Plants in Human Affairs, some musings

The second week of the course was also an intense week. We were learning heaps of stuff and had to start writing papers and plant profiles and plant encounters. In addition, everyone was more open in discussing plant metaphysics. Concepts like the plant spirit, intuitive healing, symbolic magic were discussed and investigated from a cross cultural perspective. In many regions of the world today people still get healing from traditional medicines. 80% of the worlds population still relies on local plants and local healers for medicine. Why? 1. They always have 2. The global south has no access to most medicines because they can't afford them. When local practitioner are asked about how they knew about using a particular plant for a particular illness they explain that the plants told them. This has always been written off by the rationalist, materialist anthropologists looking 50yrs ago into indigenous plant uses.

However, the math seems to support the universal people's theory rather than the anthropologists. Take an area like madagascar. Being separated from africa for a long time before being reached by people ~1500yrs ago, Madagascar has developed a very unique flora of plants. In the time from when people arrived to now they have developed a total floristic healing system. The number of plants they have discovered for different illnesses is too large to have been arrived at by a population of this size in this number of generations. It seems like something else is happening beyond trial and error.

Now plants are often viewed as somehow lesser than us animals and particularly of us humans due to a paternalistic god consciousness on the part of naturalists. People were "of course" Divine and the pinnacle of evolution and god's children and so naturally animals were more like us and therefore higher evolved and plants unable to move and therefore unable to think or be conscious or have feeling or emotions or any of the other attributes we revel in when thinking about how great we are. Interestingly, post-"enlightenment" (god I hate that term) men didn't think that animals were conscious or had feeling or emotions but that notion began to change in the later 1870 (although most people on the earth could have told you then and now that they do).

Plants are not like us. They are "alien". They have developed different mechanisms and systems for existing in the environment. They are also Primary. Plants have created the environment that we have today from the climate to the soils to the fossil fuels. Firstly they "eat" light. Utilising vibrational energy from the sun to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and fix the hydrogen with CO2 from the atmosphere as sugar. This is an amazing feat that has allowed the sun's energy to be stored on earth over time and provides the basis for all ecological systems on the planet. Secondly, they are fixed to the earth. Grounded to the soil a plant stays in the same place for its existance rather than moving far and wide like most animals. However, they are not grounded in the z axis. Plants display supercomplicated and intricate growth both into the earth and into the air. They provide a nexus between heaven and earth. They "move" hugley and elaboratly just in ways we don't see and in time-scales that evade our eyes. Further, some plants "walk" to areas of better light using runners to cross to the sunny spot and dying off in the shade. Thirdly, plants use chemicals as language to talk with other beings in their environments. Chemicals for pigments to signal when a fruit is ripe, chemicals to tell a catapiller not to eat it. Flavinoid chemicals to attract beneficially bacteria to the roots and volitile organic carbon compounds to signal to other plants. Many of the chemicals that plants produce mimic (by being nearly) identical to the compounds that modulate consiousness in humans, binding to the 5HT-2 seretonin receptor. Interestingly, one of the technologies developed by the shaman of the amazon is the ayuascha brew which combines two distinct plants that are both inactive on their own but produce a powerful visionary brew when combined and boiled. When asked how they discovered this combination of two plants that grow in different areas out of the thousands upon thousands to choose from in the most biodiverse region in the world? the answer is the plant told them.

Now as I said before plants were always looked down on by biologists. They were always thought of as simpler and less evolved. But that view is now changing too. While plants do not possess a nervous system they have an as complex system of cellular transport and comparmentalisation but one that allows systemic plant response and localised plant response depending on the situation. Regardless of mechanism, this provides identical function to that provided by the human one except it allows the plants to function better as a whole. When one leaf is eatten by a catipiler there is specific cellular response at the bite site but the whole plant gets the signal that it has been bitten and starts to make chemicals that will prevent other catipillers eatting the other leaves. Same with the breathing system. Rather than a centralised lung area, all leaves breath and feed the gas and chemicals they make into the vein system to transport around the plants. Rather than lesser, these are just unique.

Now interestingly this change is now coming to plant spirit. Evidence is mounting that plants can perform the equivelent of complex thought. Further, rather than a centralised brain structure, small structures for specific thoughts are located through out the plant. Meaning that the plant is modular and has more plasticity (it can lose some of its tissue and keep growing, rather than dieing if our head is cut off). For example, plant roots possess tiny areas called the "Statolith" which is a starchy "brain" which senses the earth and then decides where to grow the new root tissue. New evidence suggests that plants may plan this growth up to a year in advance. These areas can sense gravity, nutrients, acidity and soil density and develop growth patterns with the informtion. What I'm trying to get at is that plants are intellegent beings. There is a school of thought that attempts to relegate all of these plant processes to mechanistics and passive addaptions to the environment but much like mechanistic explainations of consiousness or love or growth it kind of misses the point.

Anyway, even if you wont let go of the notion of plants not being sentient just yet we can atleast agree that plants are lots more than most thought. Through this I think it is highly likely that plants and people developed ways of determining how to use different plants for medicines. whether plants are active players in this chemical communication or not is a moot point. It seems that using some intuitive thinking and listening to the plant when taking it for medicine can help healers determine what ailments a plant can be used for. One may snicker but this is how the most common cure for childhook lukemia was discovered. However, given how the system works the traditional healers were never compensated for their knowledge or expertease and the pharmacuticle companies made billions.

Plants are complex communicators with every organism that they form symbiosis with and humans are no exception. People have an inate intuitive thinking they can develop and use to work with plants for healing and I think plants have an active role too.

Plants produce everything we use and consume and deserve more respect than they get. Before our eyes this knowledge about how to heal in ones environment is rapidly being lost along with the rainforest and its plants.