The Price of a Flower
How much is a flower worth? It depends entirely on who you ask.
An economist might attempt to quantify it — the blossom of a timber tree, essential for the tree’s reproduction, carries a value tied to the timber itself. For a smallholder farmer, a flower only matters if it belongs to a crop that survives this season’s drought. For a bee whose tongue is shaped for one plant and one plant alone, finding that flower is a matter of life and death. For a poet or a nature lover, the value is at least as high as the hours spent hiking through a forest in search of rare blossoms that fill the soul with awe.
Values are relative, fluid, critical yet diffuse. And as stars care little about what we think when we gaze into the void, flowers — and biodiversity — are not really here for us. But one thing is certain: we cannot be here without them.
What’s on Your Plate, Evolutionarily Speaking
Consider a simple dish: potatoes, tomatoes, and aubergine. Three ingredients, one plant family — the Solanaceae — representing roughly 37 million years of evolutionary history. Now swap the tomatoes and aubergine for broccoli and walnuts. Suddenly, you’re drawing from three distinct plant families and nearly 340 million years of evolution.
The point isn’t about evolutionary trivia. It’s about nutrition.
We can source our macronutrients — proteins, fats, carbohydrates — from a wide range of foods. But micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals our bodies cannot manufacture, are a different story. They tend to cluster in specific branches of the Tree of Life rather than being distributed evenly across all plants. Zinc, needed in every cell of our body for making DNA and fighting infection, is concentrated in legumes like chickpeas, lentils, and kidney beans. Selenium, critical for fertility, is found in abundance in the crucifer family — cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli.
The more evolutionary diversity on your plate, the greater your chances of covering all these nutritional bases. This is not a trend or a wellness hack. It is basic biology.
The Danger of Eating the Same Thing, Over and Over Again
Over 90 per cent of the human calorie intake comes from just 15 crop plants. Scientists have documented over 7,000 plant species as edible based on traditional knowledge worldwide — and that number is itself a fraction of all edible plants that exist. Yet we eat from a list shorter than a restaurant menu.
This dependency on so few crops is quietly fuelling malnutrition, poverty, and inequality across the world. It also places us in a position of extraordinary vulnerability. A single pest or pathogen can sweep through vast monocultures and leave nothing standing.
This is precisely what happened in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. A fungus-like organism destroyed the potato crop — the dominant food source for a large portion of the population. The resulting famine, compounded by colonial inequality and political failure, killed millions. It remains one of history’s starkest warnings about what happens when a society stakes its survival on a single species.
That warning has not been heeded.
Today, the world’s most consumed fruit faces a similar threat. Despite more than 1,000 varieties of banana existing — each with its own genetic profile, colour, shape, and flavour — half of global banana production and 99 per cent of exports depend on a single variety: the Cavendish. A devastating fungal strain first detected in East Asia around 1990 has since spread to Australia, Africa, Central Asia, and as of 2019, Latin America. It is pantropical now, and largely untreatable.
Meanwhile, in Africa, smallholder farmers who have grown and traded multiple banana varieties for over a thousand years produce three-quarters of the continent’s banana supply — and remain far less exposed to total crop failure. Diversity, it turns out, is not just good practice. It is insurance.
Nature’s Contributions Go Far Beyond the Visible
The value of biodiverse ecosystems extends far beyond individual species. For millennia, they have provided us with what researchers now call nature’s contributions to people — a concept broader than the more transactional “ecosystem services,” because it includes the non-material benefits that are harder to price but no less real.
Some of the most biodiverse forests in the world have been protected not because of their ecological richness alone, but because they are the source of clean drinking water for cities downstream. Wild bees and other insects pollinate our crops at no charge. Forests and natural parks offer beauty, fresh air, and space to breathe — helping us recover from the pressure of modern lives and improving the wellbeing of entire families.
Animals, too, have contributed far more to human survival than the obvious. From the traditional seal dishes of Greenland’s Inuit to the edible birds’ nests of Borneo — made from the solidified saliva of swiftlets and harvested from caves — food cultures around the world reflect an intimate, detailed relationship with the animal kingdom that industrial food systems have largely erased.
Perhaps the most striking example comes from medicine. The horseshoe crab, which has existed for more than 240 million years, has bright blue blood of extraordinary sensitivity to toxic bacteria. To this day, it remains the most effective way to test whether medicines and vaccines are free from harmful contamination. Every COVID-19 vaccine produced in the United States was tested using horseshoe crab blood before it could be licensed for use. No synthetic replacement has yet matched it.
The One Word That Changes Everything
The central challenge in deriving value from biodiversity comes down to a single word: sustainability.
Throughout history, we have taken for granted that nature’s bounty is infinite — that we could take whatever we needed, in whatever quantity we wanted, without consequence. We caught too many fish. We killed too many horseshoe crabs. We felled too many quinine trees. We hunted too many seals and stripped too many nests from cave ceilings.
We have treated biodiversity as an inexhaustible asset, extracting its genetic richness, its taxonomic variety, its evolutionary depth, and its ecosystem complexity — without accounting for any of it, and without giving it time to recover.
The flowers were never here for us. The forests, the insects, the ancient crabs — none of it evolved for our convenience. But we have become so dependent on the web of life that any serious reckoning with our own future has to begin with a reckoning with theirs.
The question is no longer what nature is worth to us. The question is whether we are willing to act as if it matters before we find out the hard way that it does.
Source : The Hidden Universe: Adventures in Biodiversity by Alexandre Antonelli
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56669607-the-hidden-universe
Get it on Amazon Com : https://amzn.to/3UdDW9S
Get it on Amazon IN : https://link.amazon/B0axkMTGJ
Read the Previous Article in Series :
Leave a Reply