May 31, 2023 • 40 mins
In Bad Seeds, we’ve explored the crimes of obsessed hobbyists, of organized criminals, and even corrupt governments. But what about the elephant in the room? What about when the places entrusted to conserve flora are committing the crimes? And what about those risking everything… to protect plant-life and our planet?
This is the last episode of Season 1. But! You can get more plant content by following host Summer Rayne Oakes on her YouTube channels Plant One on Me and Flock.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
School of humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Deep in Peru's cloud forests, a stream of fog weaves
past tree trunks, mist blankets the undergrowth, filtering the sunlight
above and supplying moisture to the plants below. The result
is one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.
They are up to three thousand species of orchids here,
(00:32):
more than anywhere else in the world. The forest has
a way of seducing people, and in two thousand and
two the Sirens Lord James Michael Kovac to Peru. An
orchid enthusiast, Kovak flew there in search of the Holy Grail,
in search of flowers nobody could see anywhere else, And
(00:56):
one day, as he walked past a roadside flower vendor,
his heartly jumped out of his chest. It was a
Lady Slipper, a pinkish purple orchid with giant petals unfurling
like the wings of a butterfly. Kovak was mesmerized. He
(01:19):
began haggling with the shopkeeper, but they refused to budge.
The owners knew they had something special, so Kovak paid
the asking price three dollars and sixty cents. A week later,
Kovak had printed his boarding pass home, he slipped the
orchid into a cardboard tube and boarded a flight to
(01:41):
the United States. When he landed in Miami, customs officers
failed to stop him, so Kovak made his way to
Sarasota to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, home to one
of the most diverse orchid collections in the world. Kovak
brought the specimen in and watched the reactions. According to
(02:03):
journalist Craig Pittman's book The Scent of Scandal, the flower
sparked a simultaneous wave of eye widening and mouth opening.
Nobody bothered to ask if he had acquired it legally.
Shortly after, Selby published a scientific description of the new orchid,
They named it Fragmipedium kovakii. Then phone lines at the
(02:27):
US Fish and Wildlife Service started to buzz. It was Peru.
An American botanical garden, they claimed, was saying it quote
discovered an orchid that had been clearly smuggled out of Peru. Soon,
armed agents were knocking on Kovac's door. They confiscated his
papers and more than three hundred plants. Indictments streamed in
(02:52):
the gardens were fined for violating the endangered species Act,
the garden's orchid expert placed under house arrest. As part
of the punishment, the garden had to buy a full
page ad in a trade magazine apologizing a subtle message
to other institutions that they should learn from Selby's mistakes.
(03:15):
That was the dirty secret. In botany, this type of
low key smuggling was par for the course. In fact,
when activists tried to change the name of fragment pedium kovakia,
arguing it was wrong to name the plant after a
person who poached it, scientific authorities shrugged and did nothing. This,
(03:35):
they said, was too high a standard. If botany reclassified
every plant name for smugglers, poachers, and thieves, the entire
field would suffer quote major nomenclature instability. In Layman's terms,
it would throw the entire scientific field into turmoil. On
(03:55):
this podcast, we've explored the crimes of obsessed hobbyists, of
organized gangs, and even corrupt governments. But what about the
elephant in the room. What about when the places entrusted
to conserve plant life are committing the crimes. In this
last episode, when the worlds of policy and piracy collide,
(04:19):
I'm summer rain Oaks from school of Humans and iHeart podcasts,
This is bad Seeds. In the early two thousands, the
Selby scandal would divide orchid collectors. Some complain that this
(04:41):
was government overreach. Others wailed that it was about time
rich Western institutions had been taking credit for quote unquote
discovering plants that natives knew about for ages. But the
fight went far beyond claims of who got there first.
For many, the problem was the profit motive. Kovac told
(05:03):
investigators he planned to artificially propagate the smuggled flower and
mass and those are his words. He didn't express any
intention to share future profits with the people in Peru
who had actually discovered and were actively protecting the plant.
In Botany, this kind of behavior, smuggling a plant and
(05:25):
then getting rich off its mass production, conjures a painful past,
especially in South America.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
You start to hear them call Henry Wickham the Pirate
of the Amazon and the destroyer of worlds.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
That's Joe Jackson. He's a writer.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
I'm the author of At the End of the World.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
And he's an expert on one of South America's most
reviled villains, an Englishman by the name of Henry Wickham.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
He was born in eighteen forty six, had a comfortable
middle class upbringing until his father died in one of
the cholera epidemics in eighteen fifty five or eighteen fifty six.
And you know, back then you didn't have pensions, and
his mother had three kids. He had a dream in
drastic descent in class, and he had a spirit of adventure,
(06:20):
and he had a talent for art. And at that time,
if you were an adventurous boy in the British Empire,
you went out to the wild places and you explored,
and you wrote a book about your travels. And Henry
thought he was ready made for that. The explorers were
the astronauts of that generation, and Henry wanted to do that.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
So Henry, desperate for both money and adventure, set out
into the world, spending his twenties exploring places like Belize
and Nicaragua, hoping the jungles would give him material for
books and maybe even change his family's fortunes.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
He wasn't by science. He was driven by ambition. I mean,
he kind of wanted to come back up in the
world from what he had lost.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
He was ambitious, sometimes to his detriment. Henry was a
thoughtless explorer. Consider the time he brought his wife Violet
to the islands near Papua New Guinea.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
There were still cannibal tribes and some of the islands
around there, and Henry was pretty impulsive, and some of
the natives had stolen a couple of his canoes, and
Henry got rene, and he took some of his workers
and he went paddling after them and left Violet on
that island for I don't know, like ten twelve days
(07:42):
like that, by herself, and she knew there were cannibals around.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Turns out that leaving your wife alone on an island
inhabited by cannibals not a great recipe for a happy marriage.
Violet ended up being okay, but their union not so much.
Henry's absent mindedness aside, his travels helped him become something
of an expert on rubber, and this was the eighteen seventies.
(08:09):
Rubber was big. Railroads, telegraph companies, bicycle manufacturers, hose and
gasket makers. All of them were starving for the stretchy stuff.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Rubber was a central component. Everything was steam driven, so
he had giant turbines. You had these giant pistons, you
had looms, steam powered looms, and you had the British
Empire's navy. And with all of these moving parts, you
needed oil. But you also needed rubber to cushion the blow.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Problem was there was only one place to get rubber,
the Amazon Basin. About ninety percent of the world's latex
came out of Brazil, and that demand, derived from the
poetry heavy at Braziliensis, was fueling a boom of wealth.
Entrepreneurs flooded Brazil, laying thousands of miles of railroad track
(09:06):
and erecting resplendent buildings sculpted from the finest European marble.
