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Peter Raven: Champion of the Chain of Life
| Article
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18974 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
3,510 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth J. Sherman
Elizabeth J. Sherman is editor of the Biographical Memoirs of
the National Academy of Sciences. |
Something happened 65 million years ago that was hard on dinosaurs; so hard, they all died out. Some say the earth's collision with a meteor spewed dust into the air, blocking out the sun and dramatically altering the climate. But today, it no longer takes a disaster from the heavens to kill off life on earth; we have learned to do it ourselves.
Among the few whose vision encompasses the globe is botanist and evolutionary biologist Peter H. Raven. The destruction he sees all around him--the loss of countless plant and animal species--has turned this sunny, humorous scholar into a doomsayer. A less likely Cassandra is hard to imagine, but beneath the warmth a formidable intelligence sharpens Raven's blue eyes to see clearly--and to understand what they see.
"Of the 165,000 known tropical plant species, no less than 50,000 will be lost in the next 30 years," Raven warns. "This rate of loss is a thousand times greater than has occurred over the past tens of millions of years. But the difference between now and the Cretaceous Period, when the dinosaurs died out, is that today we can do something about it."
For despite his grim view of the future, in which tropical forests now lush and teeming with life will be baking deserts within 60 years, Peter H. Raven director of the multimillion-dollar Missouri Botanical Garden, home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, member of the U.S. Soviet Joint Committee on Global Ecology, professor of botany at several universities, author of nearly 400 scientific papers and two best-selling college textbooks, environmental activist, and constant world traveler, whistle-blower, and harbinger of doom--is also an incurable optimist.
Helping a child to bloom
Raven's great uncle, a second generation Californian, left the States to set up a banking and real estate business in China shortly after the Spanish American War. (Ravens of every era, it seems, are adventurous.) By the 1920s business was booming and Charles Raven, Peter's grandfather, joined his brother's firm in Shanghai. Charles' son Walter, a teenager at the time, went back to California for college, returning to China in 1930 to work in the family bank. A year later he was joined by his equally adventurous Berkeley-graduate bride Isabelle. But by 1936, the year of Peter's birth, the Depression was hitting China hard. The bank where Walter worked failed, and the young couple returned to San Francisco. There Peter grew up, an only child
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