In A Passion for Plants, Clive Langmead traces the life and career of Prance. Born in 1937, Prance is the 12th director of Kew. Engagingly, Langmead traces his first memories on Skye during the Second World War, his youth in Gloucestershire, an early interest in nature, and especially in plants, and his years at Keble College, Oxford.

Having joined the staff of the New York Botanical Garden, Prance set out for the forests of Surinam, his first visit to the tropics. Self-reliant and able, he launched into a series of expeditions, mainly in the Brazilian Amazon. This led to his organisation in 1973 of a highly successful course for Brazilian students in Manaus. He returned to New York in 1975.

The tales of the difficulties and successes of these expeditions, which occupy most of this book, are well told. At the time, most of us still thought we could go on studying the biological riches of the tropical forests indefinitely. This delusion was just beginning to be challenged by the evidence of decline that was becoming all too apparent everywhere.

Prance, motivated by his Christian devotion to the preservation of Creation, became a dedicated conservationist. He began to do everything within his power to enlist allies in the struggle against the decimation of the forest. By 1988, when he moved to Kew as director, conservation had become one of the principal aims of his work.

The work of the New York Botanical Garden and of Kew is especially well described by Langmead and the book graphicalIy illustrates the challenge facing such institutions. If we don’t know what we are losing, we will scarcely work to save it; and if we neglect to save it, we will severely limit the options available to our children for the development of stable, productive systems of forestry and agriculture, and the preservation of soil and other natural resources. We may also want to preserve plants simply because they are so beautiful and fine that we should care deeply about them.

Against this background, Prance’s life, from a childhood preoccupation with nature to the scholarly study of plants and, finally, to the maturation of both the desire and the ability to deal with the central problems of conservation – the whole informed by his abiding Christian belief – presents a suitable model for the rest of us.

OUR rapidly growing realisation that we are likely to drive to extinction
some major proportion of the organisms that share the world with us is usually
focused on elephants or rhinos, or made to apply to the nameless, identity-free
hordes of insects that swarm through the canopies of tropical rainforest
trees.

Against this background, it is refreshing to read a book that makes
clear the threat to plants, which are both attractive and important to our
lives. Most usefully, the authors stress the importance of action by individuals,
the ways in which devoted amateurs can make a significant contribution to
plant conservation. That said, this book is neither especially carefully
done, set in an appropriate context, nor accurate and up to date.

We human beings are in fact managing the entire planet Earth, every
square centimetre, right now, and the illusion that we are not, that any
one of us can be exempt from this task, is extremely dangerous. I applaud
the authors’ concern with plants – we are hugely dependent on them – and
on the importance of individual action, but their preoccupation with particular
technological fixes, their limited world view, and their often overly generalised,
simplistic statements are ultimately detrimental to their cause.

For example, Harold Koopowitz and Hilary Kaye miss important contemporary
interpretations, or they are simply inaccurate in their accounts of speciation,
the greenhouse effect, deforestation, the use of plants as medicine, the
implied definition of plants as a group (at one point they refer to ‘lower
or microbial plants’), the activities of ‘chemical conglomerates . . . interested
in maximising their profits . . . ‘, the status of plant conservation in
Japan and Madagascar, the rates of destruction of tropical rainforests and
the statistics for the flora of Hawaii. For example, on the rates of extinction,
does anyone believe that 20 per cent of the world’s organisms will disappear
in the 1990s? Many other areas of discussion tend either to reflect extreme
prejudice or to have missed important consequences.

I am left with the overall impression that the authors (who produced
the first edition in 1983) were not especially careful in their revisions.

For me, the book has two fundamental flaws. First, the technologically-orientated
authors clearly believe that the best way to save plants is to freeze their
seeds and put them away somewhere so that they can be spared the destruction
that is happening in the world outside. Specifically, they downgrade the
importance of protected areas in favour of their favourite strategy – cryogenic
seed banks.

In contrast, most of us who are active in conservation still consider
protected areas the most important strategy to protect plants, or any other
organisms. For us, an obsession with technology is not a sufficient reason
to dismiss their great importance with an ‘It is simply not feasible for
all plant species’.

What might be called a Noah’s ark strategy is fine, but it neglects
the need for managing plant and other communities throughout the world in
a sustainable way, so that the cryogenically stored seeds, or whatever other
remnants of wild populations we may have saved, can be used some day. Otherwise,
happy with the seed banks we created in our basements, we could probably
get on with our lives while, metaphorically, Rome burns.

Secondly, the authors so oversimplify the conditions that are leading
to the rapid extinction of biodiversity throughout the world that their
book tends to be misleading in attempting to present this important picture.
We are talking about a world in which three-quarters of the people live
in developing countries, where they have access to about 15 per cent of
the world’s money and the commodities that contribute to a decent standard
of living. Such a world is not one in which ‘successive governments’ in
Brazil can really ‘do the right thing’ and save plants because we think
that would be a marvellous idea.

Brazil has paid $40 billion interest on its $120 billion international
debt over the past decade, consuming nearly half of its foreign currency
earnings in doing so, but has not been able to reduce the debt itself by
a cent. Perhaps as many as half of its 140 million people are living in
absolute poverty, and up to a quarter may actually be malnourished. Only
international cooperation, understanding, and social justice along the lines
advocated by the World Commission on the Environment and Development, can
offer any hope for the preservation of much of the biodiversity there, or
elsewhere in the developing world, which will add nearly a billion people
during the 1990s.

People should be deeply involved with plant conservation, but to be
so effectively, they must understand the world context in which they are
acting, and be able to look beyond their own freezers and gardens to the
world outside. They must be empowered to act, and to be able effectively
to urge their governments to act, on matters that so clearly affect the
survival and prosperity of their children and grandchildren. At worst, to
provide the kind of limited view of plant conservation that is presented
in this book is almost to invite them to get on with business as usual,
content in the belief that their actions, their technologies, will make
everything all right.

Consequently, while I applaud the intentions of the authors and many
of their specific recommendations, I fear that they have not succeeded in
producing a book that will be particularly useful in enhancing the conservation
of plants.

Peter H Raven is the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis,
Engelmann Professor of Botany, Washington University, St Louis and Home
Secretary, US National Academy of Sciences.