The British wanted in on it.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
They needed to find some way of getting rubber from
the forests of Brazil to the British empires of.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Possession, and that's when they set eyes on Henry Wickham.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
And the director of Q Garden guy by the name
of William Booker wrote to the council and said, find
me that guy. He knows something about rubber. So Henry
did not go to the Amazon thinking he was going
to be a secret agent for Q, but in a
way he became a secret agent for Q because Booker
Rhodehiman said, would you agree to be our agent and
(09:51):
bring as much rubber back as you possibly could?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I agreed. In eighteen seventy six, he paddled down the
Amazon River and moored his boat near the town of
Boeien by a grove of potter trees. There, Henry enlisted
a group of locals to help them collect more than
seventy thousand rubber seeds, wrapping them in banana leaves. When
(10:20):
it came time to leave the country, Brazilian officials asked
Henry if he had any seeds on him. He lied
and said he had some, but that they were academic specimens.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Said I've got some rubber seeds, and he paid the
tear of you know, about ten or twelve seeds. I
forget the exact number, but it was very low.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
It was an undercount of say sixty nine nine ninety.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
He saund off and he brought as seeds to Hugh Gardens,
and twelve percent of them survived.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
British scientists grew the seeds and sent the surviving specimens
to the British Empire's colonies.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
They eventually transferred them to vast plantations around Singapore and
malays and that became the British Rubber Empire.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
The British Empire's rubber plantations, all grown from Henry's seeds,
would utterly destroy the trade in Brazil, and it.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Broke the back of Brazil's rubber empire in one year,
which is pretty dramatic.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
In the eighteen seventies, the South American country controlled the
world's rubber production. By the nineteen twenties it had all
slipped away. The dramatic boom and bust killed Brazil's economic
momentum with effects that are still felt today. In Britain,
Henry would be knighted, but Brazilians would give him a
(11:49):
much different title.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
He was the devil incarnate. They hated him down in Brazil.
They thought he had raped the nation.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
He'd be called the princip those ladros, the prince of thieves. Today,
botanists have another name for him, biopirate. Henry Wickham's theft
(12:19):
of those seeds would sap in calculable economic potential from
Brazil while enriching the leaders of British industry. But what
did his actions do for him?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
The British Empire kind of padded him on the back
and paid him the equivalent of about seven hundred dollars
and said go on your way, buddy. And he felt
cheated pretty much for the rest of his life. And
what he did for the rest of his life was
basically try to find discover this next great wonder plant.
(12:52):
And he never really did. He never found anything that
was as quote miraculous as the rubber tree. I don't know.
It was kind of like some mythological character that kind
of wanders the world trying to replicate his early success.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
If you search the annals of botany, if you look
at the names of great plant explorers, you discover more
and more people like Henry Wickham, people who today we'd
call poachers, traffickers and thieves, or as experts now call them, biopirates.
It's something of a theme. In twenty fourteen, the journalist
(13:29):
Sam Knight, writing for The Guardian, put it this way
quote one big problem with plant crime is that it
is so difficult to distinguish from the act of botany itself.
For decades, biopiracy was not the exception, but the rule.
Q Gardens paid Henry Wickham seven hundred pounds to steal,
(13:51):
mislabel and smuggle those rubber seeds out of Brazil. The
British East India Company asked the Scotsman Robert Fortune to
sneak into forbidden China and steal the country's tea making secrets.
The list goes on and on. In a way, the
study of botany was just an extension of empire, or,
(14:13):
in other words, exploitation, and most of these early day
biopirates felt little remorse. They had no problems stealing from
or talking down to native populations. In the words of
one nineteenth century botanist.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
The Spanish Americas have accomplished nothing in the development of
the knowledge of their rome, floras and vegetable products.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
The Anglo Saxon blood must originate and direct all exploitation
and development.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
This, of course, couldn't have been further from the truth.
Take San Shona officionalis a leafy green shrub with starburst
blooms that grows across the Andean forest. For centuries, Peruvians
and Bolivians had used Saintchona bark to stop fever. They
were onto something. The plant contains quinine, an anti malarial.
(15:11):
Centuries after that discovery, a British alpaca farmer named Charles
Ledger caught wind of the bark's medicinal properties in the
eighteen sixties. He traveled through Peru and Bolivia and with
the help of his servant, a native named Manuel Incra Mammani,
he stole seeds, smuggled them to Europe and sold them
(15:33):
to the Dutch. The production and study of quinine soon exploded.
It would save millions of lives. And that is where
the ethics of biopiracy gets sort of Harry.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
It's a real gray area in a lot of ways.
There's always two sides of this biopiracy thing. I mean,
it's a sovereign nation, seems like it should have a
right to the things that are found within its borders.
But then what the British Empire used when they were
taking the Tinjona tree for quini, and they said, well, look,
(16:08):
this is for the greater good of mankind. And that's
something that still is going.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
On regardless of where you land on the issue of quinine.
This long history of biopiracy left many nations, especially those
in South America and Africa, feeling cheated, and it wouldn't
be addressed by the international stage until the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
In Rio de Chenaier you had a the nineteen ninety
two Earth Summit, the first summit that basically came up
with international regulations against biopiracy.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
That year, an international treaty was signed, the rules for
which are pretty simple. If a country is home to
a genetic resource, for instance, a rare or unique plant
like rubber, then that country is entitled to benefit financially
from any profits when the plant is sold elsewhere. It's
essentially a thank you for keeping and protecting the plant
(17:07):
over the past few centuries. The same goes for a
traditional knowledge. If a pharmaceutical company learns about a plant's
medicinal benefits thanks to indigenous knowledge, then locals deserve some
financial compensation when the profits roll in. In other words,
it's about giving credit where credit is due. Despite these efforts,
(17:33):
biopiracy remains what Jackson calls a rancrous issue, especially as
corporations get bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
You still have that kind of sovereign rights versus the
greater good, that kind of pushing pool that is part
of the argument, that's part of the exchange. People don't
really believe in empire right now, Government empires aren't so big,
but I mean private are a big deal.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
In the US, corporations can patent a plant, new breeds
can be protected by intellectual property law, and this has
gotten some folks in trouble. In nineteen ninety five, the
US Patent Office granted scientists a patent for turmeric, also
known as kurkuma longa, because it could be used for
(18:22):
wound healing. Of course, over in India, locals had known
this for centuries, if not thousands of years. A couple
years later, a Texas company tried to patent basmati rice,
a decision that, to put it lightly, made a lot
of farmers in India very angry. And the treaty itself,
(18:42):
even though it's prevented a lot of exploitation and theft,
has its downsides because as it's gotten harder to export
and study some plants, they've only gotten rarer and more endangered.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
By the time I wrote a book and talked to
some dis botanists and then demoloed it would go down
to the Amazon and study these things. Is said. You
go down there and you're the villain. You don't know
whether or not you're going to be called a biopirate.
Even after you've jumped through all the hoops and paint
all of the fees at the airport, they might decide
that you're trying to steal from them, and they'll sequester
(19:19):
you for a long time.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
All of you or specimens will die.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
The ability to patent plants in the US has also
made it a huge target of foreign biopirates. It's twenty
eleven and a field manager working at DuPont Pioneer is
peering across a cornfield when he notices an Asian man
crouched over a row of maize sifting through the dirt.
