We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.
If humans evolved in a tiny area of Africa, they only saw plants and animals within a 100-kilometre radius for a million years. When they began to migrate, there would have been different animals and plants - and potentially a lot of allergy issues.
My father being an outdoors person, he used to take us on quite a few adventures thorugh the wild areas down there, introducing us to alligators and rattlesnakes and all the trees and plants.
It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.
During the 1950s, I decided, as did many others, that many practical problems were beyond analytic solution and that simulation techniques were required. At RAND, I participated in the building of large logistics simulation models; at General Electric, I helped build models of manufacturing plants.
'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.
As a director, I'm not the one animating every frame, every shot. I'm moving around like a surgeon on rounds, or a farmer checking in on all the plants being grown, pruning and adjusting. For me, it's a very exciting job.
Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.
The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.
Fiat has assembly plants in Brazil and Argentina.
The chance of any species reaching and then surviving on an island as distant as one of the Hawaiian chain is infinitesimal, but despite the extraordinary odds, plants and seeds found their way ashore, carried by the tide or blown by trade winds, inside birds or in their feathers, in the branches of trees and in the jetsam of sunken ships.
There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.
Our plants had now increased to 252: as they were all kept on shore at the tent I augmented the guard there, though from the general conduct of the natives there did not appear the least occasion for so much caution.
If the auto plants in Detroit would just sit around the table and say, 'What do we gotta do to make this thing work?' Instead of, 'I want this and I want that,' they might make it.
The whole purpose was to say that it doesn't have to be a zero sum. It's not the environment or jobs. You can have both. You can help the auto industry achieve that if you have investment in plants.
I remember being amazed that actors had a union. I thought only coal miners had unions, or guys that worked in automobile plants. That's an indication of how naive I was.
It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.
God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man.
You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have - while we have consciousness, toolmaking, language, they have biochemistry.