On the way back Monday from my family reunion, I listened to All Things Considered on NPR. I realized something that I already knew but that registered only when this program and its contributors pointed it out to me. During graduate school I researched volatile components released from fruit crops because those play a role in scent and taste. Despite that, during all these years teaching, it never dawned on me while burning snack foods in lab that the components of plants are flammable because they are organic, and that trees actually facilitate smog.
Everything pollutes. Everything creates carbon dioxide. It is a common misconception that plants make energy from the sun. They make SUGAR, and then they burn sugar, just like we do, for energy, releasing carbon dioxide. Of course we don't usually notice this because they consume much more carbon dioxide than they release, but I remember a chlorophyll flourescence assay we did which correlates the carbon fixing ability of a plant to its health. When plants are weak, they fix less because they have to burn more in order to survive or take in less in order to keep from dehydrating, but they always take in more than they release, so nobody notices that. Consequently, if carbon dioxide is a pollutant, then EVERY LIVING THING on earth is killing the planet. Plants and fungi and bacteria are not more virtuous; they are just not creating things or erecting edifices that produce more organic waste than the organisms themselves can manage. We pollute more than anything else because entropy must always increase or in other words the price of progress is pollution. Don't believe me, think about the industrial revolution...
Plants make more organic compounds than humans ever could. During my studies, I focused exclusively on polyphenolics and diterpenoids because those materials are volatile, which means they evaporate into gas quickly, making them the compounds we are most likely to sense when smelling or tasting things. However, the number of volatiles we characterized from Vitis vinifera amounted to fewer than fifty, leaving at least 300 other compounds collected which were present in at least 1ppm concentration. As I listened to the treatise on the reason why the Great Smokey Mountains are smokey, it dawned on me that plants actually accentuate the smog accumulations. Volatiles are released by plants in response to stimuli from their environment, much like when you release pheromones when you find someone attractive or sweat when it's hot, or toot when you eat food that disagrees with your digestive track. Plants use these chemicals to communicate with and influence their environment. They drive away predators, restrict water loss, attract pollinators, and notify other plants of danger. Consequently, plants release hydrocarbons all the time, they're just not politically controversial, so nobody notices because people think "organic" means "makes you healthy".
Organic chemicals are essential to living things everywhere. Most of the famous ones like gasoline, acetone, and turpentine make the water unsafe to drink. Some of the lesser obvious which should be famous like lipids, proteins, and carbohydrates are essential to life, interact with water, and react with it to form other compounds in your body. When you walk out into the forest to collect a Christmas tree and smell the pine forests, you are actually picking up volatile organic chemicals. They are not evil, and they do not have an agenda. Like I tell students- fat is not evil. In fact, when you look at someone and find them attractive, what you essentially mean is that you find the way their fat is arranged to be preferable to that of other people because what you see is fat. The outside of every cell is phospholipids, lipids, are fat, and what you see when you look at someone is the outside or a whole lot of fat. Carbohydrates are not evil. DNA, tree bark, cotton socks, carrots, peaches, ad infinitum are all impossible to make without sugar. The trouble is that plants release volatile chemicals which become gases that then interact with the environment. When there is smog, they attract other "pollutants" because chemistry teaches us that similar things collect together, which means that organic chemicals that are volatile will accumulate, leading to smog and toxic clouds. When there is fog or acid raid or other things, it's because the water has attracted so much to polar organic compounds that it forms droplets and makes rain or fog or dew.
Far too many wizards of smart think that plants don't pollute and that humans are the only problems. The same people know that pine trees constitute a huge problem in wildfires because they explode when burnt. The organic compounds burst out when the tree hits a certain temperature, and because they are made of carbon they are FLAMMABLE. THis is how fires jump fire lines and spread, like the Blue Ridge fire burning out near Baker, CA. Trees and plants are not virtuous any more than humans are villainous. Nothing operates in a vacuum, and some of the things we assume are one way actually constitute an amalgamation of far more influences than we realize. When I mentioned this to my friend from Baltimore, he told me that made sense because you can smell the forests, and he knows enough about chemistry to know that those things are probably polyphenolics and diterpenoids- things you smell and taste. The things I learned in graduate school primarily focused on our senses, but they do other things besides bind your tongue and nose. They bind water, they bind other organic compounds and create clouds that some people consider pollution, and they bind our firemen who are trying to render compounds inflammable that quite frankly always will be.
Please enjoy this picture of a burning Taki, whatever those are...
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