(19:48):
Now this isn't just any old cornfield. This is a
grower field, a place where agricultural companies test news strains
of veggies, ones that could be more resistant to disease
and famine. In other words, exactly the kind of plants
a foreign nation might want to steal and replicate. The
(20:08):
manager drives over to the visitor and confronts him. The
man named Mo looks startled. He explains he worked for
a university, but he doesn't go into any more detail. Instead,
he quickly gets in his car and speeds away, the
(20:30):
field manager notifies the FBI. Turns out the FBI is
already on Moe's tail. Mo Hi Loong has been sneaking
through the cornfields of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa with a
crew of accomplices, stealing ears of corn, rooting up seedlings.
(20:51):
The FBI discovers that Moe works for a Chinese agricultural company,
and he's been targeting cornfields owned by American corporation. His
goal to unlock the trade secrets buried in the DNA
of various new GMO corn. If he can steal the seeds,
his employer can reverse engineer the plant to skip years
(21:14):
of expensive biotech research required to create new strains. Mo
and his accomplices would later be caught trying to ship
two hundred and fifty pounds of stolen corn seed to China,
hiding hundreds of small samples in envelopes of microwave popcorn.
The trade secrets hidden in those seeds were worth at
(21:35):
least thirty million dollars. After police caught up with him,
Mo would be sentenced to three years in prison, a
pretty light sentence for a biopirate all things considered, because
remember that story about Charles Ledger, the guy who's sticky
fingers helped launch the world quinine biz. You may recall
(21:55):
he had help from a native, a guy named Manuel Kramamani.
While in Europe, Ledger was celebrated as a hero, but
in gram Amani Back home, locals soon learned what he
had done, and he'd be arrested, beaten, tortured, and then killed.
The difference between a smuggler and a saint, between a
(22:18):
backstabber and a lifesaver, may merely depend on whether you
live in the nation that was pilfered or the one
that profited. But where there are people willing to kill
for a plant, there are others who are willing to
die for one. Their story when we return Leningrad nineteen
(22:49):
forty three, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union with a plan.
First they would surround Leningrad, Then they'd cut off the
city's supply routes, and then finally they'd starved the population
into submission. The goal, according to a high level memo,
was to quote wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth.
(23:12):
For months, Germans dropped bombs onto Leningrad's hospitals and homes.
The Luftwaffa zeroed in on the food depots and markets. Meanwhile,
Axis troops looted the cities famously ornate palaces, transforming them
into smoldering heaps of ash. Leningrad became a tomb. Michael Wahlzer,
(23:33):
a political theorist, claims quote more civilians died in the
Siege of Leningrad than in the modernists infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima,
and Nagasaki taken together. But the Red Army punched back.
Snipers lurked in the rubble, hid in the bell towers,
(23:53):
and burrowed under bodies. A chorus of anti aircraft weapons
boomed day and night. Millions of ordinary people who did
not or could not evacuate, stretched their bread rations by
substituting flour with sawdust, and in the center of town,
a team of botanists made a decision that would change
(24:16):
the course of world history forever. In nineteen forty three,
Leningrad housed one of the world's largest seed banks. Established
two decades earlier, the institute was at the forefront of
a new type of botany. Not as a haven for
(24:37):
biopirates or greedy monarchs, but a new botany for the
good of the world. In Leningrad, scientists used a vast
collection of seeds to study plant immunity, pathology, and cultivation.
It was a library designed to preserve and protect the
plant world's genetic story, a repository and intensive care unit
(24:58):
for some of the planet's rarest and most endangered species.
As the neighborhood around the institute crumbled, dozens of botanists
working inside risked their lives to keep those seeds safe.
But bombs and mortar fire were the least of the
botanist's worries. Their greatest enemy was their own hunger. To
(25:23):
preserve the seeds, the botanists had to keep the collections warm.
With electricity destroyed and the brutal Russian winter barreling in,
the scientists scoured the charred rubble of their beloved city,
burning any scraps to keep the collection alive. Then the
(25:43):
ice swept in. With the cold came mass starvation. Up
to one hundred thousand people began dying every month. Even
the rats began to show the rib cages inside the
seed bank. The botanists, grappling with their own hunger, faced
(26:06):
an unrelenting temptation. They had access to rice, wheat, peas, oats, corn,
the work courses of agriculture, and yet each scientist, despite
growing increasingly hungry, refused to tap into the collection to
save themselves. One by one, the botanists starved. According to
(26:34):
The Washington Post, the first was Alexander Stutkin, a peanut expert.
He collapsed at his desk. Then it was the institute's
rice specialist, and then another and another. Eating the seeds
could have saved their lives, but each scientist had made
(26:54):
a choice. They refused to grow or eat the seeds
because doing so would have destroyed the future they had
worked toward. The Siege of Leningrad lasted eight hundred and
seventy two days. Over that time, at least nine botanists
starved to death, but the seeds survived. Years later, those
(27:24):
same seeds would be crossbread to produce crops used around
the world today. You and I have definitely eaten food
descended from those Leningrad seeds. In a world of biopirates,
these botanists were something different. What journalist Boyce Rensburger called
the first martyrs for biodiversity, and that's where we want
(27:47):
to end this podcast by focusing not on the thieves,
the crooks, and the corruption. We want to end by
shining a light on the people making huge sacrifices right
now to save us. In the nineteen forties, the Leningrad
(28:07):
Seed Bank was a novelty, but today there are approximately
seventeen hundred seed banks across the globe.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
My name's Eleanor Braman, and I work at the Millennium
Seed Bank at the roeb Botanic Gardens Queue.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
The Millennium Seed Bank program is the largest conservation resource
in the world. If there's any place to find hope
in the future, it's here.
Speaker 4 (28:30):
Since two thousand, we've worked with ninety seven different countries
and territories to help conserve their native flora. It sounds
deceptively simple. You just say, well, you just go out
and you collect some seeds, and then we dry them
and freeze them.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Of course, it's a little more involved than that. The
Millennium Seed Bank is the kind of place that would
make a Doomsday prepper drool.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
The vaulte underground is actually within half a meter thick
reinforced concrete, so we're near an international air The idea
was it could withstand a plane going down. We've also
got radiation detection which would cut off a supply to
the vault if radiation was detected, and we have a
flood protection mechanism, and we have backup generators, and we
(29:14):
have some solar power.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
And protected in these underground vaults are seeds. Lots and
lots of seeds.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
So we've currently got six walking cold rooms that are active,
four of those are full, and we've got space for
formal We've currently got forty thousand species held in our vault.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Forty thousand species, or at the moment, around fifteen percent
of the world's plants, all being saved for the future
and emergencies.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
We are a real bank in that sense. We save things,
we hold it for a rainy day, but you can
withdraw seeds at any time.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
And Millennium is not alone. Many countries have their own
networks of seed banks. In the United States, there's a
National Plant Germplasm System full of cryo preserved seeds in
Fort Collins, Colorado. Cherokee Nation has its own seed vault,
and at the Smithsonian scientists are currently banking the genetics
(30:18):
of two hundred plus orchids native to the US, more
than half of which are endangered.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Goes back to the fundamental that all lives dependent on plants.
