IMAGINE A BALL OF TWINE THE EXACT SIZE AND SHAPE OF EARTH. Better yet, telephone line. Take the end point of the line and weave it back into the beginning so that there is no beginning and no end. Every place the line crosses itself (you could think of them as synaptic junctions) messages cross over; communication travels quickly throughout the entire line itself as well. Academic disciplines are areas where a segment of line is cut out of the ball and studied. They explore its tensile strength, its molecular structure, its chemical composition, the colors and types of wires that run through it. Any communications that were flowing or might flow through it cannot be studied once it is cut out of the whole—only a tiny part of the picture can be seen. Misunderstandings easily arise, especially if the communications that flow through the line are the most important thing.

Turn the ball of telephone line back into Earth. Each plant, plant neighborhood, plant community, ecosystem, and biome has messages flowing through it constantly—trillions and trillions of messages at the same time. The messages are complex communications between all the different parts of the ecosystem. There is no beginning and no end, no cause and no effect. The three-and-a-half-billion-year-old feedback loops of Earth are so closely intertwined that there is always another cause underneath whatever cause you begin with. Impacts at any one point affect every other point in the system. Life is so closely coupled with the physical and chemical environment of which it is a part that the two cannot legitimately be viewed in isolation from one another. As James Lovelock says: “Together they constitute a single evolutionary process, which is self-regulating.” 1

This recognition of Earth’s self-regulating nature led Lovelock to understand Earth as a living being, not a ball of resources inhabited by human beings hurtling through space. The novelist William Golding, a neighbor, suggested a name to him: Gaia, an ancient Greek name for the living, intelligent, and sacred Earth. And Gaia, at four billion years of age, is very old compared to us. Even the plants are ancient compared to our tiny life-spans, having begun to appear some 700 million years ago.

There is a holly in Tasmania that is 43,000 years old, a creosote bush in the American Southwest that is 18,000, a box-huckleberry up north over 13,000, and a grass colony covering half a square mile 1,000 years old. The oldest Bristlecone pine is nearly 5,000 years of age, the oldest redwood was 3,200 years old when it was cut, there is a bald cypress in Oaxaca, Mexico, that is over 2,000, and some lichens grow so slowly that they only add millimeters to their size every century. The Indian banyan tree (a type of fig) can store 25,000 gallons of water within it and live more than a thousand years. Thousands of pillarlike prop roots rise up to support massive limbs; a single tree can cover acres. Banyans can grow so large that Alexander the Great could camp with 7,000 of his men under a single tree. There is a thousand-year-old mycelial network that covers 1,500 acres in Washington State and another one 1,500 years old in Michigan covering 38 acres. There is an aspen grove whose root system has spread over 106 acres, has lived for 10,000 years, and weighs 6,500 tons. The innocuous herb that is plowed under a housing development can be 200 years old, the osha root picked for medicine 300, the shrub rooted out for a parking lot 800. Judging the actions of these plants, their functions in ecosystems, and their chemistries through the timescale of a human life often misses what can only happen in decades, centuries, or millennia.

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university.

A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.

Professors serve science and science serves progress. It serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands. One by one the parts are thus stricken from the song of songs. If the professor is able to classify each instrument before it is broken, he is well content.

—Aldo Leopold, A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC


It is our temporal limitations that prevent most of us from noticing what plants do over such scales of time. For instance, from recognizing that plants and plant communities possess tremendous powers of movement, that their movement shows intention, that they can cross thousands of miles when motivated, and that their movement patterns are not random but are determined by large-scale feedback loops millions of years old. On short, localized scales: Climbing plants that need support will grow toward a trellis, and if the trellis is shifted the plants will change direction. On long scales this can be even more pronounced, though it is harder to see. As ecologist K.D. Bennett ob-serves: “On long timescales, herbs may be much more mobile than they would appear from observation of processes occurring within the timescales of research grants (or careers), and this is because other processes become involved and are, in fact, the processes that determine [their] overall distribution.”2

Plants circulate throughout ecosystems, between ecosystems, and across and between continents; the longest seed dispersal distance known (without human help) is 15,000 miles. Plants, in fact, move themselves throughout landmasses and across distances that mere seed dispersal dynamics and mathematics cannot explain. The places they move to and the ways that they arrange themselves in ecosystems are not accidental and are not random.3 Plants arrange themselves in ecosystems and throughout continents to fulfill specific functions; their spatial arrangements exist for a reason.


At the beginning of the twentieth century a gifted Viennese biologist with the Gallic name of Raoul Francé put forward the idea, shocking to contemporary natural philosophers, that plants move their bodies as freely, easily, and gracefully as the most skilled animal or human, and that the only reason we don’t appreciate the fact is that plants do so at a much slower pace than humans.

—Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS

Conventional Western epistemologies limit conception of what plants can do, and short human attention spans interfere with being able to see plant functions that exist over extremely long cycles and large systems. Most ecological field studies contribute to the problem: They are generally less than three years in length and 95 percent of them occur on plots less than 2.5 acres in size—half of them occur in a 9-square-foot area or smaller. Few of the researchers have a personal, long-term relationship with the area they are studying.4 Such difficulties of scale and time are compounded in a number of ways. One is the language we use to name plants, the Latin binomials by which they are classified.

The system of naming plants created by Linnaeus gives plants a genus and species name. For instance, osha is named Ligusticum porterii—the large grouping or genus is Ligusticum and the kind of Ligusticum, or species, is porterii. Ligusticum means “of Liguria,” referring to a geographical area of Italy; porterii means “of Porter” or “Porter’s,” referring to a Philadelphia botanist, Thomas Conrad Porter (1822–1901), who roamed over the country naming plants after himself. So this uniquely North American plant interwoven into local ecosystems for hundreds of thousands of years now has as its name “Porter’s Liguria, Italy.” And except for a number of European plants (such as Achillea millefolium) whose names embody functions based on long use and relationship (and which Linnaeus decided to keep), all plants on Earth now possess these kinds of invented labels that, when used, indicate nothing about their nature. Conventional scientific plant naming creates and sustains the illusion that plants such as osha exist in isolation from the animals, plants, insects, people, and landscapes among whom and in which they grow, that no connections exist between them and anything else. Like all language, botanical language shapes how the world is perceived and the unexamined assumptions that are embedded within it are reinforced the more it is used. Gregory Bateson expressed concern about how the hidden perspectives in such languaging affects children (and the adults they become) when they are taught it.

There is a parallel confusion in the teaching of language that has never been straightened out. Professional linguists nowadays may know what’s what, but children in school are still taught nonsense. They are told that a “noun” is the “name of a person, place or thing,” that a “verb” is “an action word,” and so on. That is, they are taught at a tender age that the way to define something is by what it supposedly is in itself, not by its relation to other things.5


In a like manner Buckminster Fuller took issue with phrases such as “sunset” and “sunrise” noting that the sun neither rises nor sets and that such usage creates a kind of insanity in people by divorcing them from the world in which they live and inculcating a “picture” of the workings of the Universe that is not accurate.

Ecologists have begun to take issue with Linnaeus’s system of naming for the same kinds of reasons, insisting that for ecology to succeed “classical taxonomy will have to give way to functional classifications”6 that essentially would group “together those plants with similar ecological properties, rather than those plants which necessarily look similar, or have similar evolutionary origins.”7 To understand plants and Earth’s ecosystems they have to be viewed as living systems, not isolated collections of unrelated mechanical bits—an illusion embedded within the language of Western taxonomy. Naming plants instead by their function, by their relationship to their habitat, connects people to that habitat, to the communications and purposes that run through ecosystems. Such naming carries within itself the implicit knowledge of what will happen if a plant is driven to extinction or declines in population. Many older folk taxonomies—often more complex than Western systems—have long recognized that plants play unique and important functions in ecosystems. Their names for them (as with such plants as Elders and Ambrosias) often reflect plant/ecosystem connections and interdepencies and describe more accurately their true nature and functions.

Intellectual activities have their verbalisms, their confusions and misdirections and these may also accumulate into what are practically diseases. Every science, of course, needs its technical terminology but all have suffered from the verbosity of nomenclatures and, notoriously, botany most of all.

—Sir Patrick Geddes (in Tompkins and Bird, THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS)


Plants mean nothing in isolation; they are a life-form rooted in and identified by their community, by their relationships to and interactions with all other life on Earth. Individual plants form local neighborhoods and neighborhoods associate together in communities and those group together as ecosystems that interconnect together to form biomes which together form the larger system called Gaia. Ecosystem function determines the plants that grow within them and the nature of plant associations.

Over decades, centuries, and millennia forests move from here to there, wetlands shift location, meadows spread, new species increase in dominance, old ones decrease; everything is in flux. The plants work with much longer timescales than we do and the cues for emergence of a specific plant species in an ecosystem might only happen once in decades or centuries.


