Prologue

I sit before the end of a very long line. These few dried branches are the only evidence of a nearly unknown tree species that existed for millions upon millions of years. A quiet and unremarked goodbye that belies a much larger loss.

The specimen laid out on my workbench is a branch about a foot long, with compound leaves made up of tapered leaflets splayed out here and there and several sprigs of tiny flowers hidden among them. The whole thing is brown and brittle with age. Somehow, it even smells old. It’s attached to a heavy sheet of paper, itself yellowed with time, that describes where the tree it came from was found, when, and by whom.

In the cool, airy silence of the herbarium, I hunch over to use a small hand lens I carry with me. I study the curvature of the leaves, how they are attached to the branch, and the way the veins move across them. I try to take in every detail. At length, I move to the flowers. There aren’t many, and each is precious. I examine how they arise from the branch, the sort of groupings they form, before gently plucking one off with a set of tweezers and moving it to a bath of boiling water to soften the petals and other floral parts. This will allow me to dissect the flower without the brittle tissues crumbling at the touch of the tools.

The branch and flowers I’m examining are those of a tree called Androcalymma glabrifolium, and as far as anyone knows, it is extinct. Gone forever. I’m looking at a tiny piece of the once-living world that very few others have seen, but every flower that is taken apart to be studied is one fewer for future scientists. I try to steady my hands. This is important.

The one and only documented sighting of Androcalymma glabrifolium, which produced the specimen in front of me, occurred in 1936, deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. Because it wasn’t fruiting at the time of that sighting, botanists like me have no idea what its fruit looked like. We’ll probably never know. It now exists only as a few dried specimens like this, pressed on paper, tucked away in herbarium collections. I feel both privileged and sad to be one of the few scientists to have dissected one of its flowers.

It’s too late for Androcalymma, but at least it was acknowledged and given a name before it vanished. There are countless other plant and animal species on the brink of being lost forever, and in a great many cases, we don’t even know what they are yet. Science has documented about 374,000 of an estimated 450,000 plant species, and only about 1.2 million of an estimated 8.7 million species overall.

According to the 2020 State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report produced by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, two plant species out of five—40 percent of all plants—are threatened with extinction. At least six hundred plant species are known to have been lost in modern times, and that number is likely much higher.

The fossil record suggests that even during the planet’s most catastrophic mass extinction events of the past, such as the global warming–induced end-Permian event, which knocked out 70 percent of the world’s terrestrial animal species and over 90 percent of marine invertebrates, plants have fared well. They responded with adaptations to new climates and new dominant groups, but show no clear evidence of mass extinction themselves. That these organisms – which couldn’t be significantly impeded by what was, for animals, nearly world-ending climate change – are now massively endangered worldwide is more than a little bit frightening.
Many species are already facing extinction by the time they are first named. With habitat destruction and climate change eradicating species by the hundreds each year, many will be lost before they are ever found, a phenomenon known as “dark extinction.”

“If something doesn’t have a name, you can’t conserve it,” explains Damon Little, the curator of bioinformatics at the New York Botanical Garden. “You can’t get a government to pay attention to it. You can’t get local people to necessarily pay attention to it. You can’t get a funding agency to give you money to make a seed bank or to cultivate it in situ in any way. Having the name is really the first step in getting any kind of conservation action to happen.”

Natural history research—the collection, description, and classification of organisms—is the only way to build the foundational knowledge to understand what’s being lost and what most needs protection. It also has the effect of making large, mind-numbing numbers into something real.

A hundred species of trees wiped from the face of the Earth is a statistic. Sitting silently in front of a once-living branch that exists now only as a browned and brittle carcass feels like a personal loss.

Running in parallel to the loss of both species and our capacity to build knowledge about them, a different loss of diversity is happening within scientific research. Highly trained and motivated women and other birth parents, as they have children and find that to be incompatible with their chosen career, are leaving science in droves. Like the impoverishment of genetic potential in the wake of an extinction, their departure represents a loss to research—of diverse perspectives and ways of approaching problems. As microbiologist and former National Science Foundation director Rita Colwell put it in an interview with The Atlantic, “Why go into battle with just half an army?”

As we’ll see in looking back through time to the strategies used to establish botany—and biology more broadly—as professions in the first place, the ivory tower wasn’t built to accommodate women. It was explicitly built to exclude them, and only began to adapt as they pushed their way in. Today, academic research has become competitive to the point that, without explicit policies in place to support them, many birth parents will ultimately be forced to choose between family responsibilities and the commitment required to be sufficiently competitive in research.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We know what measures are needed to stop the haemorrhage of women from the sciences. These include protected maternity leaves, designated pumping spaces, flexibility around working from home for new mothers, and childcare at conferences, so women aren’t missing out on the networking and dissemination of their research that will get them hired down the road. More intangibly, a bit more understanding, particularly on the part of male researchers, of gaps and slowdowns in the publication records of female scientists with children when evaluating them for funding, hiring, or promotion would go a long way.

Being the gender that bears the brunt of childrearing has concrete impacts on women’s publication numbers, which are a key factor in who gets chosen when one of the all-too-few tenure-track positions open up. At the level of training, male researchers train fewer women than female researchers do, a gap that grows even wider the more elite those men become, effectively barring women from top labs. Put more plainly: the more successful male researchers become, the less interested they are in training women. But in a rapidly warming world charging headlong into an extinction crisis, we don’t have the luxury of excluding so many of our best minds.

In 2019, nearly two thousand new plant species, mostly from South America and Asia, were named for the first time. Yet at the current rate of description and study, documenting all the unknown species projected to exist would take over a thousand years.

What’s more, those unknown species aren’t only in remote, “unspoiled” paradises deep in the rainforest somewhere. Of the 1,942 new plant species named by scientists in 2019, over 90 were from North America. One new species found in Texas, Eryngium arenosum, may be useful in treating inflammation and high blood sugar.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, usually referred to simply as the Red List, is our best and most comprehensive resource for global species extinction risk. Yet despite being the best we have, only 10 percent of plants (and 0.2 percent of fungi) have been assessed for it. Red List assessments can include various data in order to make a case for a species’ need for protection, but claims are primarily built around factors such as population size, generation time and life cycle, range size, changes in habitat, and specific threats such as poaching. These are data points that can be contributed by local citizen scientists for inclusion in assessments that can then be used to protect local species as needed, meaning people with no special scientific background can play an important role in fighting against species loss.