This piece was originally published in Undark and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. Iris Gao keeps a ginseng root in her office. It’s fixed on black velvet with three other bleached-brown specimens, all of them twisty and otherworldly and protected by glass in a shadowbox frame. This particular root, says Gao, was more than 40 years old when it was plucked out of the Tennessee soil; you can tell because of the more than 40 gnarled rings on what she calls its neck. As a biologist…