Wherever [Linnaeus] went the laughing brook died, the glory of the flowers withered, the grace and joy of the meadows was transformed into withered corpses whose crushed and discolored bodies were described in a thousand minute Latin terms. The blooming fields and the storied woods disappeared during a botanical tour into a dusty herbarium, into a dreary catalogue of Greek and Latin labels. It became the hour for the practice of tiresome dialectic, filled with discussions about the number of stamens, the shape of leaves, all of which we learnt only to forget. When the work was over we stood disenchanted and estranged from nature.

—Raoul Francé (in Tompkins and Bird, THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS)

IRONWOOD AND THE SONORAN DESERT COMMUNITY

No one living has ever seen an ironwood grow from seed in the wild; the trees can be more than one thousand years old. They often grow in the harshest areas of the southwest Sonoran Desert of North America. The events that allow their seeds to germinate and survive occur decades or centuries apart. But once an ironwood seed germinates, it begins to alter the desert soils around it. It begins creating life and community.

The seedling sends out chemical cues. Rhizobium bacteria respond and begin to form nodules on the roots, making nitrogen available for the unique chemistries to come. Fungal symbionts begin to appear and spread a mycelial network just under the soil. A rich community of organisms—one that does not normally exist in the hot and dry desert soils of the Sonoran—begins to settle into the ironwood soil. The process is slow, though; the desert teaches nothing if not patience. In a good year the germinating seed can grow a foot. Not many years are that good.

When the seedling emerges from the soil, it immediately sends out spreading branches covered with leaves. Unlike other trees in the desert, ironwood does not lose its leaves in the hottest parts of the summer; the shade it produces lasts year round. The cooling its canopy creates is constant.8

While the canopy forms overhead, the new root system shoots rapidly down through the desert soil, tapping in to the water that runs deep below. Over time, ironwood roots can probe to depths of 165 feet below the desert surface. And like all trees, ironwood brings up significant amounts of water each day and breathes it out through its stomata. At night, when its stomata are closed, the tree releases and stores the hydraulically lifted water and deep-soil minerals just under the surface of the ground.

Smaller plants begin to appear. Continually shaded from the desert sun, cooled by transpired water, and watered daily by hydraulic lift, some 65 species of plants will come to grow under ironwood. Catclaw, elephant tree, ocotillo, creosote bush, wolfberry, desert lavender, ratany, ambrosia, cassia, orange-velvet mallow, saguaro, senita cactus, prickly-pear, climbing milkweed, passionflower, evening primrose, buffel grass, spiny aster, tansy mustard, desert bedstraw, plantain, silver nightshade, and more.9 Thirty-one of these will grow nowhere else. This emerging plant community connects to the mycelial network and plant chemistries flow throughout the network. Wherever plant roots touch, they can share their chemistries directly.10 All the plants exude volatile aromatics. Some aromatics call pollinators, others fall in a continual rain over the plant community and to the Earth below. The soil takes them up; the companion plants under ironwood breathe them in. The smaller community plants cover the ground, keeping the soil moisture high. They all release their own unique mixtures of phytochemicals that blend together with ironwood’s in maintaining the microclimate and soil community under the tree.

By modifying the habitat under its branches, ironwood plays a leading part in creating the ecosystem that it occupies, greatly enhancing the diversity of the Sonoran Desert. . . . The unique environment that ironwood trees create under their canopies is found nowhere else.

—Tewksbury and Petrovich, “Ironwood as Habitat Modifier Species”

As leaves, bark, and limbs age, they fall to the Earth, forming a layer of decaying matter. Over the centuries, the tree and its community build up a mound of detritus around its trunk and under its canopy, in effect becoming an island or archipelago of life and richness amid the desert—a facilitative nucleus of life. Scores of insects, birds, and animals come to the archipelago. They pollinate, spread seeds, build nests from archipelago plants, dig burrows, mate, aerate the soil, use plant chemistries in their growth, as their medicine, as their food, and contribute, over the years, tons of their own “night soil.” Ironwood increases the abundance of life by 88 percent and species richness by 64 percent in any area in which it grows. Plants such as the endangered saguaro cactus can rarely germinate outside the kind of zone that trees such as ironwood create. Ironwood, and similar trees, literally create the ecosystems in which they and other beings live.

The ironwood is powerful, long-lived, and patient. It exerts strong and long-lasting stability in the desert ecosystem. As ecologists Burquez and Quintana observe: “Chance events like sustained droughts or wet periods are not likely to alter the permanence of the community given the homeostatic effects of long-lived ironwood trees.”11 It is not unusual, however, for such stable communities to take a century or longer to form. Many of the plants that grow under ironwood can only do so after other plants have already been there awhile, added their unique chemistries, and altered soil community structure. Thus, the older the tree, the more complex and stable the plant community in which it grows.

This kind of plant relationship or community dynamic is not unusual. It is just easier to see in the Sonoran Desert because of the isolated nature of ironwood archipelagos. The Sonoran Desert has at least three distinct types of archipelagos forming around three different dominant or keystone tree species: ironwood, mesquite, and paloverde.

ELDER, NURSE, AND COMMUNITY PLANTS

Dominant or keystone species such as ironwood are usually large, and quite often they are trees; always they contain more mass than other plants in an ecosystem. Fewer of them (in terms of species) live in the local ecosystem and often scores of subordinate or community plants are associated with them. In many ecosystems the density of plant species growing between the archipelagos is much greater than in the Sonoran and they blend imperceptibly into one another. A hundred acres of meadow might have three primary bush types scattered irregularly within it and fifty to one hundred subordinate plant species in different densities associated with each of them. Even in a forest each tree has scores of plants associated with it. They each form archipelagos; the tree archipelagos in forests are just very close together. Tightly coupled feedback loops exist between all archipelagos in an ecosystem. The intercommunication between them shapes and maintains their ecosystem and its responses to stressors. How ecosystems respond to environmental stressors changes completely with which keystone species are at the centers of their archipelagos.12

The formation of archipelagos—the movement of keystone species in ecosystems such as the Sonoran—often takes place over a 400- to 500-year period and is initiated by episodic ecosystem events that are unknown and are not predictable. They are initiated by environmental feedback cues whose nature is unrecognized and unsuspected by the majority of researchers.13 Quite often, before it can establish itself in a new location, a keystone species must have a plant that goes first and prepares the way. These initial species, usually selected from among the community of plants that grow with keystone plants, are the outriders, the plants whose emergence signals the movement of plant species in mass, and the slow shifting of ecosystems in response to Gaian feedback loops. These plants move first and essentially determine what keystone plants will grow where and when. In a way, they act as “filters” through which keystone species are sifted.14 This is often done by plants such as the Artemisias and Ambrosias who, when the soil is ready, send out chemical cues telling the keystone species where and when to send its seed. Though wind, ants, and burrowing animals may sometimes disperse keystone seeds to the new locations, researchers have found that mere wind and animal dispersal patterns cannot explain how the seeds move. The distances are too far, the dispersal patterns too unusual.15 But by whatever means, the seeds answer the chemical call sent by the nurse plants.

In the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada, sagebrush, an Artemisia, establishes the community that piñon pine needs. It nurses the piñon until it is old enough to grow on its own: changing soil chemistry, providing unique chemistries for the emerging seedling, protecting it from the vagaries of life.16 And in the Mojave Desert approximately three-quarters of young creosote bushes are found under Ambrosia shrubs.

Paloverde trees also usually germinate in areas first inhabited by Ambrosia species. The Ambrosia acts as a nurse plant, raising the palo-verde seedling until it is large enough to live on its own. And though the endangered saguaro cactus will establish itself under ironwood it more often prefers paloverde. Thus the saguaro depends on the Ambrosia that comes, unseen by modern eyes, sometimes centuries before.

Ambrosia species received their names from the ancient Greeks and Linnaeus, out of convenience, kept them. It still embodies ancient understandings and functional relationships. The name literally means “not mortal” and is named after the food of the gods that, when eaten, confers immortality. Ambrosia species are givers of life. (Commonly, Americans call them “ragweeds.”)


Reality is a seamless whole where virtually everything affects virtually everything else. There are, however, various concentrations of interaction or causation, and we have somewhat artificially divided these up into “disciplines.” There is a certain amount of overlapping at the edges of many closely related disciplines, and this is good. There is a certain amount of bridging that is done even between more distantly related disciplines, and this is also good. But there is much about the structure of reality that is missed by this artificial classification. There are important connections between information fitted into separate disciplines that are being badly overlooked. These weaken our man-made structure. And there are important gaps in the seams between adjacent disciplines. We have a leaky structure where information that we need to encompass is leaking out. . . . And these inherent weaknesses in our way of dealing with reality by dividing it into self-contained, graspable chunks, become magnified by social interactions within each discipline that tend to draw it into itself and thereby widen the gaps: the tendency of disciplines to develop a jargon and often a dogma and to some extent a clique, all of which make it more difficult to bridge the gaps. This is further magnified by a tendency for research not to push out the borders of the discipline at the edges, nor to establish connections to other disciplines, but rather to superspecialize and plunge ever deeper into the minutiae of the subject until it is impossible to be an expert except by spending all one’s effort in the field, with little or nothing left over to become even cursorily familiar with other disciplines.

