edited oct 25th
Evitt Nashed
Oct 17, 2023
In chapter 3 of the Remington-Doucette book, it talks about what direct drivers and indirect drivers are and how it connects with each other. Drivers are defined as a force that is either changing the system for good or for worse. A direct driver influences the ecosystem directly whether we like it or not. Indirect drivers influence the ecosystem’s processes indirectly causing a change to direct drivers. An indirect driver can be used to act upon the driver. This can either cause it to worsen or fix the problem. The MOBOT facility shows great examples of how these direct and indirect drivers are classified as.
The herbarium at the Missouri Botanical Gardens serves a great site for plant specimens and data about plants. The herbarium includes multiple facilities and collections for the conservation of plants. The herbarium includes plant pressings, DNA portions, archives, and the library. The herbarium serves as a research facility for scientists and others. This facility holds documentations of scientific specimens to help identify new specimens. The herbaria serve as a great site for students to learn more about plants which is basically what our research team is doing!
The herbarium faces many problems, that needs action to be fixed. One direct problem they go through is being a very Midwestern plant conservation. Sometimes these scientists don’t know what the biological name of the plant is. This leaves indigenous knowledge out of the picture, and we need their history. The purpose of the herbarium is to identify diverse plants. To identify diverse plants, we need indigenous knowledge in our research. Scientists need access to with natives to know their biological name and their original uses. Research and connecting with history can help these scientists a bit with trying to find the bionomical nomenclature of the plant. This takes lots of research of where the plant was originally from, who first found them, and how we can access that name.
An indirect driver of Western plant conservation would be that it is tied to colonial extractive practices. The colonizers long ago used extractive practices that scientists use today to extract DNA from plants and other specimens. Extractive colonizers often push away the knowledge of indigenous and native people. This limits indigenous knowledge. Scientists need to access information from natives and indigenous people in order to fully understand the concept of what they are examining about. People may think that indigenous knowledge isn’t as important, but they are wrong! Indigenous people can give us a lot of information about the indigenous knowledge that has been passed down for years. Knowing this knowledge can help scientist answer problems by using the resources and practices by the people.
PowerPoint done by Evitt Nashed.
The main question that gets asked is how scientists can fix this problem of using western extraction and conservation methods. To start off, western extraction is the practices used by the colonizers back then to develop plants. This can be a very vague problem but that doesn’t mean there’s no possible solution to fix it. One solution for that problem could be having better communication with the indigenous people. We first have to connect the plants with where it was originally from and to contact the people that have knowledge about the plant. We might not think the knowledge of indigenous people is important, but it really is the base of what makes plant history. These indigenous people use certain types of methods in order to use certain plants that us Americans didn’t know at all. Their knowledge is very creative to the American mind because they had to adapt to their environment differently than others. It is important to respect the indigenous plant life because it can help people live a more sustainable life by using their unique methods. Video on how Indigenous knowledge can affect plant conservation.
The herbarium isn’t just a place to go sightseeing but also serves a place that holds research and history about plants. This facility helps researchers from around the world get access to the conservation and history of these specimens. These researchers also have acess to try and fix these problems the herbarium goes through. These problems are urgent and need attention in order for plant specimens to thrive for future research.
References
Remington-Doucette, Sonya. Sustainable World: Approaches to Analyzing & Resolving Wicked Problems. Second edition, Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2017.