Driven by Nature: A Personal Journey from Shanghai to Botany and Global Sustainability
Peter H. Raven
The following is an excerpt from Peter H. Raven’s autobiographical memoir, Driven by Nature: A Personal Journey from Shanghai to Botany and Global Sustainability.
“Tom Emmel, one of Paul Ehrlich’s graduate students, asked whether I would be interested in teaching part of a course on tropical ecology in Costa Rica the following summer. The course was offered by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a consortium of American and Costa Rican universities organized three years earlier to offer instruction in tropical biology. Mildred Mathias had been one of the founders, but it didn’t take her imprimatur to make the prospect exciting to me. I had enjoyed and learned greatly from my earlier trips to Colombia and Chiapas, continued to sense the importance of the tropics to the planet’s health, and was thrilled about the very rich plant life that I would see. Though somewhat smaller than West Virginia in size, Costa Rica was home to about four times as many native plant species, some 10,000 of them.
I made a preliminary visit in March 1967 with Tom Emmel and Roy McDiarmid, a genial student of reptiles and amphibians Emmel had selected to help him organize our course. The visit familiarized me with the field sites to which we would bring students that summer. I collected plants widely and savored the lush and verdant vegetation as well as the beauty of San José, Costa Rica’s colonial capital. I loved the exuberance of the people, reflected in the national slogan ‘¡pura vida!’ connoting life lived richly and fully.
With Roy McDiarmid, I went to look for an unusual member of the Onagraceae, the very distinctive genus Hauya, one of the few trees in the family. It has large white flowers that, as we learned on this occasion, open near sunset. In the beautiful colonial city of Cartago, we were able to watch not only the expected hawkmoths but also bats pollinate Hauya. We went on to visit the OTS field site at La Pacífica, where the dry forest was alive with howler monkeys, and ecologist Les Holdridge’s boarded-up house at Finca La Selva, in the rainforests on the country’s Pacific lowlands [Editor’s Note: La Selva is on the Caribbean lowlands.] Later, the OTS would acquire La Selva and develop it into one of the world’s major tropical field study sites. For me it was remarkable enough even then. Every day brought stunning new sights and ideas, and I savored every moment.
This trip was my first opportunity to witness Dan Janzen in the field. He was totally immersed in the rich world of tropical biology around him, teaching students and constantly looking for new ways to interpret what he was seeing. Still in the early part of his career in 1967, Dan would go on to become perhaps the most original and influential tropical biologist of his time.
Coming home musing on the similarities in the plants of Costa Rica and Chiapas, I began to consider the possibility of treating all the plants from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico through Panama in one comprehensive work. Getting involved in the Flora of North America project had definitely set my sights much higher when it came to cataloging plants. What was to become the Flora Mesoamericana wouldn’t get started until the 1970s, but the seeds were sown right then.
In August, I was back in Costa Rica for my month of teaching. The eight-week ‘Fundamentals of Tropical Ecology’ course was held in July and August for about twenty graduate students. A bright and dedicated group, the students included Gary Hartshorn, who went on to become a noted forester; Tamra Engelhorn from UCLA, of whom Harlan Lewis had spoken highly; and Helen Kennedy. We would assign exercises to the students each morning, to be reported on and graded later that day. I shared the botanical instruction with noted ecologist Rex Daubenmeier of Washington State University, one of the founders of modern ecological studies in the U.S., who took care of the first month of the course before I arrived.
Our first field stop with the class was a twelve-day stay camping near Rincón on the Osa Peninsula. The whole area was covered in dense tropical lowland rainforest, a fairyland of biological diversity and a marvelous place to teach. The forest was flat and open underneath, a bit disorienting once one entered under the trees. One afternoon, Tom and I were alarmed to realize that we were missing two students simultaneously, a worry especially in view of the venomous fer-de-lance and bushmaster snakes that were common in the forest understory. Once we had finally gathered up our flock again, we issued stern warnings about not wandering off alone.
Our course then moved inland to San Vito de Java, a town connected with the rest of the country only when the Pan-American Highway was extended over Cerro de la Muerte, the highest point on the Highway in Costa Rica, in the 1950s. On the ridge above San Vito, an English couple named Robert and Catherine Wilson had constructed a house amid the upland forest. Avid gardeners, they were gradually turning their 360 acres into what would become perhaps the most important botanical garden in the country, a place where precious remnant patches of the original vegetation are still preserved.
The cloud forests above the station were virtually intact, with only some small milpas, cultivated areas along the borders of a dirt road that wound its way into the distance. All the slopes running down to the Java River in the valley below were heavily clothed with forests. The fireflies, bright flowers, hummingbirds, lush vegetation: all were extraordinary, a feast for the senses. (Unfortunately, all this exists only in memory today; the whole gloriously beautiful eastern side of the Osa Peninsula and the area around San Vito were both completely deforested before another decade had passed.)
Working with the OTS that summer gave me the opportunity to become the first botanist to collect intensively around Rincón and also the first around San Vito. Back home, I sent off the 600 specimens that I had collected during that one-month trip in 1967 to the Field Museum in Chicago, then the major center for the study of Central American plants.
…
Professionally, that month provided a productive break from the intensity of activities at Stanford. It gave my thinking process time and space to unfold and expand, sixties-style, to encompass my constantly evolving understanding of the relationships among the flora and fauna around me, and let it all interweave with my knowledge of conservation, preservation, sustainability, biological diversity, and how humans live on the Earth. My growing awareness of all these interconnections was marinating in the back of my mind as the course ended. Beginning to put the pieces of this great network together, I packed my bags and headed for home.”
Pp. 214-215 –>
“On the other side of the world, in Central America, another opportunity for building up botanical knowledge presented itself in the late 1970s, in the context of my involvement with the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS). I had come to St. Louis in 1971 with rich and pleasant memories of working in Costa Rica in 1966 and 1967 under the auspices of the OTS. Given that background, I had urged Washington University to become a member of this organization as a way of providing a place for our students to learn about the tropics. The university formally joined the organization in 1977, at which time I had become a representative to the OTS board of directors (I would serve in the capacity until 1991). This set the stage for many enjoyable experiences in Costa Rica, especially in connection with attending the semi-annual meetings of the OTS board.
The OTS had acquired land and buildings on Costa Rica’s Caribbean plain at Finca la Selva in 1968 and there established a permanent field station. From the beginning, those developing the station were concerned that active deforestation would soon isolate it as an island of vegetation, with a consequent loss of species and diversity. With the establishment of the magnificent Braulio Carrillo National Park along the summit ridge of the mountains above Finca la Selva, however, a solution to this problem came into sight. We could protect our station and the diverse vegetation zones that lay between it and the tops of the mountains by permanently acquiring what would essentially be an arm of the national park extending down from the top of the range to the lowlands at La Selva.
With the active collaboration of Bill Burley, then of The Nature Conservancy, and the encouragement of the OTS board, I set out in 1979 to raise the necessary $1.7 million to make the acquisition of this vitally important additional land possible. Eventually we were successful, and the connecting acreage was purchased parcel by parcel over the next couple of years. Within the new lands, animals and plants could migrate freely up and down the mountainside, and La Selva no longer faced the danger of being cut off as an island of vegetation in which there would have been a much greater danger of local extinction.”
Pg. 277 –>
“We have relatively short lives, and yet by preserving the world in a condition that is worthy of us, we win a kind of immortality. We become stewards of what the world is.”
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The book was published in 2021 by Missouri Botanical Garden Press, St. Louis, MO.