The majority of our ecosystems are made up of wild plants,
and these are the things that are providing us with
the oxygen that we breathe, and preventing floods and providing
all these amazing services within the landscape. We tend to
focus on things that are threatened in the wild, things
(30:45):
that are rare so they're likely to become threatened, and
also useful plants, And that's in the broadest sense. You know,
it could be useful for food, for medicine, for fiber,
for cultural reasons, whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Focusing on plants that are threatened carries a certain feel
good message, but it's not like you could bring a
species back from the dead, like back from extinction, right wrong.
In the nineteen nineties, there was only one cylindrocline lorentzi
alive in the wild. The small tree native to the
(31:21):
island nation of Mauritius, was saved from oblivion when scientists
successfully extracted and grew sells from dead cylindricline seeds. More recently,
researchers in Israel were able to nurture a date palm
called Phoenix dactylifera from two thousand year old seeds. That
(31:45):
tree now bears the same fruit that biblical figures may
have eaten. And impressively, in twenty twelve, scientists discovered a
seed of a flowering Siberian plant which had been buried
an ice age squirrel thirty two thousand years ago, and
they successfully revived it. And you know, that spells hope
(32:11):
for the plants plagued with poaching or overexploitation, because it's
here in places like this that solutions are emerging.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
We're involved in a project in South Africa because the
illegal trade in succulent plants there is kind of at
a crisis point. They seized something like seven hundred thousand
individual plants at the borders to date, and some of
those plants can be tens to hundreds of years old,
so you know the impact that that's having on these
(32:42):
populations is pushing them towards extinction. So our partners in
South Africa have recently developed a nursery for growing on
succulent plants and for training their staff in how to
propagate them and how to restore them to the wild,
and we've got a really interesting program that's just starting
(33:03):
to see if you can use stable isotopes within the
plants as a signature for where they came from. So
then could you say whether something's been illegally collected or
was from a reputable nursery. So can we help to
stop this illegal trade In.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
That way, maybe in the not too distant future, buying
plants will be more secure and transparent. You'll be walking
through the store and be assured that the plant you're
buying didn't come from a bad seed.
Speaker 6 (33:41):
So we're going to walk just a little bit further
down this hiking trail we.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Wanted to end here in Tennessee.
Speaker 6 (33:48):
So as we get out here and take a walk,
you'll see gravel right at the surface, so very little soil,
very rocky, harsh environment for plants to grow in.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
David linsecom, manager of the Natural Heritage Program for the
State of Tennessee, is showing our producer Gabby around the
state's Cedar Glades to witness a little miracle.
Speaker 6 (34:07):
Today we are here at Couchville Cedar Glades State Natural
Area in Davidson County, Tennessee. Today we're going to look
for the Tennessee purple cone flower Echinasia Tennessee ensus. It
is a globally rare species and a state rare species.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
The Tennessee cone flower Echinasia Tennessee ensus is a gorgeous bloom.
It kind of resembles a spinley purple daisy. It attracts
important pollinators like bees and butterflies. It's also rare. It
only exists right here in Tennessee.
Speaker 6 (34:40):
The plants that occur here many of them her nowhere
else in the world, including our Tennessee purple cone flower.
It's surprising when you walk this hiking trail, the cone
flowers scattered throughout, and it's so common here that probably
no one thoroughly thinks about it being globally rare. In
about a fifteen miles of range here, and there's only
(35:04):
five wild populations, and that's in the entire world, and
it's all right here, primarily in Davidson County, Wilson County,
and Rutherford County in Tennessee.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
The coneflower thrives in this unique environment where shallow soil
is layered atop limestone croppings, but back in the day
its survival was at risk. In the nineteen seventies. It
became just the second plant to be added to the
US Endangered Species list. But when state and federal entities
(35:38):
realized it was at risk of disappearing, they jumped into
action to conservative.
Speaker 6 (35:43):
So it's the two pronged approach of protecting the habitat
and then working with conservation horticulture to collect seas, propagate plants,
and re establish colonies that has really proven to be
successful for this species.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Workers acquired land to tech the environment. They enlisted botanic
gardens to propagate the cone flower. They sent specimens to
seed banks for preservation. Up until twenty eleven, the government
was spending around thirty thousand dollars a year to keep
the flower on life support and it worked. All of
that effort helped revive a plant staring down extinction. Similar
(36:25):
efforts have worked with other plants you've heard about in
this podcast. The Saint Helena ebony is bouncing back. The
cacti that you heard about in episode one, the ones
found in a man's apartment in Italy. They're back home
in Chile. Io For the cone flower, botanical gardens and
seed banks saved the day. They propagated the plants, providing
(36:47):
an alternate source for obsessed buyers, known as Echinasia rocky top,
helping reduce collection pressures on wild populations. Seeds became widely
available across the country, feeding the demands of gardeners and
what the cedar glades protected. The government was able to
reintroduce the flower into the wild. In twenty eleven, the
(37:10):
Tennessee cone flower was removed from the Endangered Species list.
Speaker 6 (37:14):
The Tennessee cone flower was a big deal because it
was one of the first plant species ever listed on
the Endangered Species Act and it took thirty two years
to reach that recovery state. It's quite an achievement for myself.
That was one of the first species I was really
actively in working with and you know, reaching recovery. I mean,
(37:35):
that's what our job is, to get these species off
the list, and so being able to actually do that
and accomplish it was very rewarding. It really took a
small army of folks to make it happen.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
It really does take an army. And now you're a
part of it, because the first step is awareness. But
if you're still wondering where do I go from here?
How do I help stop this? I have a few ideas. First,
know where your plants come from, especially if you're like
buying wood or something like that. If the person or
(38:13):
place you're buying from can't tell you anything about the
plant source, then get it somewhere else. If you're dealing
with foreign or endangered species, always ask for a FIDO
sanitary certificate. If they don't have one, look elsewhere. And
please don't buy non commercial plants from places that do
not have nursery certificates. Many can be illegal or poached.
(38:35):
Now if you must, always ask the seller to show
their nursery certificate, permit or FHIDO Sanitary certificate if need be.
Support your local botanical garden, not only are they wonderful
places to visit, where your money goes straight to the
conservation and protection of species, and you could give to
groups like the Environmental Investigation Agency, the International Union for
(38:59):
the concert of Nature or Cactus and Succulent Plants Specialist Group.
The work they do matters, and please, if you're in
the US and witness the poaching or trafficking of plants,
or have any evidence of any other wildlife crime, report
it to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Their tip
line is one eight four four three nine seven, eight
(39:22):
four seven seven. Again that is one eight four four
three ninety seven eight four seven seven. I'm Summer rain Oaks.
That's it for Bad Seeds. Thank you for listening and
for building a future for some good to grow. Bad
Seeds is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
(39:46):
I'm your Host Summer rain Oaks. Lucas Riley is our writer,
Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our
senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugely and Zoe Farrell.
