher we dealt with was going to require that we supply them with all of our marketing data and all of the names of the potential buyers that we have been collecting for years --- that was for their financial benefit, not ours.

So now that we are our own publisher, we do have to pay to get the works printed and have to do the prepress work ourselves—layout, proofing, editing, marketing, sales, etc.—but everything that comes in from sales is ours to put towards completing and producing the remaining volumes and funding our educational programs.

Scooter, you are still an architect aren’t you? Why would an architect do a plants project? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

In the very narrow view held by some that “architects are people who build buildings”, yes, but that’s not really what all architects do. Most really good architects attempt to modify the environment to enhance quality of life and that aim will always take the plant kingdom and other natural elements into consideration. In this sense architecture and the plant world are really part of the same system, whether it is the part designed and built by people or the part designed and created by nature. When you look at it this way the UWP project can be seen as a quality of life—quality of environment project.

How do you account for the broad range of disciplines represented in the project? The text seems to involve every branch of science known to humankind.

Well, plants do affect every science in some way and almost every profession, whether the participants realize it or not. At the same time, when Johnston and I conceived the project, I was involved with large scale urban design and regional planning both academically and professionally and I’m sure this affected the layout of the project. The term “interdisciplinary” was coined during the late 1960s to represent the interaction of disciplines, each instructing the others, in a problem solving setting rather than historical model of the multi-disciplinary problem-solving team where each group just performs their part of the project and turns in the results without any contact with the other sciences involved. I was an early subscriber to the Ian McHarg approach which was founded on the interdisciplinary concept. When I developed the Matagorda Bay Estuarine Resource Management Project for Bob Armstrong [Land Commissioner] in the early 1970s, we used this model and were able to get geologists, botanists, fish and animal biologists, water resource people, sociologists and others around one large table at the same time to discuss resource issues. Damned exciting really. The project never reached full fruition but the work resulted in the Reagan De La Garza Act, which defined broad protection for state-owned coastal lands. The Useful Wild Plants Project was conceived much the same way, except that instead of gathering the disciplines around the table, we conduct the interaction between the various sciences and professions.

How do you justify working on something that requires outside funding and personal and family sacrifice? A lot of people think that if something won’t make a lot of money, it is a waste of time to do it.

One, it’s a quality of life issue to know as much about our world as we can. It makes life better when people understand how they fit into their surroundings, and despite all the hubbub about everyone being “wired” and the “information highway” most people don’t have access to 1% of the information we have put together—and they want it. The letters they write us and the phone calls we get tell us that. There are many things in this country that are underwritten at some stage of their creation or execution by a generous supporter or group of supporters, when public support either hasn’t been developed or can’t sustain the total burden. Many of the arts have patrons who help put on performances or exhibits where ticket sales alone wouldn’t cover the production costs without pricing a big part of the audience out of participating. If you look in the program of a ballet or symphonic performance you will see a list of its supporters. If you look on page ix through xi of Volume 1, you’ll see the same things. We see the Useful Wild Plants Project as a collective effort—us, volunteers, foundations, corporate donors, members, the Board of Trustees, our students, the people who are buying the books.

What is the most common question you get?

“What is a useful wild plant?” and then almost always followed by “Are there any that aren’t useful?” This typically comes from people who are just finding out about UWP and the work of the organization. The answer is that a “useful wild plant” is any plant that has or has had some benefit or value to people in some sense. Actually, “useful” pretty much covers most plants from an environmental and ecological, though for the purposes of the encyclopedia we define it as having been made use of by people. Our real targets are those native plants which are truly useful in one of three basic senses: edible, medicinal and utilitarian, such as rubber, oil, waxes, fibers, cosmetic ingredients, household products, and building materials, to mention only a few of the thousands of potential commercial and domestic applications. Otherwise there would be no stopping point. And because our work is about “useful wild plants” we decided to name the organization after the title of the Useful Wild Plants Project, which was started some time before the formal organization was created in 1991.

