「植物看得見你」公開課筆記／1.2 Plants & Human History

Why should we be studying plants? 

Plants are the source of all oxygen, and all the carbon in the world. We can't live without plants, they produce everything we breath, everything we eat. The clothes I wear, the chairs we sit on, the fuel we burn in our cars, the drugs we take, everything that we have is based by plants, as sort of as factories that produce chemicals for us.

For example Vitamin C, we can't produce it. But plants do, and that's why we drink orange juice. Vitamin A, carotene, caffeine. Morphine, as pain killers. THC, which for marijuana. 

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Thousand years ago, somewhere in the fertile crescent, Mesopotamia, from Iraq, up through Turkey, Syria, down in through present day Israel. Some nomadic farmer, sorry, it wasn't a farmer even yet. Some nomadic gatherer, hunter, gather some of the wild wheat that was growing on the fertile crescent, to save the seeds and to plant that the next year. This was the first crop that was ever cultivated, which allowed for people to plan for their food, it allowed for the first communities, written history and everything that all of modern history that preceded from it. Later in history, rice, corn and other animals were cultivated.

Mulberry bush actually is the only food of the silkworm. And the importance of the silkworm in history was the route to the East, that Marco Polo found the east. The trade with the East opened up the whole world connecting West and East. 

Opium poppy allowed for the first analgesics, painkillers, which has affected all of modern medicine. But it also affects modern history with the drug problem. Here we see one plant making one chemical affecting both good things and bad things in human history.

Potato affected history because of the Irish potato famine. In the 19th century, there was only strain of potato growing in all of Ireland. Unfortunately, this strain was sensitive to a fungal like pathogen called phytothora, which wiped out potato yields for several years, led to the huge famine and death of a million people and the immigration of another million people to other countries in Europe and to North America. One of these people were the family of John Kennedy.

Modern cotton has affected us by what we wear. The need for cotton, was one of the emphasis for the importing of slaves from Africa to the New World to North America.

Without rubber we would have no air flight, because the rubber that comes from the rubber tree, natural rubber is the only material that airplane wheels can be made of. There is no synthetic rubber, there's no synthetic type of plastic that can match the characteristics of natural rubber.

Yams led to the development of the modern birth control pill, because yams contain a phytoestrogen. It was from yams that they first isolated this estrogen that was the source of the first birth control pills.

Just for me in the world, there are 15 coffee trees that need to be grown to supply me with my two cups a day. If you multiply that by all the coffee drinkers in the world, think how much coffee we need to grow in order to supply that need.

If there are any musicians among you, you know the wood that goes into a Stradivarius violin, or to a Martin guitar, completely affect what type of tone you get. It's because of the characteristics of the wood that can't be matched by anything made of plastic or that's synthetic.