Re: What made you study plant life?

    There are many great reasons to study plant life.  Plants and algae are 
the basis of all life on this planet.  They provided the oxygen in our 
atmosphere that made evolution of animals possible, and because they 
photosynthesize, they are at the bottom of every food web.  Whereas animals 
(like us) have to eat other living things (like plants or other animals) to 
survive, plants are able use sunlight energy and carbon dioxide from the 
air to make their own food and able to get minerals directly from the soil. 
 They don't need to eat anybody else.  A lot of scientists study plants to 
try to figure out how exactly they are able to do these things - especially 
how they use the sun's energy.  Others study them to figure out better ways 
to grow them for food - how we can get more plants to grow on farms and how 
to keep our crops from getting diseases or being eaten by pests.  Others 
study them in order to find new cures for human diseases.  Most of the 
medicines used around the world originally came from plants.  Others study 
them because they want to use them in landscaping or start a nursery to 
grow and sell plants.  I started studying plants partly because I know how 
important they are to everyone living on the planet and partly just because 
I like them!   I was driving through a very poor neighborhood one day, 
where everything was dirty and old and generally sad, and I saw that 
someone had put a pot of geraniums on their front porch.  It was the only 
bright spot on the whole block, and it made me smile to see it there.  I 
realized how much happier people are with plants around.  Now I study ways 
of restoring ecosystems, so that they can keep doing their jobs and support 
all kinds of life, and so that we can always have places to go where we can 
be surrounded by the wonderful and amazing organisms we call plants.