Ethnobotany
The Importance of Ethnobotany in Environmental Conservation
Richard Evans Schultes, PhD, FMLS
Excerpts from a speech given at Biosphere 2 on April 17th, 1993
As reproduced in Biosphere 2 Newsletter, Summer 1993 (copyright Global
Ecotechnics)
There are numerous definitions of enthnobotany. The most widely employed and
simplest definition explains it as the study of the knowledge and the use of
plants in primitive societies in the past and present. Ethnobotany is certainly
not new. The earliest humans must have been incipient ethnobotanists. It began
when man first classified plants out of neccesity: those of little or no
utility; those which were useful in many practical ways, those alleviating pain
or otherwise ameliorating illness; and those that may have killed him outright.
Many indiginous groups around the world - the Indians of the Amazonian
regions, for example - are literally masters of their ambient vegetation as a
result of inherited knowledge. As a consequence of the Indian's familiarity with
the properties of te plants with which he lives there are, at least in the
northwest Amazonia, two systems of medicine: that of the medicine man or payé,
including the use of psychoctive plants, and ... that wholly based on the
familiarity in the general population of medicinal plants and their properties,
knowledge amassed by experimentation over many millenia and passed on orally
from generation to generation. This knowledge - of great potential value to
humanity as a whole - seems unfortunately to be doomed to extinction with the
rapid acculturation and westernisation in many parts of the globe. Indigenous
people should live peacefully without disruption, from road construction,
airships, missionary pressure, warfare, tourism, industrial settlers or various
well-intentioned government efforts to "civilise" the natives. The loss of this
knowledge and of the natives themselves will be a grave hindrance to progress in
many aspects of environmental conservation. Realisation of the seriousness of
this impending loss has given rise in recent years to the urgent need for
ethnobotanical conservation.
Examples of the value to conservation of ethnobotanical knowledge of the
natives are evident with the properties of bioactive plants and their
recognition of numerous subspecific varients or ecotypes. Although techniques of
ethnobotanical research will differ according to the kind and condition of
culture of the aboriginal people and the type of ecology in which they live,
there seems to exist an underlying similarity in the relationships of
ethnobotany to environmental conservation.
The Amazon basin supports the world's largest rainforest - 2,700,000 square
miles, with an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 species of higher plants, probably 15%
of the world's flora. The number of species and their diversity increses towards
the westernmost point of the hylea. The Columbian sector, protected from easy
penetration by rapids and waterfalls in most of it's rivers, has not suffered
the extensive acculturation and wanton environmental devastation that many other
parts of the basin, particularly in the Brazilian sector, have had and are
experiencing. Furthermore, the Columbian goverment has wise and stringent
programs directed towards environmental and cultural conservation. The 70,000
indians in 50 ethnic groups in the Columbian Amazonia speak a mosaic of
languages classified into more than 12 linguistic families. Their knowledge and
use of medicinal and toxic plants is outstanding; during my field work since
1941, I have identified nearly 1600 species in 596 genera in 145 plant families
employed as medicines or poisons; and I am certain that I have missed many.
Only a minute fraction of these 1600 species has ever been chemically
studied. In fact, an outstanding Brazilian chemist has stated that fewer than
10% of the plants of the Brazilian Amazon have ever been analysed for bioactive
compounds. If phytochemists must procure sufficient material for a thorough
analysis of 80,000 species from such remote areas, the task - obviously a random
sampling - will undoubtedly never be finished. Ethnobotany can help.
Concentrating on those plants which the natives have by long experimentation
found to be bioactive and which they have bent to medicinal use would be a kind
of "short cut": for, if a plant has any physiological effect when ingested or
otherwise applied to the human body, it means that it has at least one active
chemical compound. We should know what the active compounds are.
The are two excellent examples. The principal source of curare (Chondrodendron
tomentosum), used to prepare one of the numerous kinds of arrow poisons to kill
animals is perhaps the best example. An extract of this plant is the source of
tubacurarine, a valuable adjunct of our own modern pharmacology as a muscle
relaxant before deep surgery. The other excellent example is rotenone, a complex
ketone from species of Lonchocarpus employed by Indians as a fissh poison but
from which the active principle is now used as a pesticide that can be spread
over hundreds of acres of agricultural lands and which is biodegradable in
several days after doing it's work.
A major contribution that ethnobotany research offers concerns biodiversity.
Many, if not most plants, have local variants or ecotypes. Botanists seeking
diversity find it advantageous to utilise the perspicacity of the Indians in
recognizing slight, often hidden, differences in these variants. Biological
diversity of subspecific categories are often not easy for specialists, even
trained botanists, to discern. Ethnobotanists, taxonomists, geneticists,
agronomists and others would do well to utilise this native familiarity and
knowledge before it is forever lost.
I would like to make two pleas, both of which can directly concern
ethnobotanists. The first plea is to influence and pressure to train more oung
people in the numerous aspects of our discipline. This effort includes
attempting to convince granting agencies - private and governmental -
pharmaceutical companies, international organisations, academies and individuals
to increase grants for educational training and practical field work. The need
for more dedicated ethnobotanists is urgent in view of the rapidity of
extinction of the precious knowledge of plant uses in aboriginal societies in
many parts of the world. The second plea concerns the ethnobotanists' duty to
exert influence to correct wanton commercial or other exploitation of
defenseless indigenous peoples. We know how much natives have suffered in former
periods, in may parts of the globe, and we often blithely believe that those
conditions have disappeared. Nothing could be more erroneous. In a number of
areas in the Amazon, Indians are still being deprived of their land, working
under near-slavery conditions, subjected to introduced diseases, having their
sources of water pisoned by mercury from gold mining, killing the people
themselves and their sources of fish, and a number of other abuses.
It brings to my mind the powerful words of Theodor Koch-Grunberg, the German
anthropologist who spent a number of years amongst the Indians of the northwest
Amazon in Columbia and Brazil early in this century. In 1910, he wrote the
following words :
"Hardly five years have gone by since my last visit ... Whoever comes here
now will no longer find the pleasant place I once knew. The pestilential
stench of a pseudocivilization has fallen on the brown people who have no
rights. Like a swarm of annihilating grasshoppers, the inhuman gang of rubber
barons continues to press forward. The Columbians have already settled in at
the mouth of the Kuduyari and carry off my friends to the death-dealing rubber
forests. Raw brutality, mistreatment and murder are the order of the day. On
the lower Caiary, the Brazilians are no better. The Indian villages are
desolate, their homes have been reduced to ashes and their gardens, deprived
of hands to care for them, are taken over by the jungle.
Thus a vigorous race, a people endowed with a magnificent gift of bright
intellect and gentle disposition will be reduced to naught. Human material
capable of development will be annihilated by the brutality of these modern
barbarians of culture."
We can learn a lesson for today from the words of Koch-Grunberg, written 80
years ago; and, as anthropologists, botanists and ethnobotanists, we should be
willing to come to the defence of our defenseless Amazonian natives of today.
To order or with questions call toll free: 1-800-920-1696
|