Original music is by Claire Campbell, sound design and scores
by Jesse Niswanger. Development was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer.
(40:08):
Special thanks to a voice actor Christopher Goldie. Executive producers
are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and
Jacob Selzer.
School of humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Deep in Peru's cloud forests, a stream of fog weaves
past tree trunks, mist blankets the undergrowth, filtering the sunlight
above and supplying moisture to the plants below. The result
is one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.
They are up to three thousand species of orchids here,
(00:32):
more than anywhere else in the world. The forest has
a way of seducing people, and in two thousand and
two the Sirens Lord James Michael Kovac to Peru. An
orchid enthusiast, Kovak flew there in search of the Holy Grail,
in search of flowers nobody could see anywhere else, And
(00:56):
one day, as he walked past a roadside flower vendor,
his heartly jumped out of his chest. It was a
Lady Slipper, a pinkish purple orchid with giant petals unfurling
like the wings of a butterfly. Kovak was mesmerized. He
(01:19):
began haggling with the shopkeeper, but they refused to budge.
The owners knew they had something special, so Kovak paid
the asking price three dollars and sixty cents. A week later,
Kovak had printed his boarding pass home, he slipped the
orchid into a cardboard tube and boarded a flight to
(01:41):
the United States. When he landed in Miami, customs officers
failed to stop him, so Kovak made his way to
Sarasota to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, home to one
of the most diverse orchid collections in the world. Kovak
brought the specimen in and watched the reactions. According to
(02:03):
journalist Craig Pittman's book The Scent of Scandal, the flower
sparked a simultaneous wave of eye widening and mouth opening.
Nobody bothered to ask if he had acquired it legally.
Shortly after, Selby published a scientific description of the new orchid,
They named it Fragmipedium kovakii. Then phone lines at the
(02:27):
US Fish and Wildlife Service started to buzz. It was Peru.
An American botanical garden, they claimed, was saying it quote
discovered an orchid that had been clearly smuggled out of Peru. Soon,
armed agents were knocking on Kovac's door. They confiscated his
papers and more than three hundred plants. Indictments streamed in
(02:52):
the gardens were fined for violating the endangered species Act,
the garden's orchid expert placed under house arrest. As part
of the punishment, the garden had to buy a full
page ad in a trade magazine apologizing a subtle message
to other institutions that they should learn from Selby's mistakes.
(03:15):
That was the dirty secret. In botany, this type of
low key smuggling was par for the course. In fact,
when activists tried to change the name of fragment pedium kovakia,
arguing it was wrong to name the plant after a
person who poached it, scientific authorities shrugged and did nothing. This,
(03:35):
they said, was too high a standard. If botany reclassified
every plant name for smugglers, poachers, and thieves, the entire
field would suffer quote major nomenclature instability. In Layman's terms,
it would throw the entire scientific field into turmoil. On
(03:55):
this podcast, we've explored the crimes of obsessed hobbyists, of
organized gangs, and even corrupt governments. But what about the
elephant in the room. What about when the places entrusted
to conserve plant life are committing the crimes. In this
last episode, when the worlds of policy and piracy collide,
(04:19):
I'm summer rain Oaks from school of Humans and iHeart podcasts,
This is bad Seeds. In the early two thousands, the
Selby scandal would divide orchid collectors. Some complain that this
(04:41):
was government overreach. Others wailed that it was about time
rich Western institutions had been taking credit for quote unquote
discovering plants that natives knew about for ages. But the
fight went far beyond claims of who got there first.
For many, the problem was the profit motive. Kovac told
(05:03):
investigators he planned to artificially propagate the smuggled flower and
mass and those are his words. He didn't express any
intention to share future profits with the people in Peru
who had actually discovered and were actively protecting the plant.
In Botany, this kind of behavior, smuggling a plant and
(05:25):
then getting rich off its mass production, conjures a painful past,
especially in South America.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
You start to hear them call Henry Wickham the Pirate
of the Amazon and the destroyer of worlds.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
That's Joe Jackson. He's a writer.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
I'm the author of At the End of the World.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
And he's an expert on one of South America's most
reviled villains, an Englishman by the name of Henry Wickham.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
He was born in eighteen forty six, had a comfortable
middle class upbringing until his father died in one of
the cholera epidemics in eighteen fifty five or eighteen fifty six.
And you know, back then you didn't have pensions, and
his mother had three kids. He had a dream in
drastic descent in class, and he had a spirit of adventure,
(06:20):
and he had a talent for art. And at that time,
if you were an adventurous boy in the British Empire,
you went out to the wild places and you explored,
and you wrote a book about your travels. And Henry
thought he was ready made for that. The explorers were
the astronauts of that generation, and Henry wanted to do that.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
So Henry, desperate for both money and adventure, set out
into the world, spending his twenties exploring places like Belize
and Nicaragua, hoping the jungles would give him material for
books and maybe even change his family's fortunes.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
He wasn't by science. He was driven by ambition. I mean,
he kind of wanted to come back up in the
world from what he had lost.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
He was ambitious, sometimes to his detriment. Henry was a
thoughtless explorer. Consider the time he brought his wife Violet
to the islands near Papua New Guinea.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
There were still cannibal tribes and some of the islands
around there, and Henry was pretty impulsive, and some of
the natives had stolen a couple of his canoes, and
Henry got rene, and he took some of his workers
and he went paddling after them and left Violet on
that island for I don't know, like ten twelve days
(07:42):
like that, by herself, and she knew there were cannibals around.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Turns out that leaving your wife alone on an island
inhabited by cannibals not a great recipe for a happy marriage.
Violet ended up being okay, but their union not so much.
Henry's absent mindedness aside, his travels helped him become something
of an expert on rubber, and this was the eighteen seventies.
(08:09):
Rubber was big. Railroads, telegraph companies, bicycle manufacturers, hose and
gasket makers. All of them were starving for the stretchy stuff.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Rubber was a central component. Everything was steam driven, so
he had giant turbines. You had these giant pistons, you
had looms, steam powered looms, and you had the British
Empire's navy. And with all of these moving parts, you
needed oil. But you also needed rubber to cushion the blow.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Problem was there was only one place to get rubber,
the Amazon Basin. About ninety percent of the world's latex
came out of Brazil, and that demand, derived from the
poetry heavy at Braziliensis, was fueling a boom of wealth.
Entrepreneurs flooded Brazil, laying thousands of miles of railroad track
(09:06):
and erecting resplendent buildings sculpted from the finest European marble.
