Carbon dioxide, as most of us know, is a common gas that is the result of the respiration process from all organisms, plants included.High atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide produce what is known as the greenhouse effect where short wavelenghts of visible light, as UV or blue light from the sun are absorbed by the atmospheric gas layers but the long wavelengths as red or infra red from the heated cities, land or any object are trapped within the same atmospheric gas layers leading to more heat and higher temperatures.

It's atmospheric concentration varied quite a lot over the geological time. In the beginning of the history of earth, when no plants or algae were around the concentration was quite high and a set of completely different organisms lived on earth. The arising of the first green algae in the oceans started a process that would lead to the world as we know it today: plants colonized land and evolved from small mosses to ferns, to conifer types and at last flowering plants. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere staedily decreased as plants use it to produce their own food and for their growth, releasing oxygen as a trade off.

This had several consequences for life on earth: oxygen was a terrible poison for the existing organisms, the more it was produceed the better plants thrieved - a positive feed back that favoured a green world. On the other hand carbon dioxide depletion by plants was so severe at some points of our geological history that it is thought to have had an important contribution to the first recorded ice age in the planet several hundreds of million years ago.

With continents migrating and climate changing earth came to a set of conditions that enabled mankind to establish.

Earth has today an amazing diversity of vegetation types that sustain an amazing diversity of animal communities and human populations and cultures.

Among those vegetation types that contribute most to carbon dioxide trapping and oxygen release to the atmosphere are the tropical rain forests and mires or peat bogs.

Tropical rain forests because of the age, mass, diversity of plants that have been trapping carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen to the atmosphere for millions of years. They are a luxurious vegetation type where every niche is explored enabling diversity and incredible adaptations. It has also been proved to host an unknown number of plants that produce also some still unknown chemicals with great potential for the pharmaceutical industry.

Mires or peat bogs cover even greater areas, especially in the boreal area of the northern hemisphere, from Russia, to Canada and the US. They have been extensively explored heavily in the industrial age as peat was the fuel available together with coal. These peat bogs are the result of the peculiar activity of a moss, the first group of plants that colonized earth. These plants have an extraordinary capicity of holding water inside their bodies (ca. 20 times their own weight) and at the same time they exchange hydrogen from their metabolism for chemicals they need to grow with the wet enviroment that surrounds them. In this way they make this environment more and more acid, preventing competition from other plants, as most don't tolerate these conditions, and spreading over extensive areas. The acidification of the surrounding water also prevents bacterial activity that promotes decay, so the peat mosses grow upwards continuously whereas the basal parts remain undecomposed, and accumulate as peat. The peat cores can be as deep as 90 meters.

A small increase in temperature will unbalance the conditions in peatlands. As they will dry out, more oxygen will come into the system promoting decay and releasing the carbon dioxide trapped in these ecosystems. The more carbon dioxide is released the more the temperature increases in a non stop process. Destroying the peatlands is destroying the greatest carbon dioxide trapp in the planet in a loop that will engolfe many of us.

Yes, it is a moss, peat mosses that are responsable for the greatest resevoir of carbon dioxide on earth. And yes, it's the tropical rainforests that are responsible for the most significant release of oxygen to the atmosphere and host the greatest species diversity on earth. They host unvaluable resources, ultimately the survival of many human populations and cultures.

And yes, earth has gone through periodic changes of temperature conditions, that caused extinctions of sometimes great percentage of the estimated species number. But never ever at the rate we are facing now, nor the consequences will be so tragic.... there were no humans then.

The dependence of animal communities and humans from plants its realized by decision makers, the media and general public in two different channels: when it comes to mankind the focus is agriculture, making more free space for producing food for a continuosly growing human population. When it comes to animals, well they can be viewed also from the human feeding/cultural channel, of course but we can hear much lowder voices when at least the emblematic animals as pandas, whales, wolves, polar bears are at stake.

I believe that this comes from the fact that animals mimic the human behaviour in several ways: when feeding their puppies and caring for them, when fight for survival in harsh environments. And of course this has great impact on the media as they explore these similarities and human compassion.

I wonder if there is anyway for the media to make also money in transmiting the fact that without the natural habitas and vegetation types that plants provide these animals are much more at risk than for any other reason.

Here are some suggestions that each of us and each community could do to make plants and vegetation at the same level in the media agenda.

• Get interested to know what's the natural vegetation types around you and put them high up as the natural heratige that supports all others, including humans
• Get to know all the threatned plants in your area, in which vegetation types they occur and if there are animal communities that depend on them.
• In your garden favour plants that are native to your area, they are locally adapted so they don't need that much care and if you leave in an area where there is shortage of water, it certainly saves a lot of it.
• Fight for the natural vegetation and the native plants around you against economic interests that will not sustain you and all of us in the long run. There are certainly a lot of imaginative ways to use the natural environment as a service with economic revenues to you or your community.
• And... talk about plants and vegetation. Make them fashionable so to attract attention they deserve from the public opinion.