14 



The first point I would like to make today is that botanical gar- 

 dens all over the country and all over the world are very active in 

 plant conservation efforts. We have heard already from Monsanto 

 about the efforts of the Missouri Botanical Gardens and Kew Gar- 

 dens and others in working toward some kind of conservation 

 effort. 



I would like to say that small gardens can do the same thing. I 

 am from an institution that has an annual budget of $300,000, 

 which by Federal standards is pretty low. We have a staff of 10, 

 and yet we were the first botanical garden in the country to set up 

 a regional seed bank for rare and endangered plants. That hap- 

 pened in 1983. 



We work cooperatively with a number of Federal agencies. It is 

 an essential kind of activity for our garden. We are working on 

 nine different projects currently involving the Fish and Wildlife 

 Service or the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Manage- 

 ment. 



One of the plants we are going to be working on more extensive- 

 ly next year you see up on the wall, the western lily. That is one of 

 the species that we work with in a number of different conserva- 

 tion activities. So with a relatively modest investment, by pairing 

 our efforts with the Federal agencies, all made possible through 

 the Endangered Species Act, we have been able to accomplish quite 

 a deal already. 



The second point is that the States of this Nation have made sig- 

 nificant efforts on their own to conserve endangered plant species. 

 Over half of them, 26 right now, have an endangered plant law in 

 which there is protection similar to the Endangered Species Act. 

 Another group has laws that help specifically in the conservation 

 of those plants. 



It is important that the Endangered Species Act now and in the 

 future encourages and rewards the activities of the States that 

 have their own programs, programs for conserving the plants, 

 sometimes plants at the edge of their ranges, as Dr. Eisner referred 

 to earlier, that are very important resources within those States. 



Third, I would like to address the topic of this particular hearing 

 today which is the medicinal use of plants. That is something that 

 I have been interested in for some time. I estimate, based on some 

 work that I have done in the past, that about half — probably more 

 than half — of the rare and endangered plants in this country are 

 related to plants that have been used medicinally by Native Ameri- 

 cans or, in other uses, are used medicinally around the world; and 

 just right off the top, have a very strong potential value for hu- 

 mankind. 



For this hearing, I took a list that I had developed for other pur- 

 poses. It is a list of 556 species, a combined list of rare and endan- 

 gered plants from Idaho, Oregon and Washington. Just using 10 

 references that I happened to have in my office, in cross-referenc- 

 ing to the genre of those species, I found right around 50 percent 

 that were related to plants that I could reference easily as having 

 some kind of medicinal value. So I cannot say strongly enough just 

 how important they are as a resource. 



This is not really surprising. Plants have been evolving for thou- 

 sands of years on their own. They have had a lot of stresses to deal 



