Among the myriad casualties of tropical deforestation, none provides a more compelling narrative than the loss of rainforest healers and their plant pharmacopoeias. Fortified by a diet of documentaries, trade books, and Hollywood productions, the notion that miracle herbal remedies are being sacrificed needlessly has become firmly ensconced in western everyday wisdom. As Gentry queried, """"""""Is it an impossible dream to hope that through medicinal plants the biodiversity of tropical forests might be able to save the world from cancer or AIDS?"""""""" Combined with a legacy of hefty profits and crucial contributions to public health-roughly 30,000 American lives are saved each year by anti-cancer drugs derived from plants-the `rainforest medicine narrative'constitutes a highly persuasive argument for protecting pristine tropical nature and culture. This two-year book project-The Roots of Rainforest Medicine-challenges the environmental cornerstone of this narrative, that is, that medicinal drug plants inhabit virgin tropical forests. Drawing on theory and fieldwork in Borneo and Brazil, it is argued that disturbance habitats- trails, kitchen gardens, and second growth forests-represent the preferred foraging habitats of healers. Rather than the pristine parcels of paradise marketed by environmentalists, healing habitats are reflections largely of anthropogenic engagement with nature, past and present. They are messy areas dominated by weeds, cultigens, shrubs and vines. Our perception of the healing properties of nature, it is suggested, represents a romanticized artifact of history and geography, encouraged by Edenic beliefs regarding the mysteries of the equatorial latitudes, and tempered by galenical theories that only nature can rein in the medical maladies it has spawned. The public health implications of this disturbance pharmacopoeia hypothesis are explored, including the explosion of crowd-type diseases during the agricultural revolution, the consequent quest for medicinal plants, and the gendering of healing roles. The historical transference of medicinal foods, ornamentals, and weeds is investigated through colonial sources, as is how this process enhanced and homogenized the tropical healing floras of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Focusing on the African diaspora, it is argued that habitat disturbance and plant introduction were critical to the diffusion of immigrant healing traditions. Finally, this work documents how and why the legacy of centuries of ethnomedicinal wisdom is dying out with this generation of elders.
| Voeks, Robert; Greene, Charlotte (2018) GOD'S HEALING LEAVES: THE COLONIAL QUEST FOR MEDICINAL PLANTS IN THE TORRID ZONE. Geogr Rev 108:545-565 |
