Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 79

With a quarter of the world's plants set to vanish within the next 50 years, Doug Alexander reports on the scientists working against the clock to preserve the earth's botanical heritage. They travel the four corners of the globe, scouring jungles, forests and savannahs. But they're not looking for ancient artefacts, lost treasure or undiscovered tombs — just seed pods. It may lack the romantic allure of archaeology, or the whiff of danger that accompanies going after big game, but seed hunting is an increasingly serious business. Some seek seeds for profit — hunters in the employ of biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical companies and private corporations on the lookout for species that will yield the drugs or crops of the future. Others collect to conserve, working to halt the sad slide into extinction facing so many plant species. Among the pioneers of this botanical treasure hunt was John Tradescant, an English royal gardener who brought back plants and seeds from his journeys abroad in the early 1600s. Later, the English botanist Sir Joseph Banks — who was the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and travelled with Captain James Cook on his voyages near the end of the 18th century — was so driven to expand his collections that he sent botanists around the world at his own expense. Those heady days of exploration and discovery may be over, but they have been replaced by a pressing need to preserve our natural history for the future. This modern mission drives hunters such as Dr Michiel van Slageren. He and three other seed hunters work at the Millennium Seed Bank, which is an £80 million international conservation project that aims to protect the world's most endangered wild plant species. The group's headquarters are in a modern glass-and-concrete structure on a 200-hectare estate at Wakehurst Place in the West Sussex countryside in the UK. Within its underground vaults are 260 million dry seeds from 220 different countries, all stored at –20°C to survive for centuries. These stored seeds can be used in various ways, including the restoration of damaged environments, or in scientific research to find new benefits to society — in medicine, agriculture or local industry. Among the 5,100 species represented at the seed bank are virtually all of Britain's 1,400 native seed-bearing plants, the most complete such collection of any country's flora. Overseen by the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Millennium Seed Bank is the world's largest wild-plant depository with over 24,000 species in its collection. The reason is simple: thanks to humanity's efforts, an estimated 25 per cent of the world's plants are on the verge of extinction and may vanish within 50 years. We're currently responsible for habitat destruction on an unprecedented scale and, during the past 400 years, plant species' extinction rates have been about 70 times greater than those indicated by the geological record as being 'normal'. Experts predict that during the next 50 years a further one billion hectares of wilderness will be converted to farmland in developing countries alone. The implications of this loss are enormous. Besides providing staple crops for human consumption, plants are a source of many medicines, and the principal supply of fuel and building materials in many parts of the world. They also protect and improve the quality of the soil and help regulate the climate. Yet, across the globe, plant species are being driven to extinction before their potential benefits are discovered. The World Conservation Union has listed 5,714 threatened plant species worldwide, but it admits this is only scratching the surface. With only four per cent of the world's described plants having been evaluated, the true number of threatened species is sure to be much higher. In the UK alone, 300 wild plant species are classified as endangered. The Millennium Seed Bank aims to ensure that even if a plant becomes extinct in the wild, it won't be lost for ever. Seed banks are an 'insurance policy' to protect the world's heritage for the future, explains Dr Paul Smith, another Royal Botanic Gardens seed hunter. "Seed conservation techniques were originally developed by farmers," he says. "Storage is the basis of what we do, conserving seeds until we can use them — just as in farming." Smith says there's no reason why any plant species should become extinct, given today's technology. But he admits the biggest challenge is finding, naming and categorising all the world's plants. And someone has to gather these seeds before it is too late. "There aren't a lot of people out there doing this," he says. "The key is to know the flora from a particular area, and that knowledge takes years to acquire." When in the field, Royal Botanic Gardens collectors are guided by a target list, generally provided by the host country, of the seeds they need. Priorities are determined by economic importance, endangered status and distribution — although they will deviate from the list if the chance arises to gather an unknown plant they've stumbled upon.

