Peter Raven

Dr. Peter Raven is a world-renowned plant biologist, conservationist, and an outspoken defender of endangered plant species. For 40 years, he was the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. Born in China and raised in California, his interest in plants dates from his childhood. As a 14-year-old boy wandering in the hills above San Francisco Bay, he discovered a previously unnamed, nearly extinct shrub now called "Raven's manzanita." When Dr. Raven arrived at the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1971, after teaching at Stanford, he found an institution that was under-financed, under-developed and virtually ignored by its community. Under Dr. Raven's leadership, the Garden's collection was expanded, educational programs were developed, and annual attendance tripled. Raven restored the Garden's geodesic-domed conservatory, the Climatrona, and built the largest Japanese garden in North America. Today, the major research focus of the Missouri Garden is on the tropics, where much of the earth's biodiversity is centered, but where it is also exceptionally threatened by human activities. Dr. Raven helped create the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, the world's pre-eminent center for plant research, where scientists explore new means to fight hunger, disease and environmental degradation. He is the author of a number of essential books in his field, including Environment and The Biology of Plants, as well as the influential essay Coevolution of Insects and Plants. He is the co-editor of Flora of China, a joint Chinese-American project to inventory all the indigenous plants of China, which constitute about an eighth of the total plant species in the world. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2000 gathering in Scottsdale, Arizona, Dr. Raven discusses the pressures placed on the environment by an ever-expanding human population, and urges the Academy's student delegates to consider what they can do to protect the planet from further destruction.