The Future of Plants: Diversity, Conservation, and Sustainability

Rhodes College will host a free public lecture on "The Future of Plants" by noted botanist Sir Peter Crane on March 1, 7:30pm in Hardie Auditorium.

When	03/01/2012 03/01/2012 03/01/2012 from 07:30 to 10:30
Where	Rhodes College
Add event to calendar	vCal iCal

Distinguished Evolutionary Biologist to Speak in Memphis

(Memphis, Tenn.)— On March 1, 2012, Rhodes College will host Sir Peter Crane as this year’s Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. Dr. Crane will be discussing “The Future of Plants: Diversity, Conservation and Sustainability.” His lecture will take place at 7:30pm in Hardie Auditorium, and will be free and open to the public. Crane’s visit is co-sponsored by Rhodes Phi Beta Kappa, Biology, Environmental Studies & Sciences, the Spence Wilson Chair in Humanities, and the University of Memphis Department of Biological Sciences.

According to Crane, plants are indispensable to human survival and provide us with food, medicines, and a variety of raw materials. Plants are also important regulators of ecological processes at global to local scales. However, relatively little attention is paid to how these crucial global resources, accumulated over more than 450 million years of evolution, will be managed for the future. Crane’s lecture will explore the current status of plant diversity and consider some of the challenges in conserving and managing plants in sustainable ways for human benefit.

Peter Crane has been Carl W. Knobloch Jr. Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale since 2009. His work focuses on the diversity of plant life; its origin and fossil history, its current status, and its conservation and use. He is the coauthor of The Origin and Diversification of Land Plants and most recently Early Flowers and Angiosperm Evolution (August 2011). From 1992 to 1999 he was Director of the Field Museum in Chicago. In 1999 he was appointed Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where, along with other programs on conserving and understanding plant diversity, he worked on the initial establishment of the Millennium Seed Bank. He returned to the U.S. in 2006 as the Johan and Marion Sullivan University Professor at the University of Chicago. Elected to the Royal Society in 1998, he was knighted in the United Kingdom in 2004. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a member of the German Academy Leopoldina.