The health and robustness of scientific endeavor underpins the nation's future. Our community of scientists looks forward to the 21st Century as an unparalleled period of development in new fundamental knowledge and all its positive consequences. In this difficult transition at the beginning of the 21st Century, we face ongoing rapid readjustments to new political, economic and scientific realities. One is that the Cold War drove considerable research investment. CSSP and constituent societies need to take responsibility and leadership to establish those policies and programs that will ensure a bright future for science. We as a community of leaders have established our own next-century goals: i) developing a myriad of newer understandings of nature, ii) achieving sustainable systems, iii) maximizing lifelong learning and other human potential, iv) preempting mental and physical disease, v) creating vibrant economic systems, vi) attaining energy autonomy, and vii) re-imagining science as the foundation for creating the most positive futures.

Botanical Scientists need to work together to overcome the deep flaws in our science education system, to ensure more public appreciation of botanic sciences, and to increase scientists' influence and impact on the development of new and larger research funding sources. Compelling visions attract resources to fulfill them. A starting point is to recognize and publicize the most exciting areas of botanical research and investigation over the next several decades. Botanists face many important Grand Challenges in the 21st Century-- such as truly understanding global and local biocomplexity and biodiversity, ensuring that we can sustain biodiversity in the face of increasing human impact, substantially expanding our knowledge of how plants grow, develop and respond to environment and also widely apply this knowledge, fully understanding plant-symbiont and plant-pathogen interactions, and redesigning human systems into sustainable ones. Researching and understanding interactions and patterns ranging from ecosystem scale to gene expression scale, and many other features unique to plants, will enhance and improve fundamental understanding of biological processes, and be used to improve environmental and human conditions, and ensure all people understand and appreciate the crucial necessity of plants in a functioning and healthy biosphere.

Key words: education, public policy, research, science, scientific societies