Indigenous nature ethics

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I think it wasn't so much that non-human animal behavior provided human animals with clues, but rather that different primate species, one of them being Homo sapiens, came to use similar herbal remedies for similar reasons. The common ancestor that we share with other primate species probably did the same, which is the reason that we inherited a curiosity for plants and their medical (or intoxicating) properties.

But not only primates use herbal remedies. Cats eat several kinds of plants to aid their digestion, add vitamines and enzymes to their diet, and cure stomach problems (sometimes by inducing vomiting). My windowsills are overflowing with spider plants, cyperus, bamboo, and various kinds of grass, so that the bonsai tigers can medicate themselves as needed. My previous cat chewed vast amounts of cyperus in the last years of her life. I assume that it either helped with her arthritis or other old age problems, or it gave her a bit of a high. Anyway, cats figure out by trial and error which plants are beneficial for them, and I believe that our distant ancestors did just the same.

We also figured out by trial and error how to add a maximum amount of antioxidants to our diet by using cooking herbs. And we found kitchen herbs and spices with antibiotic, antifungal, antihelmintic and antiprotozoal properties. Cooking recipes were handed down from generation to generation, and human populations with the most health-beneficial and life-prolonging recipes were naturally selected for.

That's why modern day processed food is a huge problem. Prior to 1930, nobody knew what a twinkie was, and we would probably be better off if food abominations like twinkies had never been invented. Even bacteria refuse to eat that stuff Hence the near-infinite shelf life.

Modern processed food items have only been around for less than a century, but we already see their devastating effect on our health. Not only is fast food and processed food not a balanced diet, it also lacks the antioxidant and enzymatic benefits of real, natural food. Kitchen herbs are expensive and the food industry either uses them sparingly or finds cheaper alternatives. We have become so dependent on convenience food that age-old knowledge like cooking recipes is slowly getting lost, while both the food and the health industry reap record profits.

I would suggest that genetics may be part of the question, but environmental factors such as diet (both the amount and quality of food), lifestyle (sedentary vs. active, at its crudest) and preventative medical practices have just as much, if not more, to do with longevity.

Are you aware most western medications come from plants from tropics. they have a ethnobotanist visit those places in tropics to learn from natives using the plants to heal themselves. Then they bring the plants to west, to take the compound from the plants that help heal person, then make it into readily medication.

Indeed. Nature was doing organic chemistry long before humans. So what? Now humans have learned from nature and in some cases can do even better (if not cheaper). Digitalis, for example, is an extract of the fox-glove planet. Now it can be made more cheaply and in larger quantities when synthesized from non-organic compounds. Or insulin. We use to get insulin from the pancreases of slaughtered steers. Now it is synthesized by bacterium with the human insulin producing gene spliced into its plasmid. It used to be very expensive when it came from cattle. Now it is much better (because it is human insulin that is being produced) and much, much cheaper.

Let us see how good your favorite primitive tribes are with gene splicing.

ruveyn

I apologize for jumping to conclusions. Health is a way of life, so there isn't some pill you can pop to be healthy, and even herbal and other "alternative" treatments that work to enhance the body's own healing and self-cleansing mechanism can only lessen the damage from living an otherwise unhealthy lifestyle. What I think is important is not to put native cultures on a pedestal, because this implies that it is something fixed and distant. Rather, the "indigenous" mentality is something that is alive and dynamic. It's not about living in the past, but embracing the future with innovation that works with nature, rather than trying to fight it.

^^^^yeah, good point. i should have actually given you background before i posted the video. i was being a stinker.

Consider another perspective:

"As long as the establishment commits the basic mistake of corrupting bio-chemistry (life-chemistry), it will continue to administer deceptive and ultimately destructive unnatural com­pounds into the incredibly complex and sensitive biochemistry of the body.

"Even the synthetic, exact duplicates of what is described as the "active" ingredient of natural herbs, moulds, hormones or enzymes are often, in practical application, not as effective as the original and usually are accompanied by dangerous side-effects.

"The reason for this is self-evident. A specific compound isolated from its natural environment in the structure of a plant, for example, may lose some synergistic, buffering or even antagonistic action or balance that is present when ingested in its natural form.

"Although the pharmaceutical companies usually claim that the artificially created product provides a more dependable consistency, better control of the dose and other sometimes questionable claims, it is rarely the real truth. The ability to obtain a patent is always the prime concern."

- Robert E. Willner M.D., Ph.D.

Dr Willner was a medical doctor of 40 years experience. He became a medical heretic after his wife was mutilated and killed by orthodox cancer therapies.

Heheh and now you're being a Miss Worrypants.

Do you relize. Even If an herb or the plant is in it natural state( compound is stll in plants) used by natives. It still quite dangeres, as just as much as synthetic compound,. Even if it says it's weaking. plant compound is really just the plant's poison and this poison is too keep anmails from eating the plant. But people have found the poison helpful healing people but at the same time it can kill if misused. Synthetic just means they just remade it's compound in a lab and made it possibility stronger then plant chould have. becouse they feel they need a higher doeges of this compound.

