For the Journal Plants are everywhere, providing food, clothing and shelter and determining how we live. Agriculture is an enormous business, with huge environmental effects.
Plants also grow disputes in laboratories, board rooms and the corridors of political power.
More than ever, plants are wealth, and their owners are rich. About 25 years ago, Loren Miller of Palo Alto, Calif., traveled to the Amazon River in Brazil looking for medicinal plants. He found ayahuasca, used by South American Indian tribes to make a hallucinogenic tea for religious ceremonies. Miller brought ayahuasca home and patented it. When they heard about the patent, the Amazon tribes went ballistic.