—Louis Pascal, “What Happens When Science Goes Bad”

Keystone species, once established, call to them not only soil bacteria and mycelia but the plants they have formed close interdependencies with over millennia. As the plants arrive, the keystone’s chemistries literally inform and shape their community structure and behaviors.17 This capacity of keystone species to “teach” their plant communities how to act was widely recognized in indigenous and folk taxonomies.

Elder trees (Sambucus spp.), for example, are keystone species in many ecosystems. Among many indigenous and folk peoples it is said that the Elder tree “teaches the plants what to do and how to grow,” and that without its presence the local plant community will become confused. This function is contained within its common name, Elder, which comes from the Old English eldo meaning “old age.” The connotation of the word is that of wisdom and the ability to teach and help the young of the community, to shape their knowledge, behaviors, and relationships to other members of the community. (“Elder” is perhaps a better name for this ecosystem function of plants than either “keystone” or “dominant.”) Other indigenous peoples, recognizing the nature and function of keystone species, have said that “the trees are the teachers of the law.” Keystone species regulate the broad community dynamics of a plant community (its character), while the smaller community species regulate the flow of life to and through it: pollinators, “critical pests, pathogens, herbivores or mutualists,” etc.18

BIODIVERSITY AND THE HEALTH OF ECOSYSTEMS

The kind of plant succession, plant nursing, and establishment of dominants and subordinants found in the Sonoran Desert occurs in all land ecosystems: desert, wetland, prairie, subalpine, boreal forests, arctic alpine, and tropical.19 The same kinds of increases in species richness and abundance occur in all of them as well.20 And the ways that these plant communities assemble always produces the most vitality, abundance, diversity, and richest plant growth possible in that ecosystem.

Though community plants (researchers usually call them subordinate or filter plants) grow smaller when in relationship with their keystone species than when alone, and the keystone species larger, together they create more biomass than if grown separately, even if supplied with all the water and nutrients they need.21 As well, they draw down more CO2 than if they are grown separately, create more extensive root systems, have more dense canopies (thus are more efficient at photosynthesis as a group), more efficiently retain water in themselves and in the soil, and create more complex chemistries. The soil communities underneath them are always more diverse and healthier.22 Basically, the more diverse an archipelago the more vital and healthy it becomes. The outcomes produced by such diversity are not merely additive, they are exponential: A plant community is far more than the sum of its parts.23 The addition of every new species that joins an ironwood community contributes to community dynamics in ways that cannot be predicted from knowledge of the individual species alone. Each is synergistic with all the other species already present in the neighborhood.

The industrialized eye, accustomed to suburban lawns and controlled gardens, generally sees such diverse, visually complex plant communities as chaotic. There appears to be no order or control, only wild, random growth. Regardless, plant communities have spent some 500 million years learning their craft; there is a reason for how they are structured. The more visually complex a plant community, the better it can respond to ecosystem demands and stressors. All ecosystems are dynamic over time in their drive to preserve this kind of “wildness.” A suburban landscape, not continually forced into an orderly shape, will “relax.” It will begin rearranging, reassembling, itself immediately; it will begin to look rather unkempt.

Disease outbreaks and heavily destructive insect infestations are extremely rare in these kinds of lumpy, visually complex, “unkempt” ecosystems. The complex chemistries present in nonmonocropped natural systems automatically limit the emergence of disease and insect epidemics and resistance. In healthy plant communities susceptible plants are always located near to those with different chemistries—different medicines. Out-of-control infestations are always the result of reducing what appears to be wild chaos in natural ecosystems, of engaging in farming of monocultures, genetic uniformity in plant communities, heavy pesticide or pharmaceutical use, or environmental stress from things such as suburban building or logging. In healthy systems, plant locations shift, the community reassembles in new ways around its keystone species on a regular basis, and the plants never act to kill off all of a “pest” species, they only moderate its population levels.24

Many Native American cultures have understood that plants are communal beings, that they grow better together than apart, and that “unkempt” agricultural landscapes produce better results in the long run. Corn, beans, and squash—often called the three sisters—have been grown together in Native communities in the Americas for millennia. Food production over time is always higher than when crops are grown separately and diseases and infestations are less frequent. Indigenous peoples have long known that the plants support each other, keep each other healthy, and that the wild plants around the periphery of the fields help keep them vital.25 Among the three sisters, corn is the dominant plant, and it is said in many indigenous cultures that “the Law is in the Corn.” Cultures that have had long relationship with corn have also said that corn is the source of the Original Instructions about the nature and balance of community—for people and plants.26 Ecosystems, to be healthy, must be composed of many plants that are working together in such close-knit communal relationships. There is, in such systems, always a diversity of plant species and a diversity of functional types.

The larger the number of plants with diverse chemistries that occupy the largest number of ecosystem functional categories, the more vital and healthier the ecosystem. This is because no year is ever the same as a previous year; environmental conditions are always different. Local habitats are always shifting in response to changing conditions. A plant producing major contributions to habitat need one year may not play the same role when environmental factors change. This is why a large range of plants in all local communities is necessary: to give the system maximum response ability.27 Ironwood archipelagos exert such broad ecosystem stability because, in maturity, they contain a highly integrated plant community that contains maximum response capacity. Like bacteria, they have to have the ability to respond to environmental stressors that they and the Earth have no way to predict. Diversity, unkemptness, and community complexity are all aspects of this capacity to respond. So are exceptionally rare plants, which all mature plant communities, including ironwood, contain.28

These rare plant types exist in small quantities in ecosystems and often possess unique or highly potent chemistries. Such uncommon plants represent gene pools of chemistries needed only in tiny quantities or at rare intervals. They represent rare plant pharmaceuticals for conditions that may only be encountered once a century or for conditions where only unusual chemistries are necessary.29 Similar plants, even though closely related, may not be functional equivalents. They are not, as many researchers insist, merely “extra” or redundant parts. Earth sees needs in decades or centuries; Gaia takes a long view.

The closely related Mesquite- or Grama-grasses Bouteloua gracilis and Bouteloua eriopoda are a case in point. B. gracilis can live a long life, at least four hundred years, though no one knows exactly how long. It grows throughout the Great Plains from Canada to Mexico and as far west as western Texas. B. eriopoda rarely lives forty years, and though its range overlaps that of its cousin it grows further west, extending into the southwestern deserts of Mexico, western Texas, New Mexico, and the edges of the Sonoran Desert. Though both grasses grow similarly, in separated “clumps” with spaces between, the two plants affect nitrogen content of the soil, among other things, in significantly different ways. The Plains grass, B. gracilis, because of its long life span, concentrates large quantities of nitrogen from the interplant zones beneath it. It covers only 35 percent of the steppe but uses most of the nitrogen from the remaining 65 percent of the soil. Deserts, however, have very little nitrogen available in their soils.30 In fact, the semiarid grassland steppe that B. gracilis occupies has three times as much nitrogen as the desert grassland habitat occupied by B. eriopoda. Both species of Grama-grass concentrate nitrogen but the rate is so slow that it takes fifty years to seriously accumulate and deplete interplant zones, a period that exceeds B. eriopoda’s life span. If the longer-lived species grew in abundance in desert ecoregions nitrogen would be depleted from the soils and its presence would seriously impair the growth of the other plants in the ecosystem. People who argue that many plant species are redundant (and therefore, not necessary to protect) because there are other, closely related species that can fulfill the same functions are missing the point. Closely related species always differ along some axis of variation and there is a reason for this: Environmental needs are different. Otherwise Earth would have simply developed one plant not two.31

The drive to maintain complex plant types in order to respond to ecosystem demands extends, as with bacteria, to gene structure. Under pressure plant genotypes can go fluid and reassemble in order to enhance flexibility.

Received wisdom is sometimes just closeted ignorance . . . ignorance of the wide repertoire of responses found in plants sometimes elicits derision of the term “plant behavior” from the incognoscenti.

