Section 1
Seed Hunting
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With a quarter of the world's plants set to vanish within the next 50 years, Dough Alexander reports on the scientists working against the clock the preserve the Earth's botanical heritage. They travel the four corners of the globe, scouring jungles, forests and savannas. But they're not looking for ancient artefacts, lost treasure or undiscovered tombs. Just pods. It may lack the romantic allure of archaeology or the whiff of danger that accompanies going after a 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.
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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.
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Those heady days of exploration and discovery may be over, but they have been replaced by a pressing need to preserve our natural history for the future.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, a good-natured Dutchman who often sports a wide-brimmed hat in the field – he could easily be mistaken for the cinematic hero Indiana Jones. He and three other seed hunters work at the Millennium Seed Bank, an 80 million [pounds sterling] international conservation project that aims to protect the world's most endangered wild plant species.
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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. Within its underground vaults are 260 million dried seeds from 122 countries, all stored at -20 Celsius to survive for centuries. Among the 5,100 species represented are virtually all of Britain's 1,400 native seed-bearing plants, the most complete such collection of any country's flora.
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Overseen by the Royal botanic gardens, the Millennium Seed Bank is the world's largest wild-plant depository. It aims to collect 24,000 species by 2010. The reason is simple: thanks to humanity's effort, 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 further one billion hectares of wilderness will be converted to farmland in developing countries alone.
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The implications of this loss are enormous. Besides providing staple food crops, plants are a source of many machines and the principal supply of fuel and building materials in many parts of the world. They also protect soil and help regulate the climate. Yet, across the globe, plant species are being driven to extinction before their potential benefits are discovered.
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The world Conservation Union has listed 5,714 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 forever. Stored seeds can be used the help restore damaged or destroyed the environment or in scientific research to find new benefits for society- in medicine, agriculture or local industry- that would otherwise be lost.
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Seed banks are an insurance policy to protect the world's plant heritage for the future, explains Dr Paul Smith, another Kew seed hunter. "Seed conservation techniques were originally developed by farmers," he says. "Storage is the basis what we do, conserving seeds until you 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 that the biggest challenge is finding, naming and categorizing all the world's plants. And someone has to gather these seeds before it's 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."
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There are about 1,470 seedbanks scattered around the globe, with a combined total of 5.4 million samples, of which perhaps two million are distinct non-duplicates. Most preserve genetic material for agriculture use in order to ensure crop diversity; others aim to conserve wild species, although only 15 per cent of all banked plants is wild.
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Many seed banks are themselves under threat due to a lack of funds. Last year, Imperial College, London, examined crop collections from 151 countries and found that while the number of plant samples had increased in two-thirds of the countries, the budget had been cut in a quarter and remained static in another 35 per cent. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research has since set up the Global Conservation Trust, which aims to raise the US $260 million to protect seed banks in perpetuity.
Section 2
Born to trade
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Humans are born to trade and we don't need shops or money to do it-the heart of commerce is an instinctive ability for what anthropologists call reciprocity. This is an ability to exchange goods of equal worth and it evolved as the brains of our ancient ancestors and societies became more complex, allowing individuals to keep a running tally their interactions with others. Evidence from modem hunter-gatherers leaves little doubt that the exchange of food and flavors is innate, as is the ability to keep track of the credits and debits that accrue as a result. Combine this skill for mental book-keeping with even the most basic material culture, and trade inevitably follows.
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Once trade gets off the ground, the economic benefits quickly make it irresistible, But exchanging tools, food and other essentials of life in a barter economy is a far cry from the shopping mall. Modern consumerism sway beyond subsistence and utilitarianism to encompass everything from Gucci handbags and BMW convertibles to valuable paintings dearly, the worth of such goods is not inherent but resides in certain intangible qualities that we invest in them. When did humans start holding these goods in such high esteem?
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All the archaeological evidence for the flowering of consumer culture has up to now pointed to a date of around 40,000 years ago. that's when early modern humans started making increasingly intricate bone and stone tools, carving patterns into rocks and creating representational art such as carved figurines, jewellery and cave painting. However, discoveries in Africa are pushing the origins of consumerism much further back into human prehistory. A few years ago, reports began to emerge of discoveries made at the Blombos cave, a site of ancient human habitation in South Africa. Christopher Henshilwood and colleagues from the University of Bergen in Norway dated thousands of pieces of ochre from the cave and many of them proved to be more than 100,000 years old -before the time that early humans moved out of Africa. Ochre, a coloured clay that comes in various shades from red to black, does not occur naturally around Blombos and must have been imported from quarries at least 30 kilometres away, either directly by Blombos residents or through trade. Although ochre can be used to dry and preserver cure'- animal hides, the researchers are convinced the Blombos ochre had a symbolic purpose. For a start, it is predominantly red-any of the other colours available would have done for curing -and the surfaces of the clay had been scraped in a way that indicates they were used to yield pigment for dyes.
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An even more intriguing discovery from Blombos was of 41 beads dating from 76,000 years ago, found in clusters and made from the shells of a tiny mollusc. These cannot be natural deposits, argue the researchers, as each cluster contains shells of a similar size and colour with consistently placed holes. What's more, all the beads display a pattern of wear suggesting friction from rubbing against thread, clothes or other beads. The previous oldest find of beads in Africa dates back to just 45,000 years ago. And it seems the Blombos people's taste for beautiful items was not an isolated phenomenon. Jessica Thompson of Arizona State University in Tempe has described finding shell fragments from a site in Tanzania that she believes may represent debris from bead manufacture. They are at least 45,000-and possibly 280, 000-years old. Although there is no evidence of how the ancient beads were used, their modern counterparts are often traded. So it looks as though our taste for jewellery and art is much older than we thought.
