You may know of Paul Stamets who does extensive work with mushrooms and various kinds of fungi. He is brilliant and I urge you to tune into his work. He maintains that fungi and our close association with this form of life gave rise to the human understanding of communicating through networks much like the internet because of the intricate communication network of mycelium that covers the planet. Stamets has developed a way to transform diesel fuel and toxic oil with the use of oyster mushrooms into rich regenerating soil within a period of six weeks. What was the reason that the EPA didn’t employ this method in the Gulf Oil spill? Also, many mushrooms have been found to arrest the devastating effects of rampant viral infections. Check out Paul Stamets on TED titled Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World.
Likewise a mushroom has been discovered in the Amazon that eats hard plastic.

http://m.gizmodo.com/5880768/amazonian-mushroom-eats-indestructible-plastics.

On a more esoteric note a community in Italy called Damanhur is doing in-depth research with plants and trees by monitoring the vibratory resonance of the plant whose electrical impulses are registered through an electronic device that is connected to a synthesizer. The plants and trees learn to work with the machines and then begin to produce intricately beautiful musical pieces. One particular Avocado tree has become a master musician and teaches other plants to “sing”. As more and more trees and plants in the Damanhur community learn to sing in harmony the entire environment becomes a sanctuary for healing not only humans but all life forms. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZaokNmQ4eY.

From eating plastic, to cleaning up toxic waste, to using aquatic plants to clean-up waste water to increasing the amount of carbon dioxide uptake to healing through harmonious sound to re-patterning the bio-photons at the nucleus of the cell into a healthy pattern, to decreasing infectious viruses, plants and trees seem to be stepping up to the plate to address the urgent needs of people and the planet. The sentience of the plant kingdom may be far greater than we can even imagine and when we engage within the matrix of human and plant consciousness a co-creative partnership emerges that just might “save the world”, an imperative the plants are actively participating in and are urging us to join them.