A After the First World War, car makers Henry Ford and Arthur Sloan of General Motors moved world manufacturing from centuries of craft production into the age of mass production. Largely as a result of this, the United States soon dominated the world economy. After the Second World War, and approximately a hundred years after Japan opened up to the modern world, Eiji Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno pioneered the concept of lean production at the Toyota car company. And now, although superimposing the method on existing mass production systems causes pain and upheaval, manufacturers around the world are trying to embrace this innovative system. B Perhaps the best way to describe lean production is to compare it with the two other major manufacturing systems: craft production and mass production. The craft producer uses highly skilled workers and simple but flexible tools to make exactly what the customer asks for – one item at a time. A present-day example of this method is the customised production of a few exotic sports cars. The concept of craft production remains very popular, but the problem with it is obvious. Goods produced by the craft method – as cars once exclusively were – cost too much for most of us to afford. So at the beginning of the twentieth century, mass production was developed as an alternative method. The mass producer uses narrowly skilled professionals to design products which are then made by unskilled or semi-skilled workers, using expensive, single-purpose machines. These churn out standardised products in very high volumes. Because the machinery costs so much, and is so intolerant of disruption, the mass producer keeps standard designs in production for as long as possible. The result is that the customer gets lower costs, but at the expense of variety, and by means of work methods which most employees find boring and dispiriting. By contrast, the lean production system combines the advantages of craft and mass production, while avoiding the high cost of the former and the rigidity of the latter. Towards this end, companies appoint teams of multi-skilled workers to all levels of the organisation, and use highly flexible and increasingly automated machines to produce goods in enormous volume and variety. C Lean production is so called because, compared with mass production, it uses less of everything – half the human effort in the factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools, and half the engineering hours to develop the new product. It also results in far fewer defects. D Perhaps the most striking contrast between mass and lean production systems lies in their production standards. Mass producers set a limited goal for themselves: ‘good enough’, which translates into an acceptable number of defects, a maximum acceptable number of inventories, and a narrow range of standardised products. Lean producers, on the other hand, are unwilling to compromise standards in any of these areas. E Although cost reduction is the primary objective of the lean production system, it must meet three other intermediate objectives in order to achieve this: quantity control, quality assurance and respect for humanity. Firstly, the system must be able to adapt to daily and monthly fluctuations in demand. Secondly, each separate process must supply only good units to the subsequent process. Thirdly, in as far as the system uses human resources to attain its cost objectives, respect for human needs must be cultivated. It should be emphasised that none of these three objectives can be achieved separately. F The continuous flow of lean manufacturing production relies on two practical mechanisms: just-in-time and autonomation. Just-in-time means, for example, that in the process of assembling the parts to build a car, components from the preceding process should arrive at the next part of the line at exactly the right time and in the correct quantities. If just-in-time is fully realised throughout the company, then superfluous inventories are completely eliminated from the factory, making stores or warehouses unnecessary. However, relying solely on a central planning approach to control schedules for all stages of the production process simultaneously is very difficult in the case of cars, which consist of thousands of parts. So the lean system looks at the production flow in reverse; in other words, employees go to the preceding process to withdraw the necessary quantity of units at the appropriate time. The preceding process must produce only sufficient quantities of units to replace those that have been withdrawn, and in turn withdraws the requisite number of components from the process that precedes it. G Autonomation is the automatic checking for abnormalities in the production process. In order to realise just-in-time perfectly, only units which are in perfect condition must be allowed to flow to the next process, and this flow must be regular and uninterrupted. In other words, quality control must coexist with just-in-time procedures throughout the system. Autonomation involves building in a mechanism to prevent the multiplication of defects in machines or product lines. For example, in Toyota factories almost all the machines have been fitted with stopping devices, and the concept of autonomation has been extended to manual production lines. If something abnormal happens there, the worker pushes a button to stop the whole line, and lights, which are hung so high in the factory that they are visible to everyone, indicate the position of the problem.