—Jonathan Silvertown, “Plant Phenotypic Plasticity and Non-cognitive Behaviour”

GENETIC FLUIDITY

Plants, like bacteria, can, under environmental pressure, rearrange their genetic structure (the genotype) and produce new physical expressions in themselves or succeeding generations (the phenotype). The Nobel Laureate and corn researcher, Barbara McClintock, was the first to show (though Goethe had understood it much earlier) that plants could reorder their genetic structure under stress. She found that stressed organisms engage in genetic changes not predictable from their genetic makeup. Plants rearrange their genetic makeup, in part, through the use of transposons or “jumping genes.” McClintock’s biographer, Evelyn Fox Keller, comments: “Where do the instructions [for gene rearrangement] come from? McClintock’s answer—that they come from the entire cell, the organism, perhaps even from the environment—is profoundly disturbing to orthodox genetics.”32

The complex assemblage of plants in ecosystems represents a huge range of genotypes, all kept in a diversity bank. Not only can plant species create and release a wide range of chemistries, or arrange themselves in a multitude of combinations (or neighborhoods) to produce different synergistic chemical combinations, they can also allow their genetic structure to go fluid in response to environmental stressors, producing highly variant offspring in short periods of time. (To create even more variability, viruses can insert unrelated DNA sequences into plant genetic structure, giving the plant a wider range of responses, or two or more organisms can come together, engaging in symbiogenesis, to create entirely different life-forms, or both.)

The variation of plant forms, whose unique course I had long been following, now awakened in me more and more the idea that the plant forms round us are not predetermined, but are happily mobile and flexible, enabling them to adapt to the many conditions throughout the world, which influence them, and to be formed and re-formed with them.

—Goethe (in Tompkins and Bird, THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS)


Environments can be unpredictable; Earth has no way of knowing what events it will encounter in its long life. By designing in genetic fluidity, all organisms (and the system that is made up of their complex feedback loops) possess maximum responsiveness.33 The information that plants take in from their environment is used in a tightly coupled feedback loop to adjust genetic structure and phenotype (and the resulting chemistries) with each generation. Plants that are transplanted into stressed environments (or offspring that germinate there) can shift their structure to produce new plant characteristics that can respond to the exact nature of environmental demands. Like human immunity to certain diseases, these characteristics can be passed on to offspring and represent the inheritance of acquired characteristics (something insisted to be impossible by Neo-Darwinians). Plants can change branching patterns, nutrient uptake processes, photosynthesis capacity, and chemistry.34 They can also adjust themselves to the capacities of the animals and insects that live within their community. They literally change themselves, in very short periods of time, to better maintain relationship with specific species.35 They can also form coevolutionary bonds over short periods of time in response to informational looping in order to adjust ecosystem functioning.36 Plants can also limit many of their behavioral responses, including genetic fluidity, to make sure that disease or insect resistance to protective chemistries does not arise.

For example, during spruce budworm infestations, spruce forests always contain trees that do not produce alterations in terpene chemistry. Researchers examining the trees have found that they can increase their production, they simply do not. In other words, these are not “weaker” trees that are simply succumbing to a Darwinian survival-ofthe-fittest dynamic, but strongly healthy trees that are intentionally not increasing chemistry production. The long-range benefits of this are clear: By not raising antifeedant actions in all the trees, the forest makes sure that resistance does not develop in spruce budworms as it does in crop insects exposed to pesticides.37 Plant communities literally set aside plants for the insects to consume so as to not force genetic rearrangement and the development of resistance.

Insects such as the spruce budworm are essential parts of plant communities, they are not simply meaningless pests that arose in a vacuum and are trying to wipe out all the spruce trees in a voracious desire to breed and feed. Plants maintain neighborhood, community, and ecosystem health, including insect and animal population densities and health, through their biofeedback mechanisms. This includes providing plant chemistries at the microlevel, for individual members of their communities. Animals and insects are not redundant, they are interwoven into plant communities as deeply as plants are in archipelagos. Plants communicate with and call bacteria to themselves, they call mycelia, they call other plants, and they also call insects and animals, joining them to the community they are creating.


Any given environment usually contains several plants with widely different attributes, showing that there is seldom a unique solution to a given set of environmental challenges. This is consistent with the finding that complex, non-linear, highly linked systems (such as plant metabo-lism) have multiple stable states.

—R. J. Scholes, et al., “Plant Functional Types in African Savanna Grasslands”

In the absence of a complete understanding, this apparent species redundancy is best regarded as a system adaptation against a highly variable and unpredictable environment. In many cases it is likely to be an essential component of, and in fact may well be used as a measure of, the system’s ability to continue functioning when stressed or disturbed.

—B. H. Walker, “Functional Types in Non-equilibrium Ecosystems”

Saguaro and senita cacti, for example, often grow within the ironwood archipelago. Both have a unique and specific relationship with their own species of Drosophila fly. Both cacti create and release, as a volatile, tiny amounts of a steroidal compound called schottenol that attracts Drosophila flies. The flies use the steroid to make their molting hormone, without which they cannot grow to maturity and reproduce; the cactus that calls them is the only source of this substance. To make sure that only one species of fly comes to them each cactus also releases another, different compound simultaneously. Senita exudes minute amounts of an alkaloid, lophocereine, that is repellant to all species of Drosophila except for its coevolutionary partner, D. pachea. Saguaro, on the other hand, releases the alkaloid carnegeine, which repels all Drosophila except D. nigrospiracula. Carnegeine and lophocereine possess only minute differences in their chemical structure, yet they are so specific that for every 6,803 larvae on a saguaro cactus only one is not D. nigrospiracula. In return for their molting chemistries the flies and fly larvae eat decaying parts of the cacti, keeping them healthy by removing decomposing matter. Because both cacti also emit strong secondary chemistries to keep other insects away, this maintenance function can only be performed by the fly they call.38 The flies, like the community plants, bacteria, and mycelia, become part of an ecosystem community that can last thousands of years; their coevolutionary relationships with the cacti are millions of years old.

Regulatory interdependencies such as this are the norm throughout the planet’s ecosystem. Without these plant chemistries—millions of years in the making—released at specific times, in specific combinations and amounts, no ecosystem could function or remain healthy. Nowhere is this so obvious as in pollination.

POLLINATION

Without pollinators, most angiosperms, or the flowering plants that emerged 140 million years ago, cannot set seed. They need someone to take pollen from one plant or flower to another. Most angiosperms have developed coevolutionary, mutualistic relationships with different pollinators to accomplish this task. These pollinators, hundreds of thousands of them, are all a deeply interwoven part of plant communities. All the flowering plants, including saguaro and senita cacti, create a sophisticated mix of chemicals that communicate with and maintain their pollinator communities.

Although most people know that honeybees pollinate plants, few are aware that there are hundreds of thousands of plant pollinators, many of whom have coevolved over millions of years with specific plants. Less than 6 percent of them are known to researchers. They range from bats, to mosquitos, to mice, to ants, to opossums, to bees, to monkeys, to beetles, to lizards, to flies, to birds, to butterflies, to flying foxes. There are at least 1,500 bird species, 15,000 wasps, 40,000 bees, 20,000 butterflies and moths, 14,000 flies, 200,000 beetles, 165 bats, and 300 other mammals that pollinate plants. Perhaps 80 percent of all the flowering plants are pollinated by beetles. Forty percent of the angiosperms have a primary, dominant pollinator with a number of other, less regular pollinators. Some plants have only one. The 700 to 900 fig species in the world (including the Indian banyan), for the past 40 million years, have each been pollinated by its own individual kind of fig wasp. Their lives are often mutually interdependent; neither can survive without the other.

The vast majority of pollinators are called to their plants by specific chemical compounds made uniquely for them, which are active in extremely tiny quantities. The fruit fly Dacus dorsalis, for example, will respond to as little as 0.01 micrograms (one hundred millionth of a gram) of the pheromone compound methyleugenol produced by Cassia plants. The compound is so specific that even minute changes in its chemical makeup will produce little or no response from the fly.39 Because of this kind of specificity, plants create a wide range of volatile compounds that appeal to pollinators. The smell of rotting meat, fresh feces, decaying fruit, or aromatic floral scents all contain chemical cues that pollinators respond to.

However, most chemical cues, millions of them, have no “smell” at all. They are picked up by receptors that in vertebrates are called vomeronasal organs (VNOs). In mammals, VNOs are located in the nose and their only function is to take in and transport to the brain the complex aromatic chemicals given off by plants and animals in tiny quantities. (Most Neo-Darwinians regarded these as present only in babies, where they labeled them vestigial—no longer useful, former evolutionary stage—organs. In spite of centuries of research on the human body, the recognition that all people have these organs, occurred only in the last decade of the twentieth century.) They are so sensitive in human beings that as little as one ppm of a woman’s sweat in distilled water dabbed with a Q-tip on another’s upper lip will stimulate her body to begin menstruating in harmony with the first.40 All pollinators, all land life, possesses VNOs or their equivalent; they are the receptors for the complex chemical communications expressed from plants.

