Natural Reality Check

The Importance of Plants

So if you venture outside your house and look at your section of this blue ball, you'll notice something. It's made up of rocks, dirt and, for the sake of simplicity, let's call it sand. Even the bits of our planet covered by water are made of more rocks, dirt and sand.

Way back when our planet had calmed down from the Hadean and late heavy bombardment, this was not the case. Earth was water rocks and more tiny rocks. How did we get a planet with gravel, sand and dirt?

Right now I want to tell you about two forces; erosion and plants. They may seem unrelated but they're not.

See, due to Earth being hit with the comets and meteors that brought both the stuff for life and water to this world, you now have complex physical and chemical processes going on.

Water doesn't just sit in one spot, it evaporates. That turns to clouds in our atmosphere. Eventually this water rains back down. That's the water cycle.

The stuff that we call rain isn't just water. Atmospheric gasses dissolve in water and changes how acid or basic it is. The rain erodes the rocks, bits and pieces break off and get rolled down hill and carried "down stream." So eventually these bits that break off the higher points get broken down into pebbles and ends up becoming gravel and sand. (There's also a rock cycle but that's not where I'm headed with this.)

Meanwhile, plants are evolving. They start out small and in the ocean. But eventually, they conquer everything. Seriously look, there's plants everywhere humans go.

The mosses, hornworts, and liverworts begin the breaking up rocks as well. Over millions of years, these simple plants have produced dirt. This substance is critical.(Not just for something to clean.)

Why? It gives a place for more complicated plants to grow. True, some animals can and do eat small, simple plants like algae and mosses, but, with the exception of some seaweeds, humans can't eat these. In fact, a great number of algae and mosses are poisonous to people. We and other animals eat plants. They form the foundation of any ecosystem's food web.

So plants gave us dirt, a source of food for everything and, as mentioned in a previous entry, they absorb CO₂ and emit oxygen. There's still more they do.

Humans like to build our homes so we don't die of exposure. Let's face it, we've settled on six out of seven current continents but came from one. (Africa, not Pangea just to be clear.) We're not adapted to the environments we've settled in, having shelter from the weather is a necessity, not a nicety. Usually, if you don't want to have to fight off bugs and cave bears, this means making some sort of structure.

Dirt by itself doesn't hold still, thanks to wind and rain. If we build and leave bare dirt, that surface will wash or blow away. That's erosion, remember?

Once your dirt leaves, there's cavities forming below your shelter. Maybe not right away, but soon, your shelter will collapse.

I can hear some out of touch person in my mind's eye. They're asking "well why don't we just pour concrete all over and build on bedrock?"

There are so many problems with that idea. Most obvious ones being the water table, thermal gain and sink holes.

Let's look at the water table. Not all the water on Earth is on the surface. Some of it is beneath the dirt and rock we build on. We call those underground lakes and Aquifers. That's what makes up the water table.

Bedrock is not always above the water table so you can't count on bedrock.

Concrete is the other problem. Water naturally tends to seep into the ground if it doesn't evaporate first. But that only happens if there's pores in the soil.

The typical concrete pad isn't porous. Water can't flow through this. But it can get underneath it from up hill. Eventually, the water sweeps away dirt and erodes any rock. This leads to sinkhole formation. Any structure sitting on top of such a cavity is going to have a very bad day. Usually, without a readily noticeable warning.

Even if your building hasn't succumbed to the undermining of sinkholes, concrete has another big problem. Even when it's not dark colored, concrete absorbs visible light, that gets re-emitted as heat. Anything sitting on that concrete is going to get much hotter than its surroundings. At best that's just unpleasant but could quickly become lethal in the wrong conditions.

Do you know what I'm going to suggest as a solution for that problem? Plants! Sure you can build your building and related pathways. Just add plants.

If you have plants growing in dirt, it provides something to hold the dirt in place while still allowing water to properly make its way down into the soil. This lowers the risk of sink holes.

Another added benefit of having plants in and around any structure is that they lower the temperature of the air around them.

How? There's this thing they do called transpiration. That's the process of dragging water through the plant's roots up through its leaves. This process cools their surroundings significantly.

Think of it, cities are often overheated because they are mostly stone and metal. Imagine if we harnessed the power of transpiration? We plant trees, bushes, flowers and other things in planters, green plant covered rooftops and along our pathways. We could potentially offset the overheating that plagues urban and suburban areas.

If all this seems useless, wait there's more. Plants make alliances with other organisms to care for the soil. It's true, corn, legumes(peas and beans), and other species form a relationship with special microorganisms that help them fix nitrogen.

Nitrogen is often a limiting nutrient for plant growth. Our crops require it to grow. Hence why we rely on the products of the Haber-Bosch process to fertilize our farms' soil. This is often inefficient and farmers apply more than necessary which leads to toxic runoff.

Unlike our artificial means of introducing more nitrogen, plants that form a relationship with microorganisms get an advantage of the microbe getting nitrogen for them. Leading to enhanced growth of not only that plant but the ones growing around it.

By depending on these nitrogen fixing alliances, we could have healthier, better agricultural practices.

For those of you saying "that's nice, I'm off to space so this doesn't apply to me." I'm just going to be rude and say you're wrong.

Even if we manage to solve all the problems with gravity, gamma rays and inorganic materials, we still gotta eat. It may not be dehydrated corn and potatoes but you can bet some sort of plant matter will be essential to providing food for future space faring humans.

Plants could also fulfill the role of oxygen supplying and bio fuel in these new space colonies.

Not only that, our species kind of has these complex brains that need something to keep them sane. Whether we're talking about aesthetics or pharmaceuticals, plants will play a critical role.

And, sigh, yes, for the utilitarian among us, we can use them for other things. Like bamboo for sustainable building materials. Plant starches for glue and bio-degradable packaging. Fibers from plants should be something we consider as well if we intend to still have textiles.

So after all that, I hope it's clear why plants will be a critical component to saving the humans.