Dave Burney says he has spent the majority of his career as an undertaker. In the traditional sense of course, he is nothing of the sort - his job has nothing to do with embalming fluid and corpses - unless of course you are talking about the corpses of plants.
Burney is a paleoecologist and a the director of conservation at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the island of Kauai. His area of expertise is in documenting the deaths of various plant species -- literally watching them die off, plant by plant, and trying to figure out what went wrong. He says it can be a very depressing process.
He and others here at the Garden tell me stories of hiking into remote areas of Hawaii's jungles to monitor the dwindling numbers of remaining native plants - numbers they can count on one hand. They show photographs taken by National Geographic photographers of them scaling the island's rocky cliffs to obtain cuttings of the last know plants of their kind. They tell me of a phone call that comes unexpectedly and bearing bad news, "I think you should come and have a look," the voice on the other end says," I think the last one has died."
Steve Perlman is one of the Garden's senior field researchers. He has spent the last 20 years traveling throughout the South Pacific finding and working with plants on the verge of extinction. He says he remembers that phone call. He remembers standing in front of the dead tree. "We just had to stop and take a moment of silence," he said sadly. When your life's work is dedicated to saving something, it clearly can be hard to let it go.
People like Burney and Perlman do more than watch plants die. The mission of the National Tropical Botanical Garden is conservation - and Burney says that his job is to see if they can interfere before its too late.
"Now that we know, or at least are starting to know happens in extinction, its time to ask can we step into the midst of an extinction and reverse that process."
It turns out that in a lot of cases they can. A rare plant discovered in a cave - never seen before - now covers the neighboring hillside, after being propagated by the garden and replanted planted there. Other plants, many on the verge of extinction are replanted in the Garden itself. Perlman gives myself and a group of other journalists a tour of the McBryde Garden - one of the five gardens that make up NTBG's garden network. McBryde is described as a botanical "Noah's Ark" and is home to the major research and conservation collections. It features the world's largest collection of native Hawaiian plants, many of which Perlman has collected himself. He points out a stretch of palms lining a a stream, and tells me that they are actually very rare, one of less than a half dozen left in Hawaii that he brought back and planted here, where they are now, clearly thriving.
He points out others. Small green plants that look a bit like heads of cabbage with yellow waxy flowers. Only one of those plants is known to remain in existence in the wild. Here there are dozens, and the Garden considers it one of their greatest success stories. Unique species of Gardenia, Noni, and Heliconia abound -- and in the greenhouse, there is most recent - and the only plant to be added to the endangered species list by President Obama, a rare vine called Phyllostegia hispida.
Burney and his colleagues have some ideas about protecting these plants that they say are somewhat controversial, and contrary to the conventional methods of conservation. Most conversationalists protect species "in situ" - that is in their natural environment - or "ex situ" outside of their natural environment (such as a greenhouse) , but Burney believes in something he calls inter situ conservation -- extending a plant's natural habitat beyond where it is currently found. He figures this makes a lot of sense, since after all, just because a plant is rare now, doesn't mean it was always rare. In fact he says most plants that are are now only found in very narrow natural habitats, are usually there because they have been forced by humans. Because a plant can only be found growing in the rocks of high mountain cliffs, does not mean that it can't grow and even thrive in other locations - it may simply be there because that's the only place humans and foreign invaders like slugs, insects, and rats can't get to it.
And what's more, environmental conditions are dynamic - not static. Global warming can change temperature zones and cause sea levels to rise, meaning the optimal conditions for a plant to flourish may exist in a different place today than 1000 years ago. Coastal plants may need to be pushed farther inland, and plants that thrive in cooler temperatures may need higher altitudes. Not everyone agrees with his philosophy, but Burney says there is no time to waste.
"Some people say 'Burney, you want to play God with these plants', and I feel like, well we've already played Satan, so lets try the other side of things," he said.