In Praise of Plants*

Useful Wild Plants, that is

By Pat McNeal

We are a different species than we were as little as 15,000 years ago. Up until that time most any material possession a person had was found or made by them or by someone they knew and lived with. Across the continents there were a few items that one might have traded for. But by and large, all that a person needed to survive—food, water, tools, clothes, shelter, and medicines—were produced locally. In this way every person had direct knowledge of where and how all the necessities of life were procured.

Contrast that with now. Who knows where their water, food, clothing, and other goods come from? And by the same token, who knows where the items we no longer need go? We now have new undreamed of needs like electricity, mobile phones, computers, internet, and satellite TV that bring us information. Does the population have any idea where these things come from? The majority is almost uniformly ignorant of how and where the materials of civilization come from. The great majority of the populations of developed countries would not have the personal resources to survive if public water systems stopped working.

We are now the exact opposite of earlier humans in that we are not aware of where just about anything we use comes from. We have become so highly specialized that a person can work in a field that, say, controls the distribution of food to markets but be as ignorant as the general population about where all the other thousands of products come from and where they go when we are finished with them.

This ignorance could explain two things about our culture. One is the preoccupation with magic. You see this with the popularity with Harry Potter or in TV shows like “Heroes.” What percentage of the popular movies are about characters who have make-believe powers? Are those powers any less mysterious than the working of the cell phone? Or a plant, which takes energy from the sun, carbon from the air, and minerals from the dirt and makes life?

The second characteristic that profoundly affects residents of the technological world is an intense sense of alienation. Most can’t place the root of this alienation. I would suggest it is born of an unconscious awareness at our individual disconnection from the ebb and flow of the natural world. To deal with this loss we have developed all manner of compensating behaviors trying to rebuild the connections back to an existence that is more compatible with hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.

The only real way to satisfy this yearning is to actually engage in actions that were part of that style of existence. This is why gardening is so popular. Our agriculture is so successful that a normal person cannot produce their caloric needs as cheaply and efficiently. We concoct justifications like freshness, ripeness, or safety when those are unnecessary for survival. We rationalize our actions to hide the fact that we are hardwired by thousands of generations of evolution to get satisfaction is certain ways. In the developed world we invent substitute compensating behaviors but never question the basis of the imitation.

Useful Wild Plants, Inc. (UWP) has completed and released the third** of fifteen*** volumes of the Useful Wild Plants of Texas, the Southeastern and Southwestern United States, the Southern Plains, and Northern Mexico. If you have not seen either of the previous two** volumes, this is the most comprehensive reference about the economic botany and ­ethnobotany for any place on earth. In the whole field of ­biology, this rates as one of the most monumental of ­mod­ern undertakings. It is as ambitious as it is compre­hen­sive. What is truly remarkable is that it is comparable to the largest scientific publishing projects of out time but is produced by the small and dedicated staff with a miniscule budget.

Even though it would seem that it is a reference of only limited national and international interest due to its regional scope, it is of far broader reach. Texas is at the intersection of ecotypes of North America. The flora of Texas contains components from plant communities from the eastern hardwood forests of the southeast, the great plains of Canada and the U.S., the Rocky mountain flora of the west and subtropical brush communities of Mexico. This alone makes it relevant throughout the continent.

Beyond the academic usefulness of the content of this set, its real use transcends that obvious use and masks its real substance. This set is a signpost that points to a possible path civilization will need to take to create a situation that will allow humans and the earth to survive each other. That may sound tenuous at best, at worst extreme hyperbole. But as a civilization we will need to find ways to procure the resources we need to maintain a standard of living that is far less deleterious to our home. We now know that there is a limit to the resources of the planet and the present rate of consumption is unsustainable beginning in just few decades. What the volumes of the Useful Wild Plants illuminate is the place of plants in the world and the inkling of our solution. There are two main resources on the planet, the elements and compounds of the planet itself and the energy of the sun falling on it. Plants have had 300 to 400 million years evolving the precision at which they utilize those two resources. Recently we have begun to realize the power of using those resources from their source. But attempts like solar-voltaic electricity generation are not as efficient as plant sources of energy and how we can utilize plant sources.

We have begun to ask why a human’s genetic information is 23 chromosome pairs and 23,000 genes and rice has 12 chromosomes and 45,000 genes. Comparing a human and all its complicated machinery to rice and its much less complicated structures, we are now asking what all those extra genes control. From the use descriptions in Useful Wild Plants… it is profusely clear that plants are individual chemical manufacturers turning out thousands of compounds. The history of humans until recently is mostly about our increasing knowledge of the use of plants and the compounds they contain. As the age of industrialization began, we forgot about the usefulness of plants and how they create so much so efficiently.

As industrialization progresses through the electronic age, we must admit most of our industrial processes are still based on exploiting the efficiency of plant-based production. One of the major lessons we are about to learn is the place of plants in creating and maintaining a livable climate. Learning that evolution and ecology taught us of the economic efficiency of supply and demand will lead us to the ultimate lesson that humans will not be able to improve on the hundreds of millions of years of testing that plant species have gone through to produce a genome that can supply humans with all we need without running out till the sun falls from the sky. This is the real and most valuable subtext contained in these volumes.

*This article originally ran in the UWP Update Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2010. Volume 4 was released since this article was published.

** Four volumes are now available and Volume 5 is underway.

***There will be more than 15 volumes when the work is completed. More like 18. Or 20.