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