Life Form of the Month

This is bigger than the Emmys, and bigger than the Oscars...

Here is Olivia Judson with her nomination of Life Form of the Month:

Imagine the Earth without grasses.

There would be no lawns or meadows. No prairies. No savannahs or steppes. No wheat fields or rice paddies. No sugar cane.

No sheep, elephants or horses.

No people.

We live in the age of grass. Indeed, from our point of view, the evolution of grasses was one of the most momentous events in the history of the Earth. Which is why I’m nominating them for Life-form of the Month: March.

You just have to go read the whole article. It will broaden you mind, get you out of that anthropocentric wallow you have been in!

And grasses are a big success story...

As a group, grasses have been wildly successful. Today, the grass family contains more than 10,000 species — that’s more species of grass than species of bird — and grasslands cover about a third of the planet’s landmasses. (“Grassland” refers to an ecosystem, like prairie, where grasses dominate; it doesn’t mean they are the only plants there.) Grasses can be tall (think bamboo) or short (think lawns), and they include our most important crops. Rice, wheat, rye, oats, maize, millet, barley, sorghum and sugar cane are all grasses.

If only humans could spread like grass or hang as tenaciously to life as grass. Instead, we've got our relationship all topsy-turvy:

We humans are dependent on grasses: we get more than half our calories directly from the tetrad of rice, wheat, maize and sugar cane, and we feed grasses to our sheep, goats, horses and cows.

And Judson finishes with a flourish:

But their effect on us has been far more profound. Our domestication of grasses, 10,000 years ago or so, allowed the building of the first cities, and marks the start of civilization as we know it. Grasses thus enabled the flowering of a new kind of evolution, a kind not seen before in the history of life: the evolution of human culture.