Often we’re also asked “What is Useful Wild Plants, Inc.?” Well, Useful Wild Plants, Inc. is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. That means it is an organization formed to do something for the public good, in this case public outreach and education about the native plants of Texas and the surrounding regions, with the Useful Wild Plants… encyclopedia being one part, and a large part, of our work. It also means that contributions are tax deductible. The people who make up Useful Wild Plants, Inc. are a group of volunteers who share an acute sense of concern for the future of our too-rapidly disappearing biological heritage. You see, humans have been in this region of the earth for thousands of years, and this time much useful information about the endemic botany, has been learned, often at the ultimate cost. The traditional means for conveying this essential information, oral recollection, is simply insufficient to prevent its eventual loss. So we are all working together to record as much as possible of this hard-earned practical information for the next generations. If we don’t save it now, they won’t be able to get it in the future because culturally we are in a period of embracing “information technology” while we let the “information” get away from us.

Where do you get your funding?

From foundation grants, small to large, and some corporate in-kind equipment donations. Also individuals. If you look in the front of Volume 1 you’ll find a list of supporters. Our Sponsor a Species campaigns have been very important too—that’s where people can make gifts in the $1000 to $5000 range and receive acknowledgement in the volume. And all of the volunteer help counts too. On volume 1 it offset the amount of money needed to put it out by thousands of dollars. I don’t think we can expect everyone who threw themselves so wholeheartedly into Volume 1 to contribute as much on every other volume, however.

What is your ideal scenario for finishing the encyclopedia part of the Useful Wild Plants Project.

Getting all the funding in hand, either in the bank or pledged, to finish all the volumes at once. We could staff up, train people, keep them through the end of the work, and get it done. This is by far the most cost-effective and quickest way to do it. We could also sell a lot more sooner if people could buy them all at once. Marketing dollars would be more effectively too.

Why is it so important to you to finish the encyclopedia? Why not drop it and do field guides and teach classes? Wouldn’t that make more money?

Maybe in the short run. But money isn’t the only consideration. The encyclopedia, or rather the complete integrative body of information that makes up what we call the “encyclopedia” is what makes any other spin-off possible. Everything else, the database, the field guides, the teaching guides, the classes, will be derived from the information base represented by “the encyclopedia.”

Why is it arranged by genera from A-Z? Most technical botany references are organized by family and many field guides are arranged by flower color. Also, if Volume 1 is plants whose names start with A, will there be 26 volumes?

No! There will not be 26 volumes in this work. We estimate twelve to fourteen plus the guide. Originally, we set the limit at twelve volumes, but in the recent updates research in some areas has taken off to the extent that the text length is increasing up to 15% in for specific genera; it would be inappropriate to leave out for example, new favorable treatments for cancer, because we strictly confine the objective to only twelve volumes. You’re right, Volume 1 doesn’t get all of the plant names that start with the letter A, but fortunately, the way botanists have assigned the scientific names of the genera, there are a lot of short letters. We’re looking forward to getting onto D, E, F, G, H, I, J, and K. Q’s another short letter, with two “Q” genera in Texas, Quercus, the oaks, and Quincula, a relative of the tomatillo. But Quercus has 45 species, and being oak, it has lots of information. Our file is eight inches thick. We looked at several ways of handling this vast amount of information and decided that A to Z had the least redundancy and was the most cost effective format. It was also the easiest way for people not familiar with what’s related to what in plant families. We talked to a lot of people as we were planning how to arrange it. We got groups of people together and had them talk about what worked and what didn’t work about other books, what they needed from information, what they were interested in—I guess we were doing focus groups back in 1985 before you heard so much about them.

I’ve read in your literature that you consider plants as the basis for all other conservation efforts. What do you mean by that?

Well, that may not be universally true in the sense that dramatic geological features like the Grand Canyon and Angel Falls are not plant-based, but it is true that all conservation efforts that address living things are inextricably linked to the plant kingdom. And sometimes the dependence is mutual, as Gary Nabhan points out in Gathering the Desert, in which he describes the survival-dependent link between species of bats that rely on only a few species of Agave in the Sonoran Desert for their entire food source, while these same agaves are pollinated solely by these bats. If one goes the other goes. The point is, is that all forms of wildlife depend on plants in one way or another. Even carnivores eat herbivores, or they eat other carnivores that eat herbivores. Birds that eat birds eat birds that eat berries. Or they eat birds that eat insects that, yes, ultimately eat plants! Fish eat smaller fish that eat smaller fish that eat water plants and algae. Whales, the largest animal on earth, feeds on plankton, some of the tiniest plants around! Plants are it. They are the only living factories that make life from sunlight, air, water, and dirt. Dr. Arthur Bell, Director Emeritus of Kew Gardens says it best; “Plants are the most important organisms on earth. The rest of us are just parasites.”