Many plants facilitate this process. They raise the temperature in their flowers (often considerably) to increase the volatilization of their aromatic compounds into the air. They increase aromatic production when pollen is ripe and vary the amount and type of volatiles being produced at different times to attract different pollinators. Since night pollinators cannot use visual cues many plants increase their volatiles in the evening. The different compounds diffuse in the atmosphere at different rates, letting pollinators know how far they are from the source. Using these chemical cues, bees are able to harvest over a range of sixty miles and remember every flowering plant and its location.41 Plant flowers will continue to release, even increase, aromatics until all their seeds are fertilized or until the flower withers and falls. This often takes a great many pollinator visits. Tobacco capsules, for example, contain 2,500 tiny seeds, which require 2,500 fertilizations (which, in the case of tobacco, must occur within 24 hours) in a space less than 1/16 of an inch wide. As soon as fertilization is complete aromatic production and volatilization ceases.42

Because nectar is an essential component of most pollinators’ diets (for some it may be the only component), nectar constituents are altered depending on when primary pollinators are likely to feed and what kind of pollinator is expected. For example, bumblebees need (and get from their flowers) a much higher amino acid content than honeybees because of their inability to consume large quantities of pollen.

Though often claimed by dieticians or physicians to be “just sugar,” the truth is that nectars (and the honeys they sometimes become) contain a variety of different types of sugar compounds. These make up only about 30 percent of the nectar. The rest is a complex mix of more than forty compounds including lipids, amino acids, proteins, and scores of unique secondary chemical compounds. Pollinators use the sugar for energy; how much they get depends on their size. The nectar from a single flower, for instance, can give a mosquito enough energy to fly twenty-five kilometers. But the nectar is also highly nutritious; the plants create and add compounds to meet the nutritional needs of their pollinators. In butterfly-pollinated flowers the nectar contains the ten primary amino acids the butterflies need to remain healthy. To strengthen the nectar’s amino acid content even further butterflies often make a pollen “tincture” by soaking pollen grains in the nectar (leaching out more amino acids) before drinking it.43 Some plants sequester oils in special compartments in their flowers for their pollinators. When visiting, solitary bees break open the vacuoles, harvest the oils—which are a complex mixture of lipids, amino acids, and other secondary compounds—mix it with pollen from a variety of plants, and feed it to their young.44 The compounds have exceptionally potent impacts on the growth and immune health of the young bees. Many of the secondary plant compounds that pollinators gain from their plant partners are unique chemistries without which they cannot survive and reproduce.


CONTENTS OF NECTAR

Amino acids, proteins, lipids, antioxidants, alkaloids, glycosides, thiamin, riboflavin, nicotinic acid, pantothenic acid, pyridoxin, biotin, folic acid, medoinositol, fumaric acid, succinic acid, oxalic acid, citric acid, tartaric acid, a-ketoglutaric acid, gluconic acid, glucuronic acid, allantoin, allantoic acid, dextrin, and other, unidentified compounds.


Some orchids create volatile chemicals that are identical to those given off by aphids. Aphid-loving flies and ants respond to the smell and pollinate the plants. A more common approach, however, is making female sexual pheromones that call their bee, wasp, sawfly, and beetle pollinators. An individual orchid, for example, often produces over one hundred different volatile aromatics, uniquely combined, to call its pollinators. Aliphatics and terpenoids such as saturated hydrocarbons, octanal and nonanal aldehydes, 1- and 2-alcohols, esters, geraniol, citronellol, E,E-farnesol, 2-ketones, acetates, farnesol esters, geranial, citronellal, and linalool are intermixed to produce compounds the bees (or other pollinators) need for sexual reproduction.45

Orchid (or euglossine) bee pollinators harvest the volatile compounds from the orchid and transfer them to their hind legs, where they store them as compounds essential for mating. During mating the bees use these pheromones to attract other male bees and together they form small swarms that attract the females (who will only respond to swarms). Each different euglossine bee needs a different kind of pheromone, which the orchids provide. Because the pollinators cannot make these mating compounds themselves, they cannot survive without the orchids.46 The production by flowering plants of unique chemical substances that their pollinators need for reproduction is not uncommon.


There is considerable diversity in the chemical composition of floral scents released by 13 plant species in the Sonoran Desert, all of which are pollinated by hawkmoths. This indicates a complex interaction between a hawkmoth community and a guild of flowers in which the odour signals are only one facet of the information used for location of nectar resources.

—Frietson Galis, “Ecology through the Chemical Looking-glass”

Many moth and butterfly species are drawn to plants such as ambrosia that produce pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs), which they collect, store in their bodies, and use as or to synthesize their sexual pheromones. Some male butterflies store the compounds in their wing hair pencils and use them to attract females. During mating they hover above the female and dust them with the alkaloids. Because PAs are toxic when concentrated these plant-specific moths also concentrate them in their bodies to deter predation by birds and other animals. In a similar way Monarch butterflies sequester cardiac glycosides, usually from milkweed species, in such high quantities that birds will not eat them.47 More than forty moth and butterfly species use unique plant chemistries in this manner. Without the chemical compounds produced by their plants the moths and butterflies could not survive. And without them the plant could not survive—there would be no one to pollinate them. These interactions can be exceptionally complex and involve multiple plants and insects.

[The] transactions between pollen-producing plants and pollen-moving animals make up a significant portion of what biological scientists are now calling biodiversity.

—Gary Paul Nabhan, THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

Tropical passionflower plants produce extrafloral nectararies on their leaf stems that support a diverse group of ants, wasps, and egg parasitoids that protect them from herbivore overfeeding. Heliconius butterflies lay their eggs on the plants and act as passionflowers’ primary pollinators. The butterfly larvae feed on the passionflower and sequester alkaloidal compounds necessary to protect themselves from birds after their transformation into butterflies. And while the 45 species of Heliconius butterflies each specialize in a particular type of passionflower, the passionflowers intentionally limit their own range of growth. There are never more than ten different species growing in any area. And though similar leaf shapes exist among the scores of passionflower species, none of those ten species will have similar leaves. Each passionflower in that area uses different chemical and visual (leaf shape) cues for its own butterfly species. But this interdependency is even more complex; other local plants, Anguria species, come into play as well. Heliconius collect food pollen from anguria, cross-pollinating the plants during their visits. The anguria generate exactly enough nitrogen in their pollen to support the egg production of Heliconius butterflies. And though the butterflies collect pollen from other sources it is only the nitrogen from anguria pollen that is incorporated directly into their eggs. The anguria and passionflower plants coordinate the opening of and chemical emission from their flowers so that they are visited in succession.

Like honeybees, Heliconius learn their area extremely well, essentially running “traplines” of flowers from whom they collect pollen and nectar. They live communally and the younger butterflies are taught the flower routes by their more experienced elders.48 Such specificity as this is not unusual.

The female yucca moth’s relationship with desert yucca plants is so specific that she actually hand-pollinates the flowers. After gathering pollen the female moth cuts into a yucca flower ovary and dusts each of the immature seeds within it with pollen. On a few of them she deposits an egg before leaving. When the moth larvae hatch, they eat a few seeds as their initial food before leaving the plant; they never eat them all. This same kind of process is also at work in fig wasp/fig pollination. Unique chemical cues call each of the hundreds of types of fig wasps to their fig species; they will go to no other. They gather pollen from the male flowers, then each enters a tiny hole in the fig ovary and hand-pollinates the immature seeds before laying eggs. Up to 70 percent of vertebrate diets in some forests come from such hand-pollinated figs.49

This use of plant chemistries by the life in ecosystems is pervasive. These chemistries are used as molting hormones; sexual pheromones; dietary precursors to protective chemicals; essential proteins, amino acids, and lipids; and healing medicines. Plants always produce more chemistries than they need merely for their own health; these chemistries are released into plant communities and ecosystems to maintain them. As with so many other aspects of maintaining ecosystems, plants sense when members of their community are ill, and they offer up chemistries to heal them. These chemistries are either sent through mycelial networks to where they are needed, or chemical cues call the ill animal or insect to the plant who needs it.

Indigenous peoples have long known that the plants heal the animals, plants, and other living organisms in their communities. Folk taxonomies link elephants, bees, monkeys, porcupines, bears, elk, deer, mice, and more to the use of plants as medicines. In 1978, for the first time, a scientist excitedly proclaimed his discovery of an animal’s use of a plant as medicine. And so it goes.

PLANTS AS MEDICINES FOR ALL LIFE ON EARTH

Deeper awareness of the sophisticated complexity of plant chemistries and the inextricably interwoven connections of the plants and their chemistries to the life around them has begun to reveal to contemporary peoples that plant chemistries are used not only for the plants themselves, but are created and released to heal disease throughout the ecosystems in which they grow.