The British wanted in on it.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
They needed to find some way of getting rubber from
the forests of Brazil to the British empires of.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Possession, and that's when they set eyes on Henry Wickham.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
And the director of Q Garden guy by the name
of William Booker wrote to the council and said, find
me that guy. He knows something about rubber. So Henry
did not go to the Amazon thinking he was going
to be a secret agent for Q, but in a
way he became a secret agent for Q because Booker
Rhodehiman said, would you agree to be our agent and
(09:51):
bring as much rubber back as you possibly could?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I agreed. In eighteen seventy six, he paddled down the
Amazon River and moored his boat near the town of
Boeien by a grove of potter trees. There, Henry enlisted
a group of locals to help them collect more than
seventy thousand rubber seeds, wrapping them in banana leaves. When
(10:20):
it came time to leave the country, Brazilian officials asked
Henry if he had any seeds on him. He lied
and said he had some, but that they were academic specimens.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Said I've got some rubber seeds, and he paid the
tear of you know, about ten or twelve seeds. I
forget the exact number, but it was very low.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
It was an undercount of say sixty nine nine ninety.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
He saund off and he brought as seeds to Hugh Gardens,
and twelve percent of them survived.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
British scientists grew the seeds and sent the surviving specimens
to the British Empire's colonies.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
They eventually transferred them to vast plantations around Singapore and
malays and that became the British Rubber Empire.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
The British Empire's rubber plantations, all grown from Henry's seeds,
would utterly destroy the trade in Brazil, and it.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Broke the back of Brazil's rubber empire in one year,
which is pretty dramatic.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
In the eighteen seventies, the South American country controlled the
world's rubber production. By the nineteen twenties it had all
slipped away. The dramatic boom and bust killed Brazil's economic
momentum with effects that are still felt today. In Britain,
Henry would be knighted, but Brazilians would give him a
(11:49):
much different title.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
He was the devil incarnate. They hated him down in Brazil.
They thought he had raped the nation.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
He'd be called the princip those ladros, the prince of thieves. Today,
botanists have another name for him, biopirate. Henry Wickham's theft
(12:19):
of those seeds would sap in calculable economic potential from
Brazil while enriching the leaders of British industry. But what
did his actions do for him?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
The British Empire kind of padded him on the back
and paid him the equivalent of about seven hundred dollars
and said go on your way, buddy. And he felt
cheated pretty much for the rest of his life. And
what he did for the rest of his life was
basically try to find discover this next great wonder plant.
(12:52):
And he never really did. He never found anything that
was as quote miraculous as the rubber tree. I don't know.
It was kind of like some mythological character that kind
of wanders the world trying to replicate his early success.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
If you search the annals of botany, if you look
at the names of great plant explorers, you discover more
and more people like Henry Wickham, people who today we'd
call poachers, traffickers and thieves, or as experts now call them, biopirates.
It's something of a theme. In twenty fourteen, the journalist
(13:29):
Sam Knight, writing for The Guardian, put it this way
quote one big problem with plant crime is that it
is so difficult to distinguish from the act of botany itself.
For decades, biopiracy was not the exception, but the rule.
Q Gardens paid Henry Wickham seven hundred pounds to steal,
(13:51):
mislabel and smuggle those rubber seeds out of Brazil. The
British East India Company asked the Scotsman Robert Fortune to
sneak into forbidden China and steal the country's tea making secrets.
The list goes on and on. In a way, the
study of botany was just an extension of empire, or,
(14:13):
in other words, exploitation, and most of these early day
biopirates felt little remorse. They had no problems stealing from
or talking down to native populations. In the words of
one nineteenth century botanist.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
The Spanish Americas have accomplished nothing in the development of
the knowledge of their rome, floras and vegetable products.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
The Anglo Saxon blood must originate and direct all exploitation
and development.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
This, of course, couldn't have been further from the truth.
Take San Shona officionalis a leafy green shrub with starburst
blooms that grows across the Andean forest. For centuries, Peruvians
and Bolivians had used Saintchona bark to stop fever. They
were onto something. The plant contains quinine, an anti malarial.
(15:11):
Centuries after that discovery, a British alpaca farmer named Charles
Ledger caught wind of the bark's medicinal properties in the
eighteen sixties. He traveled through Peru and Bolivia and with
the help of his servant, a native named Manuel Incra Mammani,
he stole seeds, smuggled them to Europe and sold them
(15:33):
to the Dutch. The production and study of quinine soon exploded.
It would save millions of lives. And that is where
the ethics of biopiracy gets sort of Harry.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
It's a real gray area in a lot of ways.
There's always two sides of this biopiracy thing. I mean,
it's a sovereign nation, seems like it should have a
right to the things that are found within its borders.
But then what the British Empire used when they were
taking the Tinjona tree for quini, and they said, well, look,
(16:08):
this is for the greater good of mankind. And that's
something that still is going.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
On regardless of where you land on the issue of quinine.
This long history of biopiracy left many nations, especially those
in South America and Africa, feeling cheated, and it wouldn't
be addressed by the international stage until the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
In Rio de Chenaier you had a the nineteen ninety
two Earth Summit, the first summit that basically came up
with international regulations against biopiracy.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
That year, an international treaty was signed, the rules for
which are pretty simple. If a country is home to
a genetic resource, for instance, a rare or unique plant
like rubber, then that country is entitled to benefit financially
from any profits when the plant is sold elsewhere. It's
essentially a thank you for keeping and protecting the plant
(17:07):
over the past few centuries. The same goes for a
traditional knowledge. If a pharmaceutical company learns about a plant's
medicinal benefits thanks to indigenous knowledge, then locals deserve some
financial compensation when the profits roll in. In other words,
it's about giving credit where credit is due. Despite these efforts,
(17:33):
biopiracy remains what Jackson calls a rancrous issue, especially as
corporations get bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
You still have that kind of sovereign rights versus the
greater good, that kind of pushing pool that is part
of the argument, that's part of the exchange. People don't
really believe in empire right now, Government empires aren't so big,
but I mean private are a big deal.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
In the US, corporations can patent a plant, new breeds
can be protected by intellectual property law, and this has
gotten some folks in trouble. In nineteen ninety five, the
US Patent Office granted scientists a patent for turmeric, also
known as kurkuma longa, because it could be used for
(18:22):
wound healing. Of course, over in India, locals had known
this for centuries, if not thousands of years. A couple
years later, a Texas company tried to patent basmati rice,
a decision that, to put it lightly, made a lot
of farmers in India very angry. And the treaty itself,
(18:42):
even though it's prevented a lot of exploitation and theft,
has its downsides because as it's gotten harder to export
and study some plants, they've only gotten rarer and more endangered.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
By the time I wrote a book and talked to
some dis botanists and then demoloed it would go down
to the Amazon and study these things. Is said. You
go down there and you're the villain. You don't know
whether or not you're going to be called a biopirate.
Even after you've jumped through all the hoops and paint
all of the fees at the airport, they might decide
that you're trying to steal from them, and they'll sequester
(19:19):
you for a long time.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
All of you or specimens will die.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
The ability to patent plants in the US has also
made it a huge target of foreign biopirates. It's twenty
eleven and a field manager working at DuPont Pioneer is
peering across a cornfield when he notices an Asian man
crouched over a row of maize sifting through the dirt.