Plants are truly the silent majority and they have too few advocates. They are usually preserved indirectly and often for the wrong reasons. One case in point of plant preservation for the wrong reason is that of the invasive Ashe juniper (Juniperus asheii) that, because of overgrazing, has spread over most of the ranching area of Central Texas in the last hundred years. Cedars were present but restricted in range to the canyons until the Plateau area, stripped of it sotols and lush grasses, yielded to the loss of most of its topsoil by erosion. Select areas of the Edwards Plateau are also habitat for the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler and, unfortunately, a source of angry debate between some landowners in the Edwards Plateau and some conservationists. While we unquestionably stand for the preservation of the health and well-being of the Golden-cheeked Warbler, those hundreds of square miles of cedar thickets were not present in the original Edwards Plateau plant communities and the warbler’s natural range was different—they have moved with the cedar invasion. A careful study of the original ecological cycle for the Hill Country makes it clear that the warblers don’t really need the entire Edwards Plateau to insure their survival. The preservation of Ashe juniper over the entire Hill Country is really unnecessary and in the long run damaging to other species. Cedar removal and revegetation efforts like that of J. David Bamberger near Johnson City have proven that once the cedar is thinned out, springs that have been dry for over 50 years often come back, and then many native grasses, forbs, and wildlife, return, and with it the original beauty of the Hill Country. Again the real problem here seems to be education.

How do you keep the information updated?

We are building a database, now called the Alluse Database, that will be an extraction of the encyclopedia and will be updated on a day-to-day basis. Queries of the Alluse Database will yield the most updated information of the moment. Most of the work on the database will follow the production of the encyclopedia and some of the funding for it will be from revenues generated by sales of the encyclopedia and CD ROM.

Why didn’t you do a smaller condensed version first?

Good question. We get that one a lot. When we started the project back in the early 1970s, there were already a number of field guide-like books out. None of them were very good. They weren’t very good because they were derivative, not comprehensive, not integrative, not interdisciplinary, and had very little research behind them. We didn’t want to do yet another one of these. Instead, we believed that it was important to produce the comprehensive work and set the benchmark first, something that could really move the 21st century ahead in research, education, conservation. There will undoubtedly be spin-offs down the line, but they will be based on the highest quality information anyone has ever had.

Will this set of volumes have some kind of index? You know most encyclopedias have some sort of volume to help you find things throughout the volumes as opposed to just hunting around from volume to volume.

Undoubtedly we will have a comprehensive index. In this case the comprehensive index, along with other materials, will be called The Guide volume. Unfortunately, the first time an encyclopedia is prepared, the index, cumulative references, and other material spread throughout the work must be completed last because there is continual change until the last volume is completed. We’re calling this volume The Guide because it will be much more than an index, it will be the entrance to the larger work, the navigation tool for the whole. In addition to a comprehensive index and bibliography, it will contain species listed by family, several comprehensive glossaries, geophysical maps to explain the importance of the regions included, biographies on the individuals listed in each volume by dedication, and heuristic listings of categories, such as all plants in each region containing waxes, oils, or potential textile fibers. It will be illustrated with plants “in use”, bars of soap, pharmaceuticals, dyed fibers, clothing, and many other commodities, rather than a showcase of photographs for each species as one finds in the other volumes.

If we gave you—say $3 million and said, “Can you finish it in three years?”—What would you say to that?

We’ve established a certain standard in the first three volumes. Are you asking us to change that standard? If so, the remaining work would be incongruous with the first and I just don’t think any segment of the audience would be satisfied with the resulting product.

If you had enough money can you just hire the botanists you need to finish the work?

