Once your life is saved by a plant Things are never the same again.
We live in interesting times. Although most of us, in the West, were trained to see the world around us as stable, unchanging year after year, that is an anomaly in the long history of this planet. The Earth goes through long periods of stability, then, rather abruptly, things change. The ecological parameters of climate alter and I am not just talking about “climate change” here. Wind patterns shift, currents in the ocean change, animal migration patterns, rainfall, snowfall, soil composition, insect density, mouse populations, and so on — all of them shift. They shift for reasons that few reductionist scientists understand — or want to. There are patterns inside the living physical world that few of us look for or notice, invisible patterns, and upon them our survival depends.
We are just one part of that incredibly large, complex, deeply interwoven ecological scenario, one organism among trillions, interwoven into an ecological matrix that has lasted billions of years. We aren’t, and never have been, in charge. So, things change, as they are wont to do, and they are in the process of changing drastically. None of us will escape the consequences of it.
One of those consequences happens to be the emergence of new disease organisms, their unique movements through the ecological fabric of the world, and their infection of new species, most especially us.
The medical paradigm that most of us in the West know emerged out of a certain historical context operating against the background of a stable ecosystem. It has been shaped by that unique situation and by the interests, and hubris, of powerful corporations, educational organizations, government bureaucracy, nongovernmental activist groups, and self-interested trade unions (i.e., medical doctors) — all of whom still assume that the planet is a stable background against which they can operate. It has most certainly not been shaped by the needs of those who become ill or a genuine understanding of disease organisms and the ecological matrix in which all life forms on this planet are embedded. For anyone who looks, the fraying fabric of that stability is clear to see, and so also the crumbling of the Western medical paradigm.
The Western medical paradigm is failing. It is failing because it is inherently dysfunctional and most especially because it does not accurately understand the nature of disease, most especially the nature of the organisms it has considered responsible for most of those diseases. In the coming decades, within 10 years if some bacterial and viral researchers are to be believed, we will see not only the emergence of microbial diseases more potent than any our species has heretofore experienced but the failure of most antimicrobial pharmaceuticals that medical science uses — primarily due to resistance problems. This means that the kind of complacency that has been in place for most of us throughout most of our lives will have to change. We will no longer be able to go to a physician to cure microbial disease; we will be forced back on our own resources. This is a scary prospect for the emotionally dependent, which all of us have been, at one time or another, when it comes to illness.
And so, we enter difficult times. But as old systems fail, out of the shards, and out of the human capacity that our species has always possessed, we will, of necessity, create something new, something that really does work better and that does reflect the world in which we live more accurately. Ironically, that will include a return to plant medicines as our primary healing agents for infectious diseases.
Some of my ancestors, powerful political physicians, actively worked to destroy the Western tradition of herbal medicines, feeling that they were the outmoded and tragic remnants of a superstitious past. They felt that science would offer the answers, all the answers, that through science we could defeat all disease organisms on this planet. It is fascinating to me that in the midst of the failure of that utopian and very psychological projection the plants are returning once again to help us in our lives and with our diseases. They have been here 700 million years, some of them, others a mere 170 million. And they have learned a thing or two in that time. We, here a few hundred thousand years (or perhaps a million or two if you take into account earlier expressions of Homo spp.), have a great many things yet to learn, among them humility. It is no accident, I suspect, that the Cherokee peoples have repeated a legend for generations to their children, a legend that tells of the time plants were asked by the animals and insects (whom the humans had harmed by their lack of awareness) to turn on humans and give them diseases (just as the animals and insects were doing). The plants thought it over and said, “No, we will not, for they are our children. And for every disease you create for them, we will make a cure. And when they come to us in their need, we will heal them.”
We face difficult times, but interesting ones as well. A new paradigm of healing is emerging, one partly based in the older healing systems of the human species (including technological medicine) but one that also contains elements never known before. In your own genius resides aspects of that new paradigm. I invite you to bring it, in whatever form it manifests, into the world. We are all going to need each other’s help, you know, and we might as well start now.
In veriditas veritas
Silver City, New Mexico July 2012