Who Is Peter Raven? A Documentary Interview -Filmed In 8K by Shiloh Documentary Films. A documentary interview I filmed of Dr. Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus Of The Missouri Botanical Garden. Dr. Peter H. Raven, age 86 years, a brilliant storyteller, weaves a fascinating and insightful narrative of his long illustrious career including some of the influential people that he has met along the way. A child prodigy whose interest in Science developed at the tender age of 6 sparking a life long fascination with Nature, specifically, Butterflies, Beetles, and Botany, from a book his mother gave him whilst recovering from the measles. Peter recounts how a photo of Pope Francis, taken by his wife, Dr. Pat Raven, inspired master sculptor Don Wiegand to create a Bas-relief of Pope Francis that Dr. Raven paved the way for the sculpture to be presented to Pope Francis, and to be permanently on exhibit at The Pontifical Academy Of Sciences, of which he is a life long member , in Rome, Italy.
An internationally renowned botanist and conservation advocate, he is the author of numerous books. Named a Hero For The Planet by Time magazine, Raven has received a number of honors and awards, including the National Medal Of Science, Guggenheim Fellowship, and the MacArthur Fellowship.
After becoming a member of the California Academy of Sciences while still a youth, Raven went on to graduate with a BSc in biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957 and a Ph.D. in botany from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1960.
After teaching at Stanford University, Raven went on to become Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1971, an institution he nurtured to become a world-class center for botanical research, education, and horticultural display.
He is George Engelmann Professor of Botany Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis
In 2001, Dr. Raven received the National Medal of Science, the highest award for scientific accomplishment in the United States. He has been president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sigma Xi, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and a number of other organizations. He served for 12 years as Home Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, to which he was elected in 1977. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, of the academies of science in a number of other countries, including China, Russia, the U.K., Brazil, and Australia.
For 25 years, Dr. Raven served as co-editor of the Flora of China, a joint Chinese-American international project that resulted in the production of a contemporary, 49-volume account on all the plants of China, 31,500 species, completed in 2014. He has authored or coauthored numerous books and publications, both popular and scientific, including Biology of Plants, the internationally best-selling textbook in botany and Environment, a leading textbook on the environment.
Raven is possibly best known for his work Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution published in the journal Evolution in 1964 which he coauthored with Paul R. Ehrlich.
He is a frequent speaker on the need for biodiversity and species conservation.
In 2000, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists established the Peter Raven Award in his honor to be conferred to authors with outstanding contributions to plant taxonomy and "for exceptional efforts at outreach to non-scientists".
Raven has published more than 700 articles, books, and monographs covering topics in Evolution, Taxonomy and Systematics, Biogeography, Coevolution, Plant Conservation, Ethnobotany, and Public Policy, including several text books.
During his early years he was associated with and led Sierra Club outings for several weeks at a time, after which he published "Base Camp Reports." Published from 1950 to 1956, these reports covered a wide range of subjects, including plant lists, insects, and ecology. His first such report, at the age of 14, summarized 506 plant collections representing 337 species collected in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Inyo and Fresno Counties. G. Ledyard Stebbins was a counselor on this particular trip, identified by Raven as Prof. G. L. "Led" Stebbins.
During this time he also published on new weed species and other plants found in and around San Francisco as well as the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
In 1950 Raven, at the age of 14, had collected a plant called C. rubicunda.In the early 1950s, in the course of revising the genus Clarkia Harlan Lewis and his wife Margaret Lewis discovered the herbarium specimen collected by Raven. They visited him in 1952 when he was 16, and wanted to know where the collection was made. Lewis eventually located the new species, and in 1958 Lewis and Raven published a botanical description of this plant, called C. franciscana, which was morphologically very closely related to C. rubicunda and C. amoena.
