5 Plants That Deserve A Little More Gosh Darn Respect

5 Rubber Trees

Rubber is such a ubiquitous material that, in our pigheadedness, we seem to assume we invented it. Sure, we’ve synthesized versions of it, but they’re all merely tributes to the original incredible material that seeps from the rubber tree. Given that life in much of America is nigh-impossible without a car, you better be taking a moment of silence during every commute to thank the trees that bled for those tires you're sitting on. 

Rubber trees deserve a sign honoring them on every major highway, but we could settle for the base respect of not completely killing them off. That’s no way to treat anybody!

4 Cinchona Trees

Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, and the fucked-up part is: that’s a massive improvement from the past. Across the 20th century, the disease racked up a staggering kill count of between 150 million and 300 million deaths before we finally found a cure. 

I don’t use “found” here as in “found via careful research” either. We truly and honestly found it — sitting in the bark of a tree in Peru. The indigenous people of the area already knew the tree bark could cure malaria, and they passed that knowledge onto Jesuit priests, who would use it to cure the Countess of Cinchona. 

As if saving millions of lives wasn’t enough? Quinine also gave us another modern miracle: the gin and tonic.

3 Wild Yams

There’s a non-zero chance that you’ve never had a real yam. But before you start sputtering about your sickening, marshmallow-covered Thanksgiving hot dish, no, those aren’t yams. Yes, they’re often called candied yams, but they’re sweet potatoes, which are definitively not yams. All part of the tuber’s constant disrespect. 

One yam in particular you should be thanking your lucky stars for, even if it’s never crossed your dinner plate: the wild yam. How do they taste? It doesn’t matter. What matters is the diosgenin found within their roots. Diosgenin was used to produce the hormone progesterone, which was converted into a form that could be taken orally, known as norethisterone, which was used to create Enovid, the first hormonal birth control pill. 

So yeah, we all owe the wild yam a high-five.

2 Opium Poppies

We’re all aware of the power of the opium poppy. It produces morphine, something that’s especially impressive given that humans are still struggling to effectively synthesize it. 

Now, does it have a dark side? Absolutely, since it’s also the source of heroin and the opioids at the centerpiece of our current pharmaceutical crisis. To which I argue: the plant didn't do all that. It was minding its own business, producing an incredibly effective painkiller, and we’re the ones who got a little too deep on it. I’m not shifting the sins of the Sackler family onto a simple, beautiful flower, okay?

1 Algae

Is algae a plant? That’s something you could get into a long, incredibly boring argument about. For once, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to tell you to start having some goodwill toward the world’s seaweeds. Sure, they suck to step on, and sometimes they trick you into thinking you’re reeling in a fat trout. I think, though, we should be able to easily forgive all that given that it’s directly responsible for life on this fucking planet. 

In the very beginning, algae was the organism pumping oxygen into our atmosphere to enable the long sequence of events that led to you and I staring at our computers while greedily sucking down air. Even now, algae is still responsible for more than half of the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. 

So the next time you feel like hugging a tree, maybe give a fistful of algae a squeeze, too.