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But why did we come to value these objects in the first place? In many animal species, individuals signal their genetic fitness by showing off with attention-grabbing adornment. Some researchers think that in humans, consumer products play a similar role. Archaeologist Aimee Plourde, from the University of California, also argues that even in egalitarian societies, some people are more successful than others. Among our ancestors, superior skills in areas such as hunting, crafts, environmental knowledge and contact with neighbouring groups would have brought respect-in other words, prestige. And because prestige brings social benefits, people would want to show off their talents. The best way to do this would be through demonstrating possession of material items that are hard to fake "A good hunter, for instance, could advertise his skills by wearing the tooth of an animal that is elusive or dangerous, says Plourde. The benefits of prestige would also lead to competition to acquire it. As a result, the value and variety of prestige goods would spiral and there would be a parallel increase in the ranking of social systems. If Plourde is correct, prestige goods form a direct link between our innate drive for trade and the development of structured, hierarchical societies. They are arguably the first step on the road to modern civilisation, paving the way for agriculture and urbanisation. We may not be impressed by beads any more, but their modern equivalents have the same fascination Nobody believes the guy who spends E670,000 on a Bugatti Veyron car does so because he needs to travel at 250mph. We all know in today's consumer society he's buying an exclusive status symbol.
Section 3
Robert Louis Stevenson
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It is more than 100 years since the death of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson on the South Pacific Island of Samoa, and it seems that time has not been kind to Stevenson's memory. Immediately after his death, his family and friends set to work to fashion the legend of Robert Louis Stevenson or RLS, as he became known one of the few writers familiar from his initials alone. Subsequent works of biography then turned him into a writer of almost religious importance. One example was literary critic Balfour, who in 1901 portrayed Stevenson's family as ministering angels to the dying genius during his final illness. Similarly, the biographer Crouch absurdly overstated Stevenson's significance by placing him in the same company as those most revered names in English literature: Shakespeare and Keats. The reaction to this nonsense was a number of highly critical assessments of Stevenson's legacy in the 1920s.
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Normally, the critical pendulum can be relied on to swing back again, but there are several aspects of Stevenson's work that have, until recently, acted against a more balanced appraisal. First is the allegation that Stevenson was a mere master of linguistic fireworks, who lacked moral depth. Some critics accused him of being a literary charlatan, of juggling words very prettily to strike effects which overawed an ignorant public, and served to distract from the inadequacy of his ideas.
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Then there has long been a prejudice against the adventure story as the proper medium for deep moral seriousness, a prejudice which is still extremely influential today. It seems that we can accept that an adventure film can successfully express profound moral truths, but we reject the same idea for a book. The absurdity of this becomes apparent when we think of writers like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, but it is no use pretending that this bias against adventure stories is not part of our high culture. A further problem is that Stevenson has often not found favour in the land of his birth because his conservatism so often collides with the strong radical tradition in Scotland. His many escapist stories and preference for living abroad have led to accusations that he camouflaged Scotland's health problems. Lastly the high adventure of Stevenson's own lifestyle has sometimes obscured his output. His globe-trotting, and above all the final phase of his life in Samoa, tended to make his own life a greater story than any he could devise. This was precisely what his friends feared would happen towards the end of his short life: his art might be overwhelmed by the drama of life in Samoa.
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One consequence of this has been that Stevenson's influence on other writers has too often been neglected. The writer and poet Oscar Wilde was deeply influenced by Stevenson, even though he declared that Stevenson would have produced better work if he had lived in London rather than Samoa. Stevenson tends to stick in the throat even of those writers who would like to spit him out, such as Shaw, who claimed to have learned from him that the romantic hero is always mocked by reality. Likewise, the writer Galsworthy, who began as a determined critic, later changed his mind and said that the superiority of Stevenson over the novelist Hardy was that Stevenson was all life and Hardy all death. The influence on the novelist Chesterton would also repay detailed study, for it was through him that Stevenson has managed to cross the ages, emerging as an influence on the modernist movement and our own contemporary Latin American school of 'magical realism'.
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When making an assessment of his life and work one question must inevitably be asked: was Robert Louis Stevenson Scotland's greatest writer of English prose? For most commentators this honour falls to Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe among many other classic novels and it is true that in terms of craftsmanship, precision and the ability to minutely regulate language to create the desired effect, Scott takes the Prize. However, this is not the something at all as inherent talent: by way of comparison one may take the example of the two great Russian composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev, of whom the former had learned more precise skills of execution but the latter's intrinsic genius was greater, and so it seems to be with Scott and Stevenson. Admittedly, Scott's detailed style does permit his stories to explore levels of tragedy that are beyond Stevenson's reach, but in this regard they have the musty smell of the museum, somehow artificial and removed from modern day reality. On the other hand, Stevenson's skill with plotting and narrative give his books a timeless quality, so that they still live today. And Stevenson was also the shrewder judge of behaviour and psychology. For example, his compelling descriptions of a man with a split personality in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have proved so accessible and accurate that the expression 'Jekyll and Hyde' has entered common English usage. Even if we do not see a revival of critical interest in this great Scottish writer, it is to be hoped that readers go back to Robert Louis Stevenson's magnificent stories and reassess this neglected genius.