For example, in plant communities, the closely intertwined feedback loops automatically note when any member of the plant community is ill and the mycelial networks just under the surface of the soil transport necessary chemistries to it.50 Healthy plants connected to the mycelial network increase their production of whatever chemistry is needed and send it to the mycelia for distribution. Trees that are intentionally girdled by scientists (they cut a circle of bark from around the trunk of the tree, which will kill it, so they can see what happens) are supported with nutrients transported through the mycelial network from other plants. They can live for years, while plants that are disconnected from the network die within a year. A wide variety of chemistries have been found to be transported this way, including carbon, phosphorus, sugars, and more. Feedback loops are constantly analyzing the needs of the mychorrizal community, and plants that are ill receive whatever it is they need.51 Injured plants respond much the same way that people do to analgesics and anesthetics; compounds such as the alkaloids in opium poppies affect plant physiology just as they do ours. Such compounds may be taken up through root systems, transported by mycelia, or breathed in through plant stomata as a gas.

Bee pollinators, most notably honeybees, collect a gummy, resinous substance from trees to make propolis, which they use to coat the interior of their hives to protect it from infection. The resin is collected from scores of trees that exude the compounds onto their surfaces, including aspen, poplar, birch, elm, alder, horse chestnut, willow, pine, and fir. The bees combine the tree resins with nectars, multiple pollens, wax, and the bees’ internal enzymes. Propolis is generally about 50 percent tree resins, 10 percent pollen, 30 percent wax, and 10 percent various terpenoid essential oils. It is strongly antibacterial, antiviral, antibiotic, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antiseptic, and retains these qualities for many years. Ground-dwelling and solitary bees gather their own combinations of propolis to line their hives, as well. Many of the trees that propolis is collected from, such as willow, birch, aspen, and poplar, exude compounds rich in salicylic acid, which contributes to the strong anti-inflammatory actions of propolis. Bees collect a number of other compounds that they use to keep their hives or nests healthy and functioning. Most are processed from flower nectars and plant exudates. Honeybees, for instance, use flower aromatic volatiles to synthesize pheromones that they use to mark their “traplines” so that other bees from the hive can follow them.

Other insects, such as grasshoppers and certain beetles, use sequestered plant compounds to keep their shells free of bacterial, algal, and fungal infections.52 Some insects, when infected with tiny mites, specifically seek out medicinal plants to kill the infesting organisms. Many insects collect plant compounds, combine them, and store them in their bodies for later use. Sometimes they use them for protection from predators. The sawfly, for example, gathers terpenes from the pine trees on which it lives, recombines them, and releases them in a spray at predators. Grasshoppers, as well, can combine up to 26 different plant compounds in unique mixtures to produce highly powerful deterrent sprays.53

Many birds collect a variety of fresh, strongly medicinal plants and weave them into their nests to prevent and treat pest infestations or boost the immune activity of their young. The birds will separate out just the plants they want from others that look similar, and will gather different ones at different times for different reasons. Starlings regularly pick and add plants that are high in volatile oils or terpenes to their nests, so that the volatile oil emissions constantly bathe them and their young, helping prevent infections.54 Some raptors, because of the regular presence of decaying meat, regularly harvest strongly antimicrobial plants and weave them into their nests. And many birds harvest and use plants to treat mite infestations in their feathers.55

Wild boars in India dig up pigweed (Boerbavia diffusa) and eat the roots, which are high in anthelminthic (antiworm) compounds, to control infestations of intestinal worms. Boars in Mexico do the same thing, though they use pomegranate roots that contain the same kinds of compounds.56

Dogs have long been known to intentionally eat grass at specific times. They will separate out just the types of grass they want to eat from others that appear similar, altering their choice at different times for different conditions. Quack grass, a favorite of many dogs, regulates the health of the mucous membrane systems of the GI tract, helps kidney function, and possesses antibacterial and antimicrobial actions.57

Elephants will knock over a palm tree, step on its trunk, and wait while the foot-sized impression fills with one of the sweetest saps on Earth. Then they will stand, gently rocking in the jungle, until the sap ferments, and then they will drink it and become intoxicated. Elephants also utilize a wide variety of medicinal plants for many conditions, including birthing. Holly Dublin, a researcher with the World Wildlife Fund, spent more than a year tracking a pregnant elephant in East Africa, noting her diet and behavior. The elephant was extremely regular in her habits and food plants until the end of pregnancy, when she traveled 28 miles to a specific tree and completely consumed its leaves and woody trunk. Contractions began and she gave birth to a healthy baby. The plant is commonly used by Kenyan women to facilitate childbirth.58 Other animals also use plants to assist in birthing.

Pregnant Sifaka females, a type of primate, who usually do not eat plants containing tannins, widely seek out the plants during the weeks prior to birth and consume them. Tannins reduce the incidence of postpartum bleeding during childbirth and promote more rapid healing of vaginal tissues.59 African Colobus monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, and Muriquis (woolly spider) monkeys also seek out a variety of plants to help with certain conditions or heal themselves when ill.

When suffering from pathogenic intestinal parasites chimpanzees will select from a variety of plants depending on the nature of the parasite. For example, they ingest pith of Vernonia species to kill and stop the reproductive activity of schistosoma parasites. Vernonia contains a variety of potent chemistries, including toxic sesquiterpene lactones and steroid glycosides. The glycosides vernonioside B1 and vernoniol B1 suppress parasite movement and egg laying, reducing their population density. When infected with oesophagostomum parasitic worms, on the other hand, chimpanzees seek out entirely different plants. They pick rough, bristly haired Aspilia leaves, which contain a unique compound—thiarubrine A. Thiarubrine A is active against a wide variety of nematodes and intestinal worms that commonly affect chimpanzees. The chimpanzees fold the leaves like accordions and swallow them whole. The thiarubrine A weakens or kills the worms and the unchewed leaves, because of the folding and rough bristles, catch the worms as the leaves move through the GI tract, pulling them loose and out of the system. By not chewing the leaves the chimpanzees ensure they will pass into the small intestine in their whole, folded form and also ensure that the thiarubrine A will not be broken down in the stomach.

Chimpanzees are, as well, exceedingly particular about which part of the plant they choose. They only use the pith of the Vernonia; it is lowest in toxic sesquiterpene lactones and highest in the steroidal glycosides. Chimpanzees actively test Aspilia plants for activity by holding a leaf in their mouth for extended periods of time before deciding to pick it or go on to another. And they take these medicines early in the morning before they begin to feed so that they can pass through the GI tract unencumbered by food.

For caenorhabditis worms, chimpanzees utilize a variety of ficus (fig) leaves, which they also swallow whole and early in the morning. Only young fig leaves are used; they contain significantly stronger antiworm chemistries. Chimpanzees also use a variety of highly antibiotic plants for other conditions and rub those with antiparasitic actions into their fur to treat skin and fur parasites.

The racoonlike South American coati pick the resin from Tratti-nickia aspera and rub it into their fur to protect against parasites, and capuchin monkeys use at least six plants for the same reason. Capuchins also seek out the leachate formed from rainwater as it runs down the trunks of Hymenea coubaril trees and collects at the junctions of major limbs. They use the leachate, which is strongly repellent to insects, as an herbal wash to treat and prevent parasites.60 Bears, among other things, use osha.

Osha is a plains Indian name for Ligusticum porterii and means “Bear Medicine.” The plant has been called this for millennia in many languages: the Mexican name for osha, chuchupate, is an Aztec term that means the same thing. In early spring, after their long hibernation, one of the first things bears do is to use their long claws to dig osha. Some they eat, the rest is chewed and mixed with saliva into a watery paste, which they spray and rub over their fur. Male bears will dig extra roots, carrying them to their mates, whom they spray and wash as well. Osha root is strongly antihelminthic (active against intestinal worms), and helps clean out the intestinal tract after winter. It is also strongly antibiotic, antiviral, and antiparasitical. Washing fur with osha paste helps clean the body of any lingering winter parasites.61

And of course, like bears, people use plants for medicines, for we, like all other life, have long been inextricably interwoven into the fabric of the plant world.


The bear is quick-tempered and fierce in many ways, and yet he pays attention to herbs which no other animal notices at all. The bear digs these for his own use. . . . We consider the bear as chief of all animals in regard to herb medicine, and therefore it is understood that if a man dreams of a bear he will be expert in the use of herbs for curing illness.

—Siyaka (in Densmore, TETON SIOUX MUSIC)

Human beings have used plants for food, clothing, building, and healing as long as we have been. Medicinal herbs have been found in a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal grave, and written records over the past 6,000 years have recorded the regular use of more than 80,000 different plants as medicine. People (like soil, bears, butterflies, and monkeys) have made their medicine by percolating water through plants, eating them whole, soaking them in water for teas, or rubbing them on their skin. They have worked very well for us, and for all life on Earth, for a very long time.

