Peter H. Raven, a renowned botanist and author who remade the Missouri Botanical Garden into a premier research institution and became one of science’s most influential voices on threats posed by climate change, deforestation, overpopulation and unchecked development, died on Saturday in St.
Louis. He was 89. His death, in a hospital, was from congestive heart failure, his wife, Patricia Raven, said. An ardent environmentalist, Dr. Raven advised presidents and popes on conservation, species extinction and climate change.
He lectured around the world, regularly opined in television interviews and wrote articles about the ecological menace posed by pollution and industrial practices like the clear-cutting of rainforests.
“As we destroy the environment, we are destroying ourselves,” he told an audience at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, held to address global environmental issues. “We are part of the web of life, and what we do to the web, we do to ourselves. ” Dr.
Raven’s expertise in the flora of California and tropical rainforests was showcased in seminal textbooks he wrote or co-wrote.
He also mastered the skills of an effective nonprofit director and fund-raiser for the Missouri Botanical Garden, turning one of the country’s oldest public gardens into an elite center of research and education on plants and biodiversity. Dr.
Raven brought a moral and ethical focus to his various roles. He linked environmental degradation to Western consumers’ desire for tropical hardwoods.
He argued that wealthy countries should forgive the debt of developing nations, which he said are otherwise forced to clear forests and sell vast amounts of timber on the international market to repay loans.
And he made the case that rainforests should be valued not just for their pristine beauty but also for the chemicals and compounds that are found in wild tropical plants and that can be the source of medical breakthroughs. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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