Bigging up plants
Do plants hold the key to our future? Efforts to understand, and harness, the potential of the plant world has broadened to cover everything from climate change to mental health, involving everyone from plant scientists to urban planners and even psychologists.
Plants and gardens simply have the power to improve our well-being by just being around us,
due to what can be described as our deep innate affinity with nature. Research has shown that the presence of plants significantly enhances our well-being. They improve the health of office workers, aid the recovery of hospital patients, reduce stress and even promote community cohesion.
But if that wasn’t enough, elsewhere plants are being used to find solutions to some of the biggest challenges of the modern era, from clean energy, to new vaccines and, of course, food production.
Energy demand is expected to grow by 40% in the next 20 years. And with concerns about climate change growing, the need for sources of carbon neutral energy has become a pressing issue. Biomass crops mean valuable farmland switches away from the production of food. However algae grown on marginal land has shown potential to produce a carbon neutral biodiesel and devices that tap electricity direct from plants are also being developed.
The continuing ebola crisis in West Africa has reminded us that society is still vulnerable to outbreaks of disease on a terrifying scale. After food, it is perhaps the medicinal qualities of plants, which have been exploited by humans the longest. And plants may yet provide the answer to this latest epidemic. They have been found to have properties useful in the production of vaccines, which are currently being developed by biotechnology companies racing to develop one for ebola.
The herbal knowledge of many thousands of years culminated in the birth of the pharmaceutical industry 150 years ago when quinine was produced from the bark of a tree to combat malaria. Important new drugs continue to be developed from the chemical compounds found in familiar plants. Taxol from yew (for the treatment of cancer), Digitalis from foxgloves (for the treatment of heart disease) and Galanthamine from snowdrops (for the treatment of Alzheimers) are just a few developed in years.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the modern world is that of feeding the planet. It may sound like stating the obvious to say that plants will be central to meeting this challenge, but with an estimated 2.5 billion extra mouths to feed by 2050 the scale of that task is growing.
GM technology will no doubt play a role, but one recent non-GM innovation illustrates the extraordinary potential of plants to be adapted to meet our needs. A Dutch farmer has developed a salt resistant potato. It sounds simple but when you consider that one of the biggest limitations of food production is the availability of fresh water, a commercial crop that can be irrigated with sea water would be revolutionary.
What else is waiting to be discovered, possibly even in our back gardens?