Advocating an Unusual Role for Trees

[groovedaddy]

MERRICKVILLE, Ontario — Diana Beresford-Kroeger pointed to a towering wafer ash tree near her home.
The tree is a chemical factory, she explained, and its products are part of a sophisticated survival strategy. The flowers contain terpene oils, which repel mammals that might feed on them. But the ash needs to attract pollinators, and so it has a powerful lactone fragrance that appeals to large butterflies and honeybees. The chemicals in the wafer ash, in turn, she said, provide chemical protection for the butterflies from birds, making them taste bitter.

Many similar unseen chemical relationships are going on in the world around us. “These are at the heart of connectivity in nature,” she said.

Ms. Beresford-Kroeger, 63, is a native of Ireland who has bachelor’s degrees in medical biochemistry and botany, and has worked as a Ph.D.-level researcher at the University of Ottawa school of medicine, where she published several papers on the chemistry of artificial blood. She calls herself a renegade scientist, however, because she tries to bring together aboriginal healing, Western medicine and botany to advocate an unusual role for trees.

She favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12prof.html?th&emc=th

[izquierdista]

1. When fossil fuels are gone

Trees and other plants will regain the economic importance they had before the industrial age. Mankind's building of modern chemical plants to use natural gas, crude oil and coal tar as feedstocks will seem foolish. Plants will again be cultivated for their unique chemical properties and the ecofunctions Dr. Beresford-Kroger talks about.

[phantom power]

2. Yes, right before we cut them all down.

[Swamp Rat]

3. Thanks for posting.

:)