Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist best known for his works The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works, argues that one of the reasons for our success as a species is our ability to recognise, value, classify and locate distinctive forms of plant life. Our capacity to appreciate the beauty of flowers is evidence of an ancient survival strategy — a trait that evolution has specifically favoured in the human species.
The most fragrant and dazzling flowering plants also attract the greatest number of pollinators, including bees, birds, fruit bats, moths and such primates as humans. An evolutionary side effect of the beauty of flowers was the dispersal of enormous amounts of sugar and protein throughout the world. Sugar and protein are food energy, and the abundance of herbivorous food energy, of precisely the kind found in apples, is one of the key factors that allowed for the rise and diffusion of large, warm-blooded mammal species, such as humans.
Neanderthals are known to have buried their fallen comrades with wreaths of flowers, but by Elizabethan times, flowers were necessary for quite literally pedestrian purposes: it was often impossible to walk down an English city street without a “nosegay” to ward off the foul smell of open sewers. Spices and herbs were used to mask the scent of tainted meat, and the herb garden was a pharmacy. All these years later, all over the industrialised world, people still insist upon thrusting bouquets at one another at times both happy and solemn, at weddings and at funerals, and people will go to inordinate lengths for the sake of flowers.
The case of the Kauai alula is one of the examples of the lengths people will go. The alula is a species of Brighamia, a peculiar and extraordinarily beautiful succulent. It’s a perennial bellflower with a rosette of sturdy green leaves erupting from a thick stem that can reach two metres in height. Its flowers are delicate white trumpets. It is one of the world’s rarest flowers.
At the beginning of the 1990s, there were only 150 of these flowers remaining outside of a botanical garden collections. They were confined to the Na Pali sea cliffs on the Hawaiian island of Kauau, 1000 metres above the crashing surf. A decade later, only 20 were left. Once common throughout the Hawaiian islands, the alula had come to its perilous condition because of the extinction of its only known pollinator, a moth.
To keep the Na Pali alulas alive, botanists were lowering themselves down the cliff face by rope to pollinate the flowers by hand. They were doing this every year.
It is hard to make a case that these people were behaving merely out of self-interest, or they were concerned only with the potential utilitarian value of the alula. Say what you like about how horrible the human species is, appropriating 40 percent of the planet’s productivity all to itself and chopping down all those forests. Human beings also do this, and they risk their lives while they’re going about it.
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The above excerpts are taken from Terry Glavin’s book Waiting for the Macaws; and other stories from the age of extinctions.
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