By: Arin
Since I started university in the arctic circle in Norway, I got into the habit of walking the 45-minute dirt pathway through the forest to campus. My scenic route took me past tundra tussocks and forest, a vast diversity of arctic plant life that I largely ignored unless a more interesting bird or mammal happened to be in them. I considered vegetation to be part of the landscape and the background, and I never gave it much more thought than that. Then I took a required class on arctic plants at university that semester and then another one after that on Japanese alpine plants. I came to the realization that my opinions on plants had been rather dim-witted. I had been equating the immobility and ubiquity of plants with dullness, falling prey to the pitfalls of plant blindness, and unconsciously downplaying the importance of most of the biomass on earth. What I’ve learned in the past year while climbing mountains to look for berries, finding carnivorous flowers in the shelter of a windswept tundra, and pushing through the dense bamboo of a Japanese rain forest, is that plants are some of the most amazing and vital life forms on earth.
2.4 billion years ago was what is referred to as the Great Oxygenation Event, when ancient bacteria evolved to efficiently utilize the energy of the nearest convenient star to transform carbon dioxide into oxygen, photosynthesis. This simple system gave the earth its atmosphere and turned barren volcanic land assaulted by harsh radiation into a protected oasis of oxygen and warmth, with a sky turned from the black of space to light blue.
For the first time, extensive life outside of the ocean was possible. The simple cyanobacteria that existed as green goo in the sea evolved and spread, bringing other life forms with it. Vegetation still colonizes the world anywhere there is light and nutrients; soil isn’t even required. And while coconuts float across oceans to colonize islands, trees grow to the size of over 30 story buildings and evolve fire-resistant bark. Seeds cling to birds and animals and move on wind and sea currents, growing on mountain peaks and in waterless deserts. Pollen blows across oceans and continents and flowers blossom across every biome. This vast diversity has provided habitat for nearly all other life: fish hide among kelp fronds and birds sew nests from leaves. Twined into the root systems of every tree and plant are fungal filaments, providing an internet-like network of chemical communication and protection. Their conjoined roots hold the soil together and made rivers, lakes, shores, and ecological communities possible.
Plants, as some of the first colonizers of land, are one of the oldest lineages of organisms, but they are also the organisms that live the longest. Modern, living pines have been found as much as 5,000 years old, the same age as the Egyptian pyramids. They’re also the heaviest and the largest living organisms, with fungi and forests growing clonally across massive areas, sprouting up as individuals from the same genetic organism. A squirrel that lived in the last ice age buried a seed in Siberia, which was then buried under 124 feet of ice, permafrost, and mammoth bones for 32,000 years before being found and germinating into a small white flower. These incredible feats describe a life form with enormous capabilities for adaptation and survival.
When I walked along the forested ski trail to my university in the fall, the vegetation was beautiful. The tundra was purple and gold and there were still occasional blueberries in the tussocks. Winter turned the hills white and the trees into dark skeletons occasionally inhabited by magpies and hooded crows. Seeds, shrubs, grasses, and trees survived in freezing temperatures with no sunlight, lying dormant under several meters of snow, insulated by the depths and accompanied only by the occasional vole nibbling at crowberry leaves.
It's spring time in the arctic circle now. As warmth infiltrated the polar night, sunlight touched the earth and sent streams of melting snow cascading through tiny muddy paths to the sea. Migrating birds came back and shoots and new buds and shrubs are poking up through the snow and dead leaves. Soon the hills will be what they are in the northern summers, lime green with grasses and wildflowers, full trees dappling green light through the bird nests and branches. Eventually, tiny pink flowers will turn into blueberries, green leaves will deepen to scarlet and gold, and the fireweed will send its feathery seeds wafting skyward. The basis of life for all other creatures, the autotrophs, the base level of the food webs that encompass every ecosystem in the world, will begin to slip into survival mode for winter once more. Surviving extreme temperatures and wind, able to be buried under ice for months, or years, and still bloom again in the spring.
Plants are incredibly diverse and intricate, coming in every color, living on every continent and every biome, making delicate flowers, trapping insects, crossing oceans, and surviving millennia. They provide an atmosphere and a cascading evolutionary complexity of species throughout the billions of years of earth’s history. They fix the energy of the sun into forms that can be used by the rest of the world and without them, there would be no air to breath, no food to support life, no shelter, and no land. So next time you’re outside and care to look in any direction, take a minute to notice plants, and realize they are the basis for life as you know it. Plants are the most complex, ancient, hardy, and incredible life form in the world, not least because they make it possible for us to exist at all.
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