Of course, many natural compounds are highly poisonous to humans. Furthermore, no plant evolves for the purpose of being eaten (other than fruits as a specialized way to recruit animals to distribute their seeds); indeed, many have developed elaborate chemical and other defenses against insects and herbivores. But consider that Natives were highly skilled managers of their environments, and exerted selection pressures on domesticated and semi-wild food plants. Part of the effect of this is that HUMANS protected the plants, and guided their evolution away from chemical countermeasures and towards other desirable traits (such as maximizing food production or therapeutic benefits). The fact is that some plants are edible and healthy, some are dangerous, others are somewhere in the middle--the same with any chemical species. Also, any substance (even water) can have toxic effects at high enough dosages. Natives had (have) sophisticated empirical knowledge of these distinctions.

I am, similarly, a heretic within my profession. I refuse to condemn homeopathy, and a firm belief in the proposition that sometimes the very best medical advice is, "do nothing."

Of course, that's a significant contributor to the reason that I am not in the business of being a physician anymore, but make my living from being a public servant in which my medical education and experience is required.

I think the belief in the 'noble savage', while relatively benign probably, is largely incorrect.

The Native Americans burned forests like you wouldn't believe. The land was very much cultivated and altered well before Europeans came here.

While some tribes might have lived in harmony with nature, many did not.

On the other hand, in many ways, the Native Americans were far more civilized than the Europeans of the time. Unlike the English, the natives of New England took baths, for example.

CrazyCat- I really appreciate your comments, by the way.


Visagrunt- Way to show some backbone! It takes courage to form your own opinions, instead of letting "authority" do it for you.

With all due respect, DD, you are relying on some very common misconceptions. For starters, many Indian cultures have burned forests in a managed way. This creates a variety of microhabitats (ecotopes) in all stages of succession--plains, meadows, shrublands, young forests, old-growth stands. This maximizes diversity, environmental health, and native subsistence activities. "Slash and burn" agriculture is actually sustainable--it is unfairly blamed for destruction of the Amazon, even though the real culprit is industrial clear-cutting, strip mining, cattle ranching, etc.

Several ecosystems actually rely on fire as part of their cyclical renewal process. Some types of tree seeds don't open unless exposed to fire, and then these seedlings colonize the new ecosystem. Indeed, the most destructive thing has been the United State's policy of fire suppression earlier in the last century, which led to excessive buildup of dead wood that inevitably fueled huge uncontrollable fires.

Please consider the following:

“When preservationists and environmentalists lock up degraded areas in order to save them, they call those areas a ‘wilderness’. At that point the land is no longer valuable economically, because people are excluded except for recreational purposes. We’ve got to find an accommodation with economics and an accommodation with culture.”

“Native land ethics teach not to take more than you need or that the land can provide. But Native ethics as care-giving go even further: if you do not use it, you lose it. Many (although not all) plant communities require disturbance to thrive. So, in the act of using plants, they are enhanced and conserved.

“We’ve got to have a holistic vision of what we’re preserving, and what kind of relationship your children and their children are going to have with that land, especially when we need those resources economically again.

“As a land restorationist I want to stress that every plant in the ecosystem requires use by animals and birds and people. In the traditional model of stewardship, there is no separation between people and nature. There is no separation between spirit and matter.”

Many ecosystems cannot thrive without disturbances, human or otherwise, which serve to regenerate and revitalize their structure and function. In fact, many natural habitats are “cultural landscapes” and most wild species have been modified by human interventions.

“There are hundreds of examples of this. By burning, the plant was renewed, and the shoots came up straight again. Native people pruned the elderberry in such a way that the space between the inner nodes was longer, which improved the harvest. When they harvest pine nuts today, the Shoshone have a special way of breaking off the nuts to safeguard the tree.

“The people harvested bunch grasses and also selected the seed, as they did with acorns, buckeye, redbud, gray willow, hazelnut, elderberry, the basket plants, and others. They planted these selected seeds and moved those species around so that the whole landscape was a function, in part, of Indian harvesting and selection techniques, coupled with moving and planting.

“Every time a fire was set, corms and roots dug, the plumpest seeds collected and sown uneaten, baby beavers counted to calculate the seasonal quota, a stem-tip broken deliberately in the taking of fruits and nuts, the strongest deer let out of encircling fires during communal hunts, a tree pruned to encourage straight shoots for baskets, a fishing weir constructed which let more fish through upriver than were harvested—every time humans used the land, the land was made healthier.

“This was a highly sophisticated, very competent land stewardship that was universal and very indigenous to this hemisphere.” --Dennis Martinez

Thus, the goal of ecological restoration is not a return to the pristine past, but the sustainable management of the present.

I once told an Indian shaman who loved to use a drug called peyote that the first man was a synthetic humanoid robot built from chemicals from the ground. I told him that he was artificially created and that there was nothing natural about him. He broke down and started to cry when he realized that he was an android.

Lol. I can't blame him, I had the same reaction when I realised I was an android.