THE DANGER OF PHARMACEUTICALS IN THE ECOSYSTEM

The pharmaceuticals created out of the universe-as-machine epistemology present a significant danger to this dance between plant chemistries and the living organisms of Earth. There is a great difference between the two kinds of chemistries. It is not merely a difference of chemical structure but one of meaning. Synthetic pharmaceuticals are made primarily for the profit of a few, and secondarily as a way to alleviate symptoms of human bodily conditions defined arbitrarily as disease. Plant chemistries are created out of an intricately interwoven biofeedback communication loop between different elements of the ecosystem in response to changing conditions, in order to regulate those conditions to maintain the homeostasis of the Earth. Both types of chemistries are ubiquitous in the Earth’s ecosystems in tiny dosages of ppm, ppb, ppt. Plant chemistries are chemical communication messages; pharmaceuticals are noise. Pharmaceutical production and release, in essence, has embedded within it the meaninglessness that the epistemology of science ascribes to the Universe. But the plant-created chemistries released into the ecosystems of the Earth do possess meaning: each is released to accomplish specific ecosystem purposes. The category error of science as regards pharmaceuticals possesses innate, grave consequences. Human-produced chemicals carry information that is meaningless yet still initiates life web responses. Unfortunately, because we are all expressions of bacterial complexity, they affect the metabolic pathways in all living organisms.

The biochemical steps that generate jasmonic acid (JA) in plants, for example, are extremely similar to those in animals that create prostaglandins—the fatty acids that initiate inflammatory responses to infections in people’s bodies.62 JA-mediated plant responses are initiated where needed by a signaling molecule called systemin. The biosynthetic pathway that produces systemin is itself exceptionally similar to the pathway that produces tumor necrosis factor alpha in mammals.63 Because of their similar nature both prostaglandin and JA effects are modulated by the common plant compound salicylic acid that is found in aspirin. In short, plant chemistries work throughout the life web because we all share similar chemistries, metabolic pathways, and evolutionary histories. And just because a substance is “natural” does not mean it does not have pollutant effects when concentrated. Natural plant-derived substances are also being put into the Earth’s ecosystems in quantities far beyond those normally produced by plants.

Aspirin, noticed first in sewage treatment water in Kansas City in 1976 (along with other substances including caffeine and nicotine), enters waste streams in huge quantities throughout the world.64 About 100 million pounds of aspirin are ingested worldwide each year—Americans buy 30 billion aspirin tablets alone.65 All of it is excreted into the Earth’s ecosystems. Though a great deal of it is removed by waste treatment, the problem is the dose. In low doses, aspirin enhances plant growth, in larger quantities it inhibits it. Amounts in the range of 10 ppm, as an example, increase nitrate reductase activity in corn, but that activity is inhibited when they rise above 1,000 ppm. Plant species such as the oak Quercus falcata produce substantial quantities of salicylic acid in their leaves, which is leached or washed out when it rains, inhibiting plant growth under the canopy.66 Salicylic acid also interferes with the effectiveness of JA, which plays crucial roles in plant health. JA stimulates phytoalexin production in response to invading pathogens, interferes with insect predators’ digestion, and hastens seed set in severely damaged plants. Salicylic acid blocks the production of JA, phytoalexin production diminishes, the impact on insect predators lowers, and ability to set seed lowers or can cease. The amount of aspirin being released into the ecosystem is significant enough to affect all these areas of plant chemistry.67

The same kinds of dynamics exist for caffeine. Because of the huge production and consumption of coffee and tea worldwide there is significant excretion of caffeine in places where it would not normally be found. Caffeine is strongly inhibitory of seed germination at even minute doses because it interferes with cell division.68 The amount flowing through waste treatment plants is sufficient to interfere with ecosystem functioning.

And, of course, synthetic pharmaceuticals compound these kinds of problems due to their pervasiveness and tendency to persist rather than break down. (Though herbal medicines present less danger to ecosystems, the production of hundreds of millions of tons of echinacea in extract form and its distribution to ecosystems where it does not normally occur upsets things as well—as does the removal of large numbers of echinacea plants from their natural habitat. Ecosystems were designed for their inhabitants to derive foods and medicines from local plants and then to excrete them back into common soils.)

Under the pressure of pharmaceuticals, genotypes throughout ecosystems—bacteria, insects, viruses, plants, and more—are going fluid and reassembling themselves in order to reestablish system homeostasis. The more intensely human chemicals act as environmental stressors on the system, the greater the pressure on genotypes in response. This is the primary reason it takes more and more chemicals each year to produce the same level of results in agriculture and medicine. Eventually the amount of chemicals needed will surpass energy supply and the system will contract rapidly in order to reestablish homeostasis. The amount of pharmaceuticals being produced (especially when combined with agrochemical production) is enough to interfere with the homeostatic balance of plant neighborhoods, communities, ecosystems, biomes, and Earth itself. In many instances these chemistries combine together with each other, and sometimes with plant chemistries, in synergistic ways that are not predictable and that produce magnified impacts on ecosystems.

By defining the Universe as a collection of parts of a great machine with no interior depth, we emotionally disconnected ourselves from the community of living organisms on Earth; we disconnected our selves chemically as well. Morris Fishbein of the AMA was more correct than he knew when he said that modern scientific chemotherapy is about “to wash away the plant and vegetable debris.”

We have tried to remove wildness from the context of our daily lives. We have worked to simplify the natural communities around us, hoping to make our environments more manageable, hoping to be more secure. That has not happened, for a simplified environment is ever more prone to what we call “wild fluctuations”—wild, in this sense, meaning uncontrolled or reckless.

But some people remain who associate wildness with wellness. Piman-speaking peoples of the American Southwest use the terms doajig for “health” and doajk for “wildness.” Both words are derived from doa, “to be alive” or “to be cured,” as are doakam for “living creatures,” and doajkam for “wild and untamed beings.”

—Gary Paul Nabhan, CULTURES OF HABITAT


THE DANGEROUS LOSS OF PLANT DIVERSITY

The diversity of plant species has been labeled by most scientists as redundant, and unnecessary; the plants themselves have been labeled resources placed here for the use of Man, insentient, and weeds. These care-less attitudes engendered in people by universe-as-machine epistemology have resulted in tremendous reductions in plant diversity throughout the world—in natural systems, medicine, and agriculture. Such loss of plant complexity interrupts healthy ecologies (internal and external) and allows the emergence of disease everywhere it occurs.

The Monarch butterflies that sequester toxic cardiac glycosides in their bodies as larvae, for example, are experiencing serious depredation from birds during overwintering in Mexico. Many of the more toxic milkweeds that the larvae once fed on have decreased in abundance while other, less toxic milkweeds have increased, due to changes in human land use and agriculture. Because the butterfly larvae are feeding on less-toxic plants they build up fewer defensive chemicals in their bodies and birds can then eat them with impunity. This is affecting the intricate butterfly/larvae/milkweed relationship and subsequently the health of the ecosystems in which they occur.69

The internal ecology of living organisms also needs continual inputs from wild plant chemistries to remain healthy. Large herbivores, for example, whose rumens contain more than 100 different types of symbiotic bacteria and uncounted numbers of protozoa and fungi, regularly seek out and eat multiple plant combinations depending on their level of health and particular bodily needs. The ingested plants’ secondary compounds alter the composition of the communities in the rumen, input different chemistries, and shift levels of health.70

But these kinds of internal ecologies are altered significantly if wild plant chemistries are diminished in the diet through such things as monocropped food plants. Such plants contain considerably fewer secondary compounds than wild plants. In consequence, living organisms that eat them as a steady diet are deprived of the normal complex chemistries that their species evolved with over, sometimes, millions of years. For example, pigeons, when fed a diet that in people causes goiter, will develop polyneuritis—an inflammation in multiple nerve pathways. When the pigeons are allowed to return to their normal ecosystem diet the disease disappears. The birds always harbor the microbes that generate the condition, but the chemical diversity of the plants and insects normally eaten by the pigeons does not allow the disease to occur.71 The internal ecology of animals is maintained by plant chemistries just as soil rhizospheres are.

In people, increases in cancers exactly parallel the decrease of diverse plants as foods and medicines. In 1900, for instance, more than a hundred different types of apples, fifty different types of vegetables, and thirty different types of meat were commonly found in markets depending on the season. Many were wild harvested and their chemistries were much more highly diverse and potent than the foods we buy now. Many of those wild-gathered plants contained the multiple types of cytotoxic, antimutagenic, and cell-division inhibitory compounds regularly ingested in human diets prior to 1900. The ¡Kung bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, as an example, regularly eat more than seventy five different plants in their diet in one of the harshest ecosystems on Earth; cancer is virtually unknown. (They additionally work less hours than we do, have a high caloric intake by American standards, and spend most of their time in what we call “leisure pursuits.”)

Historically, human beings have eaten between 10,000 and 80,000 different food plants in their diets. Some they intentionally grew, most they wild harvested. The combination of plants shifted from season to season, with local plant populations, and in response to the needs of the people. The kinds of diseases we see now are virtually unknown with such diets. Complex plant combinations keep disease conditions in check in people, just as they do in pigeons and in ecosystems.72 Today Americans regularly eat less than ten plants in their diet, and many eat less than five.

