Word: ravenously
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Think of it!" says Peter Raven, the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, as he stands beside a table in the rare-book room of the garden's library and reads aloud from the final paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species. "All that difference, elaborately constructed, produced by laws...
...monumental study, he quietly celebrated in sublime summation. The "tangled bank" he had initially attributed to an unnamed power, but in the third and subsequent editions, he included God in the evolutionary process. The book now ends on this glorious sentence, over which Raven exults: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have...
...passage is beloved by Raven because it is a celebration of biodiversity, the most elegant since Genesis, and it is the cause of biodiversity--of maintaining endangered plants and preserving the wilderness--that drives all he has done with the Missouri Garden for nearly 30 years. Rather than being merely a place where pretty flowers are on show (though it is that as well), the garden is a microcosm of the wide green world. It is not a zoo for plant life. The last thing Raven wants is to create a repository for the vegetation that has been destroyed outside...
...years ago. Those were brought about by natural phenomena. When it occurs, the sixth mass extinction of living organisms will be brought about by people, by a mushrooming population that has doubled in 40 years, to 6 billion, and by human carelessness and commerce. In the 21st century, which Raven would like to see called "the age of biology," he says we must learn to "master the diversity of living organisms and use the properties of those organisms as a kind of palette to build sustainability...
...Raven looks to the wide world to build other countries' capacities for sustainable development. Two areas that he regards as especially critical are Madagascar and the northern Andes. Madagascar has half as many plants as all tropical Africa (about 11,000), and the great majority are found nowhere else. The Missouri Garden has been active there since the early 1970s, helping train and support the country in evaluating and protecting threatened areas. In the northern Andes, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are home to at least one-fifth of the world's biodiversity, including perhaps 60,000 species of plants, endangered...