Plants! What are they good for? Absolutely Everything.

Again, please use you're imagination and pretend this post is for Friday January 21 2011.

Lately I have been thinking about plants almost every day of the week! I'm also taking a botany class this semester and I now have three house plants. I also have beans, corn, corms, lettuce, carrots, potatoes and a tincture at the botanical gardens. Talk about a lot of plants! I'm very enthusiastic about this whole experience though. I think that gardening is a very rewarding, useful skill to have.
Because I have been around plants so often I have been thinking a lot about why plants are important in the first place. Plants can be used for clothes, they're used for food, they are synthesized to make almost all medicines, they can be used to make paper, they can be used for shelter, AND they're beautiful. Plants are the source of human life. They're everything. So why do people insist on destroying them? People introduce toxins to plants, they move them out of their natural habitats, they clear them out to put buildings all over the land. I'm convinced that only humans destroy beauty. It makes me frustrated at my own kind, at myself. BUT I think that's why I decided to take botany. I want to give something back to the world. I want to be able to plant plants that I know will not ruin the ecosystem and harvest them and use their gifts, whatever they may be. I think this could become a very positive part of my life.
Something else is bothering me now though. It's the lecture we had this past week about water conservation. I couldn't believe the statistics I was hearing. I knew that running out of water was becoming a bigger threat to the world, but I had no idea that it is almost a reality now. What would this mean for agriculture? What would this mean for plants? It's only been a little over a week and I've already grown attached to my garden. I've already given those plants a lot of my time and care. What if one day we all have to stop caring for our own plants because there's not enough water for people to have their own gardens? Water for plants would be limited to the farmers. Farmers that are a part of huge industries, that America would then have to continue to feed in to and it's these industries that consume all the water in the first place. It's just one big cycle.
It really makes me feel like such a small person sometimes. Who am I? I have no political power. Im not a part of any environmental activism groups. I don't tell people that I am fighting for important humanitarian causes. But then I tell myself: Hey! You're Taylor Bultema. You;re taking classes so you can be get informed about these kinds of things. You have a vegetable garden and three house plants and healing a tincture. And I hold on to that because it's the best I got to offer right now and its good enough for me.