It’s not every scientist who writes books for people who can’t read. And how many scientists want their books to look as dog-eared as possible? But Patricia Shanley, an ethnobotanist, wanted to give something back. After the poorest people of the Amazon allowed her to study their land and its ecology, she turned her research findings into a picture book that tells the local people how to get a good return from their trees without succumbing to the lure of a quick buck from a logging company. It has proved a big success. A The book is called Fruit Trees and Useful Plants in the Lives of Amazonians, but is better known simply as the “fruit book”. The second edition was produced at the request of politicians in western Amazonia. Its blend of hard science and local knowledge on the use and trade of 35 native forest species has been so well received (and well used) that no less a dignitary than Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has written the foreword. “There is nothing else like the Shanley book,” says Adalberto Veríssimo, director of the Institute of People and the Environment of the Amazon. “It gives science back to the poor, to the people who really need it.” B Shanley’s work on the book began a decade ago, with a plea for help from the Rural Workers’ Union of Paragominas, a Brazilian town whose prosperity is based on exploitation of timber. The union realised that logging companies would soon be knocking on the doors of the caboclos, peasant farmers living on the Rio Capim, an Amazon tributary in the Brazilian state of Pará. Isolated and illiterate, the caboclos would have little concept of the true value of their trees; communities downstream had already sold off large blocks of forest for a pittance. “What they wanted to know was how valuable the forests were,” recalls Shanley, then a researcher in the area for the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Centre. C The Rural Workers’ Union wanted to know whether harvesting wild fruits would make economic sense in the Rio Capim. “There was a lot of interest in trading non-timber forest products (NTFPs),” Shanley says. At the time, environmental groups and green-minded businesses were promoting the idea. This was the view presented in a seminal paper, Valuation of an Amazonian Rainforest, published in Nature in 1989. The researchers had calculated that revenues from the sale of fruits could far exceed those from a one-off sale of trees to loggers. “The union was keen to discover whether it made more sense conserving the forest for subsistence use and the possible sale of fruit, game and medicinal plants, than selling trees for timber,” says Shanley. Whether it would work for the caboclos was far from clear. D Although Shanley had been invited to work in the Rio Capim, some caboclos were suspicious. “When Patricia asked if she could study my forest,” says Joao Fernando Moreira Brito, “my neighbours said she was a foreigner who’d come to rob me of my trees.” In the end, Moreira Brito, or Mangueira as he is known, welcomed Shanley and worked on her study. His land, an hour’s walk from the Rio Capim, is almost entirely covered with primary forest. A study of this and other tracts of forest selected by the communities enabled Shanley to identify three trees, found throughout the Amazon, whose fruit was much favoured by the caboclos: bacuri (Platonia insignis), uxi (Endopleura uchi) and piquia (Caryocar villosum). The caboclos used their fruits, extracted oils, and knew what sort of wildlife they attracted. But, in the face of aggressive tactics from the logging companies, they had no measure of the trees’ financial worth. The only way to find out, Shanley decided, was to start from scratch with a scientific study. “From a scientific point of view, hardly anything was known about these trees,” she says. But six years of field research yielded a mass of data on their flowering and fruiting behaviour. During 1993 and 1994, 30 families weighed everything they used from the forest – game, fruit, fibre, medicinal plants – and documented its source. E After three logging sales and a major fire in 1997, the researchers were also able to study the ecosystem’s reaction to logging and disturbance. They carried out a similar, though less exhaustive, study in 1999, this time with 15 families. The changes were striking. Average annual household consumption of forest fruit had fallen from 89 to 28 kilograms between 1993 and 1999. “What we found,” says Shanley, “was that fruit collection could coexist with a certain amount of logging, but after the forest fire, it dropped dramatically.” Over the same period, fibre use also dropped from around 20 to 4 kilograms. The fire and logging also changed the nature of the caboclo diet. In 1993 most households ate game two or three times a month. By 1999 some were fortunate if they ate game more than two or three times a year. F The loss of certain species of tree was especially significant. Shanley’s team persuaded local hunters to weigh their catch, noting the trees under which the animals were caught. Over the year, they trapped five species of game averaging 232 kilogrammes under piquia trees. Under copaiba, they caught just two species averaging 63 kilogrammes; and under uxi, four species weighing 38 kilogrammes. At last, the team was getting a handle on which trees were worth keeping, and which could reasonably be sold. “This showed that selling piquia trees to loggers for a few dollars made little sense,” explains Shanley. “Their local value lies in providing a prized fruit, as well as flowers which attract more game than any other species.” G As a result of these studies, Shanley had to tell the Rural Workers’ Union of Paragominas that the Nature thesis could not be applied wholesale to their community – harvesting NTFPs would not always yield more than timber sales. Fruiting patterns of trees such as uxi were unpredictable, for example. In 1994, one household collected 3,654 uxi fruits; the following year, none at all. H This is not to say that wild fruit trees were unimportant. On the contrary, argues Shanley, they are critical for subsistence, something that is often ignored in much of the current research on NTFPs, which tends to focus on their commercial potential. Geography was another factor preventing the Rio Capim caboclos from establishing a serious trade in wild fruit: villagers in remote areas could not compete with communities collecting NTFPs close to urban markets, although they could sell them to passing river boats. I But Shanley and her colleagues decided to do more than just report their results to the union. Together with two of her research colleagues, Shanley wrote the fruit book. This, the Bible and a publication on medicinal plants co-authored by Shanley and designed for people with minimal literacy skills are about the only books you will see along this stretch of the Rio Capim. The first print run was only 3,000 copies, but the fruit book has been remarkably influential, and is used by colleges, peasant unions, industries and the caboclos themselves. Its success is largely due to the fact that people with poor literacy skills can understand much of the information it contains about the non-timber forest products, thanks to its illustrations, anecdotes, stories and songs. “The book doesn’t tell people what to do,” says Shanley, “but it does provide them with choices.” The caboclos who have used the book now have a much better understanding of which trees to sell to the loggers, and which to protect.