(19:48):
Now this isn't just any old cornfield. This is a
grower field, a place where agricultural companies test news strains
of veggies, ones that could be more resistant to disease
and famine. In other words, exactly the kind of plants
a foreign nation might want to steal and replicate. The
(20:08):
manager drives over to the visitor and confronts him. The
man named Mo looks startled. He explains he worked for
a university, but he doesn't go into any more detail. Instead,
he quickly gets in his car and speeds away, the
(20:30):
field manager notifies the FBI. Turns out the FBI is
already on Moe's tail. Mo Hi Loong has been sneaking
through the cornfields of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa with a
crew of accomplices, stealing ears of corn, rooting up seedlings.
(20:51):
The FBI discovers that Moe works for a Chinese agricultural company,
and he's been targeting cornfields owned by American corporation. His
goal to unlock the trade secrets buried in the DNA
of various new GMO corn. If he can steal the seeds,
his employer can reverse engineer the plant to skip years
(21:14):
of expensive biotech research required to create new strains. Mo
and his accomplices would later be caught trying to ship
two hundred and fifty pounds of stolen corn seed to China,
hiding hundreds of small samples in envelopes of microwave popcorn.
The trade secrets hidden in those seeds were worth at
(21:35):
least thirty million dollars. After police caught up with him,
Mo would be sentenced to three years in prison, a
pretty light sentence for a biopirate all things considered, because
remember that story about Charles Ledger, the guy who's sticky
fingers helped launch the world quinine biz. You may recall
(21:55):
he had help from a native, a guy named Manuel Kramamani.
While in Europe, Ledger was celebrated as a hero, but
in gram Amani Back home, locals soon learned what he
had done, and he'd be arrested, beaten, tortured, and then killed.
The difference between a smuggler and a saint, between a
(22:18):
backstabber and a lifesaver, may merely depend on whether you
live in the nation that was pilfered or the one
that profited. But where there are people willing to kill
for a plant, there are others who are willing to
die for one. Their story when we return Leningrad nineteen
(22:49):
forty three, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union with a plan.
First they would surround Leningrad, Then they'd cut off the
city's supply routes, and then finally they'd starved the population
into submission. The goal, according to a high level memo,
was to quote wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth.
(23:12):
For months, Germans dropped bombs onto Leningrad's hospitals and homes.
The Luftwaffa zeroed in on the food depots and markets. Meanwhile,
Axis troops looted the cities famously ornate palaces, transforming them
into smoldering heaps of ash. Leningrad became a tomb. Michael Wahlzer,
(23:33):
a political theorist, claims quote more civilians died in the
Siege of Leningrad than in the modernists infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima,
and Nagasaki taken together. But the Red Army punched back.
Snipers lurked in the rubble, hid in the bell towers,
(23:53):
and burrowed under bodies. A chorus of anti aircraft weapons
boomed day and night. Millions of ordinary people who did
not or could not evacuate, stretched their bread rations by
substituting flour with sawdust, and in the center of town,
a team of botanists made a decision that would change
(24:16):
the course of world history forever. In nineteen forty three,
Leningrad housed one of the world's largest seed banks. Established
two decades earlier, the institute was at the forefront of
a new type of botany. Not as a haven for
(24:37):
biopirates or greedy monarchs, but a new botany for the
good of the world. In Leningrad, scientists used a vast
collection of seeds to study plant immunity, pathology, and cultivation.
It was a library designed to preserve and protect the
plant world's genetic story, a repository and intensive care unit
(24:58):
for some of the planet's rarest and most endangered species.
As the neighborhood around the institute crumbled, dozens of botanists
working inside risked their lives to keep those seeds safe.
But bombs and mortar fire were the least of the
botanist's worries. Their greatest enemy was their own hunger. To
(25:23):
preserve the seeds, the botanists had to keep the collections warm.
With electricity destroyed and the brutal Russian winter barreling in,
the scientists scoured the charred rubble of their beloved city,
burning any scraps to keep the collection alive. Then the
(25:43):
ice swept in. With the cold came mass starvation. Up
to one hundred thousand people began dying every month. Even
the rats began to show the rib cages inside the
seed bank. The botanists, grappling with their own hunger, faced
(26:06):
an unrelenting temptation. They had access to rice, wheat, peas, oats, corn,
the work courses of agriculture, and yet each scientist, despite
growing increasingly hungry, refused to tap into the collection to
save themselves. One by one, the botanists starved. According to
(26:34):
The Washington Post, the first was Alexander Stutkin, a peanut expert.
He collapsed at his desk. Then it was the institute's
rice specialist, and then another and another. Eating the seeds
could have saved their lives, but each scientist had made
(26:54):
a choice. They refused to grow or eat the seeds
because doing so would have destroyed the future they had
worked toward. The Siege of Leningrad lasted eight hundred and
seventy two days. Over that time, at least nine botanists
starved to death, but the seeds survived. Years later, those
(27:24):
same seeds would be crossbread to produce crops used around
the world today. You and I have definitely eaten food
descended from those Leningrad seeds. In a world of biopirates,
these botanists were something different. What journalist Boyce Rensburger called
the first martyrs for biodiversity, and that's where we want
(27:47):
to end this podcast by focusing not on the thieves,
the crooks, and the corruption. We want to end by
shining a light on the people making huge sacrifices right
now to save us. In the nineteen forties, the Leningrad
(28:07):
Seed Bank was a novelty, but today there are approximately
seventeen hundred seed banks across the globe.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
My name's Eleanor Braman, and I work at the Millennium
Seed Bank at the roeb Botanic Gardens Queue.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
The Millennium Seed Bank program is the largest conservation resource
in the world. If there's any place to find hope
in the future, it's here.
Speaker 4 (28:30):
Since two thousand, we've worked with ninety seven different countries
and territories to help conserve their native flora. It sounds
deceptively simple. You just say, well, you just go out
and you collect some seeds, and then we dry them
and freeze them.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Of course, it's a little more involved than that. The
Millennium Seed Bank is the kind of place that would
make a Doomsday prepper drool.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
The vaulte underground is actually within half a meter thick
reinforced concrete, so we're near an international air The idea
was it could withstand a plane going down. We've also
got radiation detection which would cut off a supply to
the vault if radiation was detected, and we have a
flood protection mechanism, and we have backup generators, and we
(29:14):
have some solar power.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
And protected in these underground vaults are seeds. Lots and
lots of seeds.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
So we've currently got six walking cold rooms that are active,
four of those are full, and we've got space for
formal We've currently got forty thousand species held in our vault.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Forty thousand species, or at the moment, around fifteen percent
of the world's plants, all being saved for the future
and emergencies.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
We are a real bank in that sense. We save things,
we hold it for a rainy day, but you can
withdraw seeds at any time.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
And Millennium is not alone. Many countries have their own
networks of seed banks. In the United States, there's a
National Plant Germplasm System full of cryo preserved seeds in
Fort Collins, Colorado. Cherokee Nation has its own seed vault,
and at the Smithsonian scientists are currently banking the genetics
(30:18):
of two hundred plus orchids native to the US, more
than half of which are endangered.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Goes back to the fundamental that all lives dependent on plants.
