Planting Our World

It all begins and ends with plants. From the chance to live on this planet to the pleasure of listening to the sound of a violin-every story begins with a plant. There''s no getting around it. We animals account for a paltry 0.3% of the planet''s biomass while plants add up to 85%. It is obvious, therefore, that every story on this planet has a plant as its protagonist. Our world is a green world; Earth is the planet of plants. And when, with just a little training, we are able to look at the world without seeing it solely as humanity''s playground, we cannot help but notice the ubiquity of plants. They are everywhere and their stories are inevitably wound up with ours. As every tree in a forest is linked to all the others by an underground network of roots, uniting them to form a super organism, so plants constitute the nervous system, the plan that is the ''greenprint'' of our world. Not to see this plan, or even worse, to ignore its existence, is one of the most serious threats to the