The evolution of ethnobotany
To save the plants, one scientific field highlights the importance of protecting Indigenous knowledge
Lauren Leffer • January 13, 2021
Blueberry plants grow wild in Jonathan Ferrier’s homelands and study sites, and have many important medicinal uses. [Credit: Kjerstin_Michaela | Public Domain Mark 1.0]
As long as humans have been around, we’ve relied on plants for our survival: as food, fuel, shelter, medicine — and to produce the oxygen we breathe. Ethnobotanists are scientists who study and catalog these complex interactions between people and plants. Yet ethnobotany has a complicated history of its own, with roots in European colonial expeditions and in the exploitation of Indigenous communities.
Now, with the biodiversity crisis imperiling plants, ethnobotanists have become unexpected advocates for Indigenous knowledge rights in the quest to conserve useful plants around the world and the cultures that rely on them. Modern ethnobotanists are striving to work in partnership with their study communities to preserve much more than just plants: Languages, livelihoods and a wealth of knowledge are at stake.
Original music by Michael Radack
Other music and sound effects by Richard Laiepce, mikevpme, and Blear Moon
You can also listen to this episode of the Scienceline podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher.
Jonathan Ferrier: (Ojibwe introduction) Aanii, boozhoo, Jonathan Ferrier nindizhinikaaz Anishinaabeinini . I’m a professor of biology at Dalhousie University. (Fade in music) Jonathan Ferrier: I take the tradition of studying the world around me from my father, and enjoy passing those traditions on to my daughter and sharing them with my First Nation — the Mississaugas of the Credit. Lauren Leffer: In her work to identify plants to study and analyze, Cassandra relies on local community collaborators, who share their knowledge of useful plants. People like Gledjis, who lives in the mountains of Albania. Gledjis: We are living in a village here, it’s very high from the sea. Lauren Leffer: Gledjis is part of an ethnic minority in the Balkans, called the Gorani — and has worked as a local collaborator with Cassandra since he was 13 years old. Gledjis: I know her because I was the best student here, which know to speak English. So I’ve tried to help her. Lauren Leffer: He, like everyone else in his village, relies on wild plants as medicine, to make traditional foods and beverages, and to sell as income to outside buyers. (Fade out mountain wind and Balkan flute) Lauren Leffer: Cassandra has been working with Gledjis and others from his village and the local university for over a decade to identify and collect plants. But she also has gone to the historic records. Cassandra Quave: We’ve done some really cool work with records going back even to the 1600s of ancient traditional Chinese medical texts, but also old records from European explorers as they were traveling through South America and documenting the local uses of plants. (Fade in atonal synthesizer) Cassandra Quave: Right now we’re in the fall season, and everyone likes their pumpkin spice latte, right? And one of the key ingredients to that, of course, is nutmeg. Nutmeg has a horrific history. It was so highly valued at one point, it was said that it was worth its weight in gold. There was tremendous exploitation. You need only look to the history of the Banda islands, where the Dutch came in with warships and murdered and subjugated and enslaved basically the entire populace in their quest for nutmeg. (Fade to emotive synthesizer) Lauren Leffer: But modern ethnobotanists like Cassandra and Jonathan are carefully working to change the impact of their field. They work in partnership with Indigenous communities to study and collect their native plant species and uses, which is important now more than ever because of the ways Indigenous plant knowledge is disappearing, along with the plants themselves. Cassandra Quave: We know that at least 723 medicinal plants are threatened with extinction. Lauren Leffer: Ina Vandebroek, an ethnobotanist at the New York Botanical Garden, works in Jamaica with people of Amerindian and Maroon descent, to protect one of these disappearing plants, a tree called — Ina Vandebroek: Cinnamodendron corticosum is a species that has a very restricted geographic range. Within Jamaica, it only occurs in two provinces in the John Crow Mountains on the northeast of the island. And this is a really culturally important plant species. It’s a spice and a medicine, and it is being overharvested. Lauren Leffer: Ina says overharvesting happens because selling the spice tree’s bark is one of the few ways local people can make decent money. So conservation efforts need to address poverty, and introduce sustainable alternatives that preserve both the plants and the human cultures at stake. Ina Vandebroek: The connection between, you know, plants and people, this is also a very important connection that we are losing. What we don’t know, we don’t love, or what we don’t love, we don’t protect. (Fade in up-tempo synthesizer) (Fade in emotive synthesizer) Lauren Leffer: With ethnobotanists considering how to work with local and Indigenous communities for everyone’s benefit, Jonathan says —
Lauren Leffer: Jonathan Ferrier is Indigenous, of the Anishinaabe people. He’s also an ethnobotanist. Ethnobotany is the study of where plants and people intersect.
Jonathan Ferrier: A lot of people know me as a lover of blueberries. In our language, we call it min — it simply means berry. It’s like the berry. I spent a lot of time looking at the biochemistry of blueberry leaves.
Lauren Leffer: Modern ethnobotany is part study of traditional plant knowledge, part laboratory research. To Jonathan —
Jonathan Ferrier: Ethnobotany is, it’s a story… the gem of the story is the plants and how the people relate to those.
(Fade in music, shift to atonal synthesizer)
Lauren Leffer: But ethnobotany is also a field with a complicated, exploitative, often violent colonial history.
Cassandra Quave: If you look at the history, many of the drugs that we use today that were originally discovered in plants, in many cases, those are the result of exploitive relationships between the people who provided the knowledge and who reaps the economic gain.
Lauren Leffer: This is Cassandra Quave.
Cassandra Quave: I’m an associate professor of dermatology and human health at Emory University.
(Fade in mountain wind and Balkan flute)
Lauren Leffer: Though she is keenly aware of the history of those notes, and the ultimate result of similar expeditions.
(Fade in forest sounds and low synthesizer)
(Fade out forest sounds and low synthesizer)
Lauren Leffer: Jonathan agrees that true conservation goes beyond the plants and land. As part of his work, Jonathan creates manuals for the communities he collaborates with, which include each plant and their uses in the Indigenous language. He is also very careful in ensuring all of the work he does is something the community is interested in, and any knowledge shared stays protected.
Jonathan Ferrier: So what, what is important to us is that we have lots of review and discussions about what the community would like to release to the public, and maybe they don’t want to release anything to the public. And that’s okay.
Lauren Leffer: Cassandra and Ina, although not members of the communities they work with, have the same goals of collaboration and communication. Cassandra partners with researchers at universities local to her study sites. Together they organize exchanges, host community workshops and even institute something of a prenup for plants.
Cassandra Quave: We also have agreements, should things be commercialized. Our goal is really to provide equitable access and benefit sharing of economic gains.
Jonathan Ferrier: I think, I think it’s improving, I think it’s getting better. And I thank people for, for working so hard on this and learning about our intellectual property.
Lauren Leffer: For Scienceline, this is Lauren Leffer.
(Fade out music)
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About the Author
Lauren Leffer
Lauren is a science and environmental journalist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She has previously been a vampire bat researcher, STEM educator, park naturalist, laboratory manager, and surrogate opossum parent. She writes mostly about biology, ecology, and people.