The majority of our ecosystems are made up of wild plants,
and these are the things that are providing us with
the oxygen that we breathe, and preventing floods and providing
all these amazing services within the landscape. We tend to
focus on things that are threatened in the wild, things
(30:45):
that are rare so they're likely to become threatened, and
also useful plants, And that's in the broadest sense. You know,
it could be useful for food, for medicine, for fiber,
for cultural reasons, whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Focusing on plants that are threatened carries a certain feel
good message, but it's not like you could bring a
species back from the dead, like back from extinction, right wrong.
In the nineteen nineties, there was only one cylindrocline lorentzi
alive in the wild. The small tree native to the
(31:21):
island nation of Mauritius, was saved from oblivion when scientists
successfully extracted and grew sells from dead cylindricline seeds. More recently,
researchers in Israel were able to nurture a date palm
called Phoenix dactylifera from two thousand year old seeds. That
(31:45):
tree now bears the same fruit that biblical figures may
have eaten. And impressively, in twenty twelve, scientists discovered a
seed of a flowering Siberian plant which had been buried
an ice age squirrel thirty two thousand years ago, and
they successfully revived it. And you know, that spells hope
(32:11):
for the plants plagued with poaching or overexploitation, because it's
here in places like this that solutions are emerging.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
We're involved in a project in South Africa because the
illegal trade in succulent plants there is kind of at
a crisis point. They seized something like seven hundred thousand
individual plants at the borders to date, and some of
those plants can be tens to hundreds of years old,
so you know the impact that that's having on these
(32:42):
populations is pushing them towards extinction. So our partners in
South Africa have recently developed a nursery for growing on
succulent plants and for training their staff in how to
propagate them and how to restore them to the wild,
and we've got a really interesting program that's just starting
(33:03):
to see if you can use stable isotopes within the
plants as a signature for where they came from. So
then could you say whether something's been illegally collected or
was from a reputable nursery. So can we help to
stop this illegal trade In.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
That way, maybe in the not too distant future, buying
plants will be more secure and transparent. You'll be walking
through the store and be assured that the plant you're
buying didn't come from a bad seed.
Speaker 6 (33:41):
So we're going to walk just a little bit further
down this hiking trail we.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Wanted to end here in Tennessee.
Speaker 6 (33:48):
So as we get out here and take a walk,
you'll see gravel right at the surface, so very little soil,
very rocky, harsh environment for plants to grow in.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
David linsecom, manager of the Natural Heritage Program for the
State of Tennessee, is showing our producer Gabby around the
state's Cedar Glades to witness a little miracle.
Speaker 6 (34:07):
Today we are here at Couchville Cedar Glades State Natural
Area in Davidson County, Tennessee. Today we're going to look
for the Tennessee purple cone flower Echinasia Tennessee ensus. It
is a globally rare species and a state rare species.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
The Tennessee cone flower Echinasia Tennessee ensus is a gorgeous bloom.
It kind of resembles a spinley purple daisy. It attracts
important pollinators like bees and butterflies. It's also rare. It
only exists right here in Tennessee.
Speaker 6 (34:40):
The plants that occur here many of them her nowhere
else in the world, including our Tennessee purple cone flower.
It's surprising when you walk this hiking trail, the cone
flowers scattered throughout, and it's so common here that probably
no one thoroughly thinks about it being globally rare. In
about a fifteen miles of range here, and there's only
(35:04):
five wild populations, and that's in the entire world, and
it's all right here, primarily in Davidson County, Wilson County,
and Rutherford County in Tennessee.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
The coneflower thrives in this unique environment where shallow soil
is layered atop limestone croppings, but back in the day
its survival was at risk. In the nineteen seventies. It
became just the second plant to be added to the
US Endangered Species list. But when state and federal entities
(35:38):
realized it was at risk of disappearing, they jumped into
action to conservative.
Speaker 6 (35:43):
So it's the two pronged approach of protecting the habitat
and then working with conservation horticulture to collect seas, propagate plants,
and re establish colonies that has really proven to be
successful for this species.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Workers acquired land to tech the environment. They enlisted botanic
gardens to propagate the cone flower. They sent specimens to
seed banks for preservation. Up until twenty eleven, the government
was spending around thirty thousand dollars a year to keep
the flower on life support and it worked. All of
that effort helped revive a plant staring down extinction. Similar
(36:25):
efforts have worked with other plants you've heard about in
this podcast. The Saint Helena ebony is bouncing back. The
cacti that you heard about in episode one, the ones
found in a man's apartment in Italy. They're back home
in Chile. Io For the cone flower, botanical gardens and
seed banks saved the day. They propagated the plants, providing
(36:47):
an alternate source for obsessed buyers, known as Echinasia rocky top,
helping reduce collection pressures on wild populations. Seeds became widely
available across the country, feeding the demands of gardeners and
what the cedar glades protected. The government was able to
reintroduce the flower into the wild. In twenty eleven, the
(37:10):
Tennessee cone flower was removed from the Endangered Species list.
Speaker 6 (37:14):
The Tennessee cone flower was a big deal because it
was one of the first plant species ever listed on
the Endangered Species Act and it took thirty two years
to reach that recovery state. It's quite an achievement for myself.
That was one of the first species I was really
actively in working with and you know, reaching recovery. I mean,
(37:35):
that's what our job is, to get these species off
the list, and so being able to actually do that
and accomplish it was very rewarding. It really took a
small army of folks to make it happen.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
It really does take an army. And now you're a
part of it, because the first step is awareness. But
if you're still wondering where do I go from here?
How do I help stop this? I have a few ideas. First,
know where your plants come from, especially if you're like
buying wood or something like that. If the person or
(38:13):
place you're buying from can't tell you anything about the
plant source, then get it somewhere else. If you're dealing
with foreign or endangered species, always ask for a FIDO
sanitary certificate. If they don't have one, look elsewhere. And
please don't buy non commercial plants from places that do
not have nursery certificates. Many can be illegal or poached.
(38:35):
Now if you must, always ask the seller to show
their nursery certificate, permit or FHIDO Sanitary certificate if need be.
Support your local botanical garden, not only are they wonderful
places to visit, where your money goes straight to the
conservation and protection of species, and you could give to
groups like the Environmental Investigation Agency, the International Union for
(38:59):
the concert of Nature or Cactus and Succulent Plants Specialist Group.
The work they do matters, and please, if you're in
the US and witness the poaching or trafficking of plants,
or have any evidence of any other wildlife crime, report
it to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Their tip
line is one eight four four three nine seven, eight
(39:22):
four seven seven. Again that is one eight four four
three ninety seven eight four seven seven. I'm Summer rain Oaks.
That's it for Bad Seeds. Thank you for listening and
for building a future for some good to grow. Bad
Seeds is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
(39:46):
I'm your Host Summer rain Oaks. Lucas Riley is our writer,
Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our
senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugely and Zoe Farrell.
Original music is by Claire Campbell, sound design and scores
by Jesse Niswanger. Development was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer.
(40:08):
Special thanks to a voice actor Christopher Goldie. Executive producers
are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and
Jacob Selzer.
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