Let's Talk about Plants, Baby; Let's Talk about You and Me...

Hey there, it's been a while!

I'm not sure what to write on today.  I'm currently procrastinating my hammering out of next week's lesson plans, grading, and cleaning my house, and I thought this would be a semi-productive outlet for that procrastination.

I think I'll write about plants.

Snooze-fest, right?  Well, not really.  See, I think we know how important plants are, but we don't really KNOW how important plants are.  Sure, they're pretty, and sure, they can smell nice, but did you ever stop and think about how much of your life you owe to plants?

I never really cared about plants all that much.  Botany was my least favorite subject (I took four classes on it), I kill every plant I try to keep in my house (not on purpose), and I don't enjoy eating them all that much.  I take that back.  Fruit is pretty awesome.

Teaching Biology has given me a new-found respect for plants, however, and I'd like to share that respect with you.

1. Plants give us the oxygen we need to breathe.
I'm starting off with the most obvious one.  Plants take our waste product (well, sometimes they take a few of our waste products) and make it into oxygen (their waste product).  If photosynthetic bacteria hadn't started photosynthesizing billions of years ago, the atmosphere would never have been able to sustain life as we know it.  Earth would still be surrounded by a cloud of carbon dioxide and nitrogen from those awesome volcanoes (which we also owe a huge high-five to), and the only life forms would be those thermophilic (heat-loving) bacteria you can still find in places like Yellowstone.

2. Plants give us the sugar we need for energy.
Blasphemy!  You may scream.  Sugar comes from terrible big corporations that are out to make us zombies addicted to their food and we should cut it out of our diets completely!
Or maybe you didn't scream that.  Hopefully you didn't.
Besides oxygen, the other waste product of photosynthesis is sugar.  Plants take in carbon dioxide and light waves, and they make glorious, glorious sugar.  If you can't photosynthesize, you have to get your sugar from eating something that does (or something that ate something that does).  Even if we had somehow managed to come about without oxygen, we wouldn't have an energy source, because without sugar we don't have ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate), and without ATP, you are a puddle of useless goo.

3. Plants give us the carbon we need to form cells.
There's a reason humans are called carbon-based life forms in science fiction.  Can you guess why?
Aw, you little genius, you!
And can you guess where we get carbon from?
Sugar!  Good ol' C6H12O6 (glucose) made from photosynthesis.  Without plants making sugar and us eating plants (or eating things that eat plants), we wouldn't have the carbon we need to create the cells in our body.  Way to go plants!

4. Plants give us the nitrogen we need to make proteins. 
How much do you know about amino acids?
Well, you've probably heard the metaphor about DNA being a blueprint.  The thing it's a blueprint for?  Amino acids.  There are 21 amino acids, and different combinations of amino acids code for different proteins, and EVERYTHING in life is made up of proteins.  Our bodies can produce some amino acids, and others we need to get from our diets.  You know what else?  Every single amino acid has at least one nitrogen atom.
You may know that around 78% of Earth's atmosphere is made up of nitrogen, but did you know that we can't do anything with the nitrogen found in the atmosphere?  Guess who we have to rely on to get us that nitrogen?  If you guessed plants, you're catching on ;)
Not all plants can get us the nitrogen we need, mind you.  They have to have special bacteria in their roots to grab onto the nitrogen found in the atmosphere (N2), rip it apart, and make it into a form our bodies can handle (usually nitrate, which is NO3-).  Legumes (like beans, peas, and alfalfa) are the most common plants that can convert nitrogen for us, which is why your mother always told you to eat your peas.

5. Plants give us the over-stimulation we need to de-stress.
A man named Richard Louv wrote a book about how as a society we are pulling more and more away from nature, and how that pull away is hurting our emotional well-being.  It's called Last Child in the Woods, and even though it repeats itself quite a bit after a while I recommend at least getting through half of it.
One thing Louv talks about is the rising incidents of ADD in America.  If you've learned about ADD, you know that people with it have a hyper-focus mode.  The problem is they aren't always focused on the things we want them to be.  Louv goes into studies of children with ADD being exposed to nature.  Turns out the over-stimulation calms the children down considerably, making them more able to focus on the task at hand when they're asked to do school work or pay attention at home.  If they can't hyper-focus, they can let themselves relax.  I don't know if you've felt "the healing power of nature," but I sure have.  Even on days when my mind is going 80 miles a minute, going into nature calms me down almost immediately.  Suddenly I'm trying to take in the enormity of the sky, the height of the trees, the smell of the world around me, and I forget what I was so worried about.

So did I succeed in convincing you about the radical nature of plants?  (I'm trying to bring "radical" back; work with me here)

You owe plants quite a bit.  Go out and high-five a tree today or something.