Actually we don’t need more than one or two botanists on staff. There are already lots of botanists in Texas and surrounding states who are involved to the extent needed for the project. Botanists, both professional and amateur, help locate the species we are looking for but that is usually the extent of it. With few exceptions botanists spend their energies on issues of classification, now increasingly in chromosome studies, and have little if any interest in economic applications. What the project needs are very good writers, and by extension very good thinkers, who can manage massive amounts of material and integrate it in a way that presents the information in a new and more usable way.

Why don’t you use a digital camera to photograph the plants?

The best digital cameras are still $50K and up, and these have to be on an armature and hooked to a big computer. At best these huge unwieldy cameras shoot at 6 million pixels—the film equivalent for a convenient hand held SLR camera is 24 million pixels—over four times the resolution. For field work a photographer would need a hand held digital camera and the best of these, a Leica equivalent, is only capable of 1.3 to 3 million pixels. Unquestionably, film far surpasses digital imagery for superior publication printing. At some point in the future if digital technology catches up in quality there would be a reason to consider switching. Meanwhile, we will stick with film.

Why are you located in Austin? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to have your headquarters in some other place?

There are several reasons. Austin is home to the largest herbarium facility in Texas, the herbarium at The University of Texas. The University also provides several wonderful library research facilities required for keeping project research up to date. The project requires a collection of highly skilled people to carry out the work and Austin is home to a very well educated work force, a hiring pool not likely to be found in smaller cities and towns. Travel to plant locations is another. Austin is in the center of the state where many of the biological zones converge. It takes about the same amount of time to get to the Panhandle from Austin as it does get to Brownsville, and the drive to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area takes about the same amount of time as going to Houston or the coast. We have to do a lot of travel, both to the cities we just mentioned, but also to Big Bend, the Big Thicket, El Paso, Tyler, Orange, San Antonio, and all the parks and roadsides in between.

Why don’t you just make it eight volumes instead of twelve?

This question has come from more than one donor. My answer is, in a comprehensive work like this, which species would you cut out and what information topics would be excluded? Since there is still much research to be done to determine the potential of these mini-chlorophyll factories, how can we know that a species with the fewest uses won’t eventually be the species with the most important uses? For example, the chemical component we decide to leave out now could be the essential data bit for an epidemic cure centuries from now. The fact that we have been comprehensive is what led Rudolf Schmid to write in Taxon (1999) that this project, “…sets a new worldwide standard for similar works on economic botany and ethnobotany.” I hope all of our supporters will come to understand that the work we’re doing is exactly right in its present conception.

Isn’t it pretty difficult to raise money for plant research like your project—I mean compared to raising money for things like AIDS research, the Special Olympics, or for saving cuddly animals?

At first blush, yes, it seems more difficult, but it’s really a matter of education. Plants and their well-being underlie all of the other “people” causes and “cuddly” causes. There wouldn’t BE any other causes without the plant life support system. Once most people really understand that, they usually get involved. Getting that message across is probably the most important thing we can do.

What is the costliest item in finishing the project?

The thinking. The thinking for hire that leads to the distillation of thought from random data to the integrated written word for over 6000 pages of manuscript. Personnel assigned specifically to some part of the project make up about 78% of the costs in the six year budget.

What can we do to help you get the Useful Wild Plants Project finished?

Plenty. There are lots of ways you can put your shoulder to the back of the wagon with us and push. Become a member—memberships help keep the doors open and the lights on. Become a donor—help support the team we must build to get the remaining volumes in print. Give your time as a volunteer Grassbur. Most importantly, if you really believe in this project, network like crazy—in Texas and beyond. The Useful Wild Plants Project is a secret too well kept, so think of everyone you know who would benefit from learning about this and let them in on the secret. Remember, when enough of the right people and enough financial resources are present the project will be finished very quickly.

How can donors participate in the Useful Wild Plants Project?

Donors of all kinds participate at many levels, from $25 memberships to seven-digit gifts. Seed Sponsorships are $500. Species Sponsorships are $1000. Other kinds of sponsorships go up from there.The total $8 M budget is broken down in large gifts by annual budget, by budgetary items, and by volume sponsorships. For example, an annual budget with the project up and running at full speed will be a $1.5 M/year budget (for 6 years). If someone was interested in sponsoring the cost of the photography throughout all of the volumes that would run $750K. Sponsoring the cost of a single volume would be $850K.

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