The Big Picture™ writ large

When I was working at the Missouri Botanical Garden, the largest botanical research institution in the US with an extensive herbarium, I had the joy of getting to sit in on a lecture by E.O. Wilson who is a friend of the director of mobot, Peter Raven. If you aren't familiar with him you should be as he is the Jacques Cousteau of the biosphere. Aside from some of his more controversial research he has a lot to say about the loss of biodiversity. The average suburbanite probably doesn't care much about the loss of rain forest any more than global warming but when you go through the herbarium with him choosing specimens at random with half of them being extinct you start to get the idea that we're in big trouble. Groups such as the Applied Research Group who find new uses for plants, including such things as cures for cancers, etc. since plants manufacture compounds we can't replicate, are in a race for species before they all disappear.

The Future of Life is his latest book and Salon has an interesting interview with him. Let's hope someone pays attention to him as living in a tin can cruising around the cosmos as an alternative to living on earth doesn't really hold a lot of appeal.