This kind of decrease is present as well in the practice of medicine. In response to the pressure of scientists and physicians, plants in medical practice have been almost completely removed in favor of pharmaceuticals. While some plants are still used as the raw material for producing pharmaceuticals, virtually no whole plants are used in modern medicine. Pharmaceuticals, on very short timescales, produce better outcomes than plant medicines, just as the short-term use of pesticides produces better crop outcomes. When viewed on long scales, however, the superiority of pharmaceuticals and pesticides vanishes. The pesticide or agrochemical that produces one season of increased crop harvest also initiates ever widening ecosystem perturbations. Attempting to keep production levels the same as that first year necessitates the use of increasing numbers of chemicals, with greater and greater ecosystem perturbations. Over time, these perturbations result in chaos in ecosystems: drought, desertification, intense weather patterns, and trophic cascades, as complex systems collapse into more simple ones from the loss of species. This escalating dynamic occurs in exactly the same fashion in internal human ecologies and in the human communities that use large numbers of pharmaceuticals. Antibiotic resistance is only one manifestation of the ecosystem perturbations that have been initiated.


Scientists have changed our foods. Take the USDA, for example, they have bred out most of the cancer-preventing compounds in soy. So an average primitive soybean will prevent more cancer than a USDA soybean. This is because we Americans tend to go for bland foods and the primitive soybean has a more bitter taste, so the USDA bred out five different chemicals in soy, and bragged about it. They bragged about lowering the phytate content, the bowman-burk inhibitor content, and the protease inhibitors, the very things that prevent cancer. They bragged about breeding out or lowering the estrogenic isoflavones, which is what soy is getting all the press about these days. They bragged about lowering the levels of saponins and phytosterols. Yet, all these have been shown to prevent cancer. . . . And this happens across the board. Food processors and food scientists are making our food less preventative—not only of cancer but also of cardiopathy.

—James Duke, “Herbal Voices Interview with Jim Duke”

Bacteria, however, do not develop resistance to plant medicines. Plant medicines, unlike pharmaceuticals, contain thousands of complex compounds that work synergistically; they are so complex that it is very difficult for pathogenic bacteria to develop resistance. Numerous plant medicines have shown activity against all the bacteria that have developed resistance to human pharmaceuticals. Plant medicines also have very few side effects. The African herb Cryptolepsis, for example, is more effective in treating even nonresistant malarial strains in clinical trials than pharmaceuticals, and possesses none of the side effects that chloroquine produces.73

Plants, like pharmaceutical companies, create highly effective compounds that are toxic when isolated. A case in point is the compound artemisinin isolated from Artemisia annua and used to treat drug-resistant malaria. It produces a number of unpleasant side effects during treatment. However, when the whole herb is taken the side effects do not exist and treatment is just as effective. The plant has created several compounds whose only known purpose is to alleviate exactly the side effects that the isolated constituent produces in living organisms.

Plants are, in essence, ecological medicines. They do not require expensive factories to make them, they do not discharge pollutants into the environment, they have far fewer side effects (internally and externally), they are renewable, and the knowledge of their use is not held in the hands of a few experts but, like plants in ecosystems, is diffused throughout the cultures that use them. They are also very inexpensive. Stomach ulceration can cost up to $25,000 when treated by surgery, or $1,000 a year with Tagamet. It can be treated for as little as $125 with the use of the medicinal plant licorice. Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), which can cost $5,000 to treat with surgery or $657 to treat with the pharmaceutical Proscar, costs $255 to treat with saw palmetto berries.74 And of course, in communities that work with wild plant medicines, who pick and prepare them themselves, they cost nothing at all.

Scientists who embraced universe-as-machine labeled indigenous and folk understandings of plant medicines useless superstition and set about removing them from the sum total of human knowledge. The pressure of Western medicine on herbalism, on folk and indigenous healing, has initiated the destruction of systems of biognosis-generated healing hundreds of thousands of years old. It is not so different than the destruction of older forms of agriculture and their replacement with modern agribusiness farming technologies. Universe-as-machine has not created a disease-free life in a Garden of Eden filled with bountiful food, but rather has initiated the increasing loss of plant species throughout the world, loss of knowledge of their use, waste that will not go away, diseases more virulent and pervasive than any known before, and ecosystems in disarray.


It has been estimated that as many as 75 to 90 percent of the world’s rural people rely on herbal traditional medicine as their primary health care. It appears neither possible nor desirable to replace this herbal medicine with western medicine.

—Ole Hamann (in Akerle, CONSERVATION OF MEDICINAL PLANTS)

Ecosystems such as wetlands, oceans, forests, and deserts are much like the organs in our bodies and, through complex feedback loops just like ours, help maintain organism health. Loss of plant species causes organ deterioration in ecosystems and biomes, just as it does in us (through diminishment of our food variety).75 While forests are like our lungs, wetlands are much like our livers. (Perhaps it is more correct to say, since we are so much younger, that our lungs and livers are like forests and wetlands. And do not our brains bear an amazing resemblance to the complex, spherical, intricately interconnected, synaptic-junction-filled living system of Earth itself?) While livers cleanse toxins out of our blood, wetlands purify and remove toxins from Earth’s waters. Wetland-specific plants such as cattails, willows, and poplars act as filters to process a wide range of toxins such as heavy metals and even dissolved explosives.76 The plants in wetlands also exert significant control over methane emissions from Earth.

Methane release occurs through the fermentation of organic plant matter by special bacteria—methanogens. If they did not break down the carbon in plant bodies and release it back to the atmosphere as methane, oxygen levels would rapidly build up to life-insupportable levels. This kind of breakdown occurs at high rates in bogs or wetland areas. Wetland plants act much like chimneys that can control the amount of gas flowing through them, funneling methane through their bodies, releasing it from the wetland.77 If wetlands lose significant numbers of their plants or if significant numbers of wetlands are destroyed, water toxins cannot be processed, methane emissions are affected. Both water and climate deteriorate.

The recognition of plants as medicines for all life on Earth is important. Thinking of them as medicines stimulates thought about what medicinal action(s) they are performing and what will happen if they disappear or decline in population density. Understanding this also engenders the recognition that specific plants can be planted in ecosystems to treat the illnesses they may be experiencing.

Some phytoremediation scientists are taking this route, planting poplars to help wetlands uptake heavy metal pollutants, though like many scientific physicians their bedside manner is often atrocious. Other people are beginning to understand that if Achillea millefolium can stop hemorrhaging and help the healing of wounds that are caused by technology it can, as well, help an oozing erosion gully that is breaking our hearts, or the scarred landscape created by a bulldozer. There is a reason they spring up in some logged forests. Such medicinal understandings can become quite subtle and complex. Combinations of plants, just like those in herbal tinctures, can be planted together to synergistically help damaged ecosystems. Herbalists can play a role in the healing of ecosystems, especially if they begin to understand the similarity between human organ systems and planetary ecosystems. Such folk and indigenous healers, because they tend to see the pattern that connects, because they have a functional sense of aesthetic unity, are important healers for the planet itself.

There is a limit, though. Imagine having to perform dialysis on your kidneys daily, then add in a depleted immune system, then add in failing lungs. Eventually every waking moment would have to be devoted to maintaining systems that are supposed to maintain themselves. The initiation of regular fire setting by the Forest Service to control large-scale wildfires is a case in point. Forest systems naturally initiated burns every five to seven years. When we have tried to take over and perform just that one, fairly clear task, the cost is thousands of people-hours, hundreds of millions of dollars, and constant errors that result in wildfires out of control. Even if we could intentionally control the functions of ecosystems (and who of us would want to—it is much more pleasant to lay in the grass than have to give it its medicine all the time), it would never be possible to approach the billion-year complexity and sophistication of Gaia in the generation and application of her medicines. We simply do not have the capacity.

THE ELEGANCE OF EARTH MEDICINE

For a number of years I lived next to intensive logging. For many reasons I could not move away so I was forced to experience what happens to life, land, and peoples in the midst of large-scale logging. There were many lessons. One: Before too long, the soil and air began to dry out and in a few years uncontrollable fires began. One year in particular the fires burned very hot. Healthy large trees flash-burned from the heat. The soil literally baked.

Early the next spring, wild lettuce, a plant that is common in that area (but never in abundance), covered acres of the burn. It is a plant used much like a mild opium, to stop pain, to soothe, to help sleep. It is also used to help damaged lungs—from dry, irritated coughs to wasting diseases such as tuberculosis. John Evelyn in 1699 commented that “it allays heat, bridles choler, extinguishes thirst, excites appetite, kindly nourishes, and above all represses vapours, conciliates sleep, [and] mitigates pain.”78 Wild lettuce has been used historically to ease the pain of burns. It only grew in such abundance that one year and only in that area. Could anyone of us have prescribed a better medicine?

Plants are being lost all over Earth; some estimates are one species a day. What will Earth and its living communities do for their medicines when they are gone?