Pediocactus despainii, a highly endangered cactus limited to a small strip overlooking Utah’s San Rafael Swell, spends most of its life underground, emerging for only a few days to flower before retracting into the desert sand.
Credit Paul Alan Cox
TUCSON — Ours is one of the most colorful relationships of history: We need flowers for our very survival, and in turn flowers — the plants that exist as crop cultivars or horticultural cut flowers or potted beauties — rely on us to reproduce and spread. But all is not well in this storied partnership: We who behold or nurture flowers are condemning their wild relatives to extinction at an alarming rate, and the world is quickly becoming a lesser place without them.
Our prehistoric ancestors certainly made use of […]
It is amazingly stupid that one of the very best source of protein for humans is the seeds of the cannabis plant which has been criminalized, even though some can be obtained through health food stores. All of us dedicated vegetarians know this yet the government has still prohibited the cultivation in most of the country. Our world would be a much better place if we all ate these kinds of proteins than eating meat products which waste water at an exponentially higher rate than the cannabis protein seeds, and that in itself would save many people from starvation, as well as protect us from unwanted hormones and other growth stimulating things such as antibiotics which are injected into animals at a high rate which end up in our food and water and subject us to intolerance to the effects of antibiotics when we need them to thwart disease because the diseases have become immune to the antibiotics, or worse yet have become superbugs for which no cure exists. This is just one more reason to become vegetarian, and do away with laws prohibiting such protein rich seed sources. Even the Christian bible, on page two, says God gave us these seeds so they may be “as meat for us”.