News

PETER AND THE WOLF

Continued from page 2

"I just wish Peter was more reflective, more willing to engage with the people he calls naysayers," comments his old friend Wes Jackson of Salina, Kan., a geneticist who heads the Land Institute and who will disagree publicly, even at the risk of alienating a man he admires. "Peter's a born biologist, and what's happened to the Garden under his tenure is impressive. But I don't think he's critical enough of what oligarchy can do. The fact that living substance, germplasm, can become the property of a corporation is going to come at a cost." He sighs heavily. "I think the boundaries of consideration need to be broader than Peter's willing to make them. In a certain sense he's a paid traveling salesman for Monsanto."

Peter Raven was born June 13, 1936, in Shanghai, with exotic dinner parties and high finance swirling around his bassinet. His father had gone to work for an uncle's bank. Then a scandal erupted (Chinese banking rules had changed precipitously) and the uncle lost his newly made $1 million. Young Peter's parents returned to California, wrenching him from the Chinese amah who'd nursed and tended him more assiduously than his own mother.

Boyhood was an extended romp through the fields of golden California. At 8, Raven started collecting bugs and plants; at 12 he joined the Sierra Club; at 15 he discovered a heather unseen for 50 years; at 16 he discovered a member of the evening primrose family unseen since 1900.

It was the Bay Area landscape that shaped Raven's conscious experience, yet to this day he feels an inexplicable affinity for all things Chinese, and the memory of that amah still warms him (he keeps her picture, carefully restored and color-tinted, on his desk). As an adult, he asked his mother how the separation had affected him. "She said I cried for two weeks and didn't eat well for a year," he reports solemnly.

His eldest daughter, Alice Raven, also thinks his generation suffered from the Shanghai syndrome, driven to succeed by oblique hints of their elders' disappointing fall. In any event, Peter was the only child of attentive, meticulous parents -- a father who actually enjoyed doing the dishes, a mother who wore white gloves to Mass and dressed her son in little pressed shorts.

Details come from family members; Raven, despite a healthy ego, talks loquaciously on any subject except himself. "Childhood? Ah, well, I was little...." he says, trailing off. Asked the source of his aesthetic, he shrugs and says his home was "tidy." He doesn't even tell the life-altering story of the butterfly-specimen pins, a special gift to him from a Chinese doctor. Young Peter, a budding entomologist, was already involved in the California Academy of Sciences' student section. When they saw the pins, scarce in wartime, they decided the child had stolen them. According to family members, he never explained, never sobbed to his parents about the black cloud. He simply switched to botany.

Raven planned to teach high-school science but wound up with a doctorate and a faculty position at Stanford University. At 22, he'd married his high-school sweetheart, Sally Barrett; 10 disappointing years later, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage, leaving him with two daughters and a remarkably blank memory. "He was so intensely interested in his work," explains Alice. "If I ask him about my mother, he really can't remember anything. I don't think it's conscious selective amnesia, but it's selective amnesia nonetheless.

"He and my mother were already separated when she died," continues Alice. "He was in the hospital, in traction with a broken leg he'd gotten skiing with Tamra." The hurt in her voice is unmistakable: Her dad never did understand how bereft his little girls felt when he hired a live-in housekeeper, dug back into his all-consuming work and, eight months later, married the 23-year-old Tamra. (Early biographical accounts identify her as a fellow biologist he noticed during a '67 visit to Costa Rica, watching, captivated, as she skinned a poisonous fer-de-lance reeking of recent prey. The real story unfolded a bit more prosaically: Tamra was a graduate student in Stanford's biology department, Raven one of its faculty's young turks.)

At Stanford, he did unprecedentedly detailed research on the languid, droopy fuchsia plants that couldn't have been less like him, and he wrote what's considered the world's best botany textbook, Biology of Plants. He also compared notes with colleague Paul Ehrlich over morning coffee, and together they developed the theory of coevolution. (Raven knew that mustard plants produced a harsh, horseradishey chemical in self-defense; Ehrlich knew that certain butterflies had acquired -- evolved -- a taste for it. By charting this delicate reciprocal dance, they spelled out far wider implications that, until then, no one had heeded.)

Already a collector and scholar, Raven was now beginning to finger the fragile knots in the web of life. Back in grad school, no one had even known rainforests were in danger; all you had to do, Raven says, was "keep away from the bandidos." But in 1962, Raven -- a bushy black beard grazing his dashiki -- read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, early notice that the Green Revolution's pesticides were turning farms into killing fields. In 1967, when he taught in Costa Rica, he noticed with a sinking heart that "things were really getting cut down." Over the next three decades, he watched a world indifferent to huge losses of topsoil; destruction of forests; pollution; energy waste; global warming; overpopulation; and an extinction of plants and animals unparalleled since the dark death that ended the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago.

As Raven gained stature, he began speaking out, using dramatic sound-bite statistics to galvanize his audiences. Always, he laced the doom with a natural optimism, making it palatable. His curriculum vitae grew so long that it looks as if an imposter got carried away. He received a MacArthur "genius grant," 15 honorary doctorates and three pages' worth of international prizes. Today he chairs the biodiversity panel of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, as well as the National Geographic Society's prestigious committee on research and exploration (launcher of Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and the Leakeys, among others).

Even his name connotes praise, the long "a" of "rave" rolling out smooth as red carpet. On top of all that, he's nice. Thoughtful. Chats with his PR woman about books, then has a box of his favorites delivered to her the next morning. Sends his daughter a case of the wine she liked at dinner. Gets people jobs, grants and awards. Remembers the details of their lives more precisely than he remembers his own.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
Next Page »