The Green World of Plants: How Life Builds Itself from Sunlight and Air
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The world of green plants is remarkably diverse and beautiful. Despite the enormous variety of their forms — from a microscopically tiny alga living in a puddle left after rain to a mighty centuries-old tree — every green plant shows the same orderly organization and the same adaptation to life in particular conditions.
What makes green plants unique?
The defining feature of green plants is their ability to build organic substances out of mineral ones — turning water, carbon dioxide, and various salts into starch, sugar, fats, and proteins. No other organisms can create organic matter from mineral matter, and in the end they all live at the expense of green plants.
A close interdependence links the two worlds — the world of green plants and the world of non-green organisms — and it shows itself in a complex exchange. The products of green plants' activity are an essential condition for the life of non-green organisms, which in turn exert a great influence on the life of green plants.
The close interconnection that exists in living nature testifies both to the unity of life and to its great complexity. With enough observation and a certain body of knowledge, this complexity — made up of the many ties between an organism and inanimate nature, and between an organism and other living things — can be discovered everywhere: in the forest, in the field, in the meadow, and in a body of water.
To explain these ties and this complexity, however, one must study how life arose and developed.
The science of how the organic world develops
The science of the development of the organic world — the study of its past and present, and in particular the study of how green plants develop — is one of the most important, useful, and at the same time most fascinating branches of knowledge. In speaking of the development of the organic world, it is impossible not to mention that, with the appearance of humans during that development, a directed change of living nature emerged alongside its natural, "spontaneous" change.
By consciously acting on nature, humans began to alter it in their own interests. The results of that influence can vary widely. Sometimes, in the pursuit of maximum profit, enormous damage is inflicted on nature: forests and other natural riches are destroyed in a predatory manner, and hundreds of millions of hectares of fertile land are turned into deserts.
Nature must be protected in a careful, husbanding way, and its natural resources used to create an abundance of products. To reshape and further enrich the green world, one must know it well and study the laws of its development. Without understanding or knowing these laws, nature cannot be reshaped consciously. The basis of the development of all living things is the metabolism — the self-renewal — of the living organism.
What are the laws governing the development of life?
The self-renewal of the living organism reveals itself in the constant change of the relationship between an organism and the environment in which it exists. To understand these relationships is to understand the laws of the development of life. If a person knows under the influence of which conditions an organism changes, then by artificially creating the corresponding conditions, that person can influence its development in a directed way — and therefore its life.
Armed with knowledge of the laws of nature, a person can bring about changes in an organism that could never arise under natural conditions. This is precisely the "secret" of creating new forms and species. It is no accident that this method was widely used by the outstanding transformer of nature and creator of new plant forms, Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin.
Delving into the world of green plants, studying the influence of the external environment upon it, and turning the laws of nature to his own purposes, Michurin opened new paths for reshaping our "friends." Michurin's work found many followers and took on the character of a broad, nationwide movement.
