Dr. Quentin Cronk
Director
UBC Botanical Garden
will be addressing the Vancouver Institute on November 22, 2003 at 8:15 p.m., Lecture Hall No. 2 in the Woodward Instructional Resources Centre, University of British Columbia.
The Thin Green Line:
Plants and the Future of Humanity
Quentin Cronk was educated in botany at Cambridge University in the UK and has worked at Oxford and Edinburgh Universities, before becoming Professor in Plant Science and Director of the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research. His early work was on plant conservation which took him to the devastated island of St Helena where he rediscovered the St Helena ebony, a plant presumed extinct for over 100 years. Seeing the destruction of fragile island ecosystems at first hand engendered his interest in plant survival more widely. At UBC his avowed aim is to create a botanical garden which is the envy of the world in its triple mission of serving research, education and the community. Human survival would be impossible without plants. Mankind's ultimate patrimony therefore consists of hundreds of thousands of plant species each with tens of thousands of genes. If even one of these unique gene combinations is lost, human survival is in some small way compromised. The role of the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research is therefore (1) to undertake genomic and biodiversity research to understand this inheritance, (2) to create, through education, an informed populace able to act as responsible stewards of the plant resource, and (3) create a space in which the whole community can contemplate and celebrate the place of plants in human affairs.
Fall Program 2003
Sep 27,
Oct 4,
Oct 18,
Oct 25,
Nov 1,
Nov 8,
Nov 15,
Nov 22,
Nov 29,
Dec 6,
Dec 13.
(These references were compiled by the webmaster in the hope that they will prove interesting to some readers. The web being what it is, some of them will have vanished by the time you go to look them up, and there is—of course—no guarantee of their accuracy.)
The UBC Botanical Garden has a web site at http://www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/.
