From Plant Press, Vol. 5, No. 2 from April 2002.
By Robert DeFilipps
The Second Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, held on April 5-6 at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, gave 200 participants an opportunity to delve into the impact of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in relation to scientific investigations during the past decade, and to explore the convention’s many ramifications for understanding our natural world. A treaty and strategy for the conservation, sustainable development, and equitable sharing of the benefits of biodiversity, the Convention was adopted at the famous 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and has to date been ratified by approximately 180 countries. The Secretariat of the Convention is in Montreal, Canada, and its financial mechanism is the $2.7 billion Global Environmental Fund (GEF). The entire world is affected in one way or another by the CBD, an ever-widening phenomenon which W. John Kress, Head of Botany at the Smithsonian, has referred to as the “Globalization of Natural History Science.”
The Hon. Bruce Babbitt, Secretary, U.S. Department of the Interior (1992-2000), delivering his keynote address, "A Retrospective View of the Rio Convention" at the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, (Photo by Leslie Brothers)
The panel of specialist speakers was international, with representatives from the United States, Brazil, Panama, Kenya and Spain, and the scope of their presentations was truly comprehensive. In fact, it soon became evident that the vocabulary of biodiversity has recently been dramatically expanded, in order to keep pace with changing dimensions of research. It now includes such relatively new terms as: “GMOs” (genetically modified organisms), “biodiplomacy,” “unnatural natural products” (biocombinatorial secondary metabolites), “agrobiodiversity,” “biosafety” (the transport of GMOs), and the “taxonomic impediment.” To this may well be added a statement made by Kress during the symposium, to the effect that in the wake of the CBD, Earth’s biodiversity has become a commodity, and terms (concepts) such as commercial value, guardianship and ownership have become “the currency of Nature.”
To start the April 6 sessions, the attendees were welcomed by Kress as convenor of the symposium, and by Ira Rubinoff, Acting Deputy Director of the National Museum of Natural History. Rubinoff’s remarks included recognition of the work of museum staff as providers of an important scientific foundation to support the Convention, while referring to multinational collaborative initiatives between the museum and host-country researchers in many nations including Mexico, Venezuela, China, Fiji and Myanmar (Burma).
Next, the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was presented by Kress to P. Barry Tomlinson of Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Although Tomlinson was unable to attend due to his recent return from extensive sabbatical field studies in Hawaii, New Caledonia and New Zealand, the award was accepted on his behalf by Dennis Stevenson of the New York Botanical Garden (Bronx, New York), and a message of thanks was read. Tomlinson, a native of Leeds, England (b. 1932), is recognized for his multifaceted research on the architecture and morphology of tropical plants, including many monocotyledons (see related article, page 7).