Plants feed us, clothe us, cure us

We vastly under-appreciate this silent and still backdrop of plant life. All plants share two unique abilities. They produce their own food, and they produce oxygen. In other words, plants produce the only food there is to eat and the only air there is to breathe. Plants feed us, clothe us, cure us when we’re ill, process our garbage, and provide a source of heat in the winter and coolness during the summer.  Moreover, plants do all these indispensable tasks while adding to, never depleting, earth’s resources.  Without plants, we mammals cannot survive.

If these services to humanity are not sufficient to inspire awe, here is another fact: Plants use no fossil fuels to run their food factories.  Sunlight is the plant’s sole source of power.  

Dr. Bob Gibbons is a highly regarded British naturalist and author.  Here’s how he describes a plant’s interior process. 

“The most significant process that goes on in plants, and indeed the basis of almost all life on earth, is photosynthesis.  In simple terms, this is a process in which plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and combine it with water in the presence of sunlight to produce sugar with the release of oxygen.  The site of this remarkable reaction is the green chloroplasts of leaves and stems, acting rather like miniature solar panels capturing and storing the sun’s energy far more efficiently than anything yet devised by man.”

Scientists have been hard at work exploring plants’ “miniature solar panels” since Gibbons published How Flowers Work: A Guide to Plant Biology in 1984. In a world with waning energy resources, photosynthesis is attracting much attention.  Finding ways to mimic the process could give access to an enormous source on non-polluting energy. The new sciences of photochemistry and photobiology both investigate various ways light can produce electricity.  The popularity of roof-top photovoltaic panels attests to the success of one aspect of light-conversion technology. Using silicon as a semi-conductor, these solar collecting panels change light into household electricity. 

Michael Gratzel works at Ecole Polytechnique Federal in Lausanne, Switzerland.  His research concentrates on a biologic conversion of sunlight to electricity.  His speciality: “photoelectricochemical devices that use the same concepts as green plants in order to harvest and convert solar energy.”  In a paper entitled “Molecular Photovoltaics that Mimic Photosynthesis,” published in 200l, Gratzel reports success with “nanocrystaline oxide films” that react in a manner similar to green chloroplasts.  

Graztel’s research may put human beings even more in debt to the Kingdom of Plants.  Besides supplying us with food and oxygen man’s ability to duplicate a plant’s photosynthetic  processes may provide a key to a fossil-fuel-free future.