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# 2018-02-05 - The Lost Language Of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner
Book cover
This book covers a lot of ground including new age spirituality and
science. While i did not agree with all of the ideas, i enjoyed the
thoughts provoked by reading them. It pushed me to consider more
about our relationship with plants. Below are excerpts, with
comments enclosed in square brackets.
# Chapter 3
> In consequence, language literally shapes personal experience of
> reality..
I began to notice that as i shifted from thinking in English to
thinking in mathematics certain things would come into focus, could
be seen, and others went out of focus, could not be seen. I was
taking on and internalizing, as my studies progressed, the
assumptions embedded within mathematics. That process of
internalization had specific and immediate effects. My psychology
changed, my personality changed, the range of emotional behavior
available to me shifted, and how i interpreted other peoples'
behaviors and thoughts shifted. Mathematical language, like all
language, shifts personal experience of reality. Behavior shifts in
response. ...
The experiences encoded in mathematics, however, are different from
those in other human languages. When thinking in mathematics human
bodies, emotions, and interpersonal relationships take on less and
less importance while the Universe as an expression of number
relationship takes on more and more. There are ecstatic moments of
insight and understanding, of course, but life, human or otherwise,
has no linguistic place in the language of mathematics.
The many, usually unexamined, assumptions woven into the fabric of
mathematics--that numbers exist, that they possess meaning, that the
language of number is important, that it is neutral and objective,
that all things can be described in mathematical terms, that it is
more real than other less precise languages--shape what
mathematicians can "see" when they think in mathematical language. It
is not a language that can express or see the organic process of
life, human or otherwise--no birthing or child rearing, or love or
need, no caring or bonding. A person thinking in mathematics cannot
perceive the thing that passes between a puppy and a human being. It
simply does not exist unless one shifts out of mathematics into
another language. I realized, as time went by, that any language i
used would shape my experience of the world around me.
This realization took on much more importance to me than that of
numbers or number theory. ...
Later i came across the work of the mathematician Kurt Goedel. Asked
to examine mathematics and refine the principles upon which it is
based he determined that they could not be refined, that they are
unprovable assumptions. And though mathematics follows logically from
the underlying principles (and everything works nicely if you accept
those principles are true), they cannot themselves be refined...
unless you stand outside of the system itself. You cannot use the
tools of a system to refine the system whose tools you are using. ...
The implications of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle are routinely ignored in most of the sciences.
Specifically: the assumptions (mental perspectives) of the observer
change what is being observed; scientific systems such as mathematics
are based on unprovable, often unrefinable, assumptions; and to
understand the limits of a system and refine its underlying
assumptions it is necessary to stand outside of it, to literally be
in a different system."
# Chapter 4
Because the experience of nature and other life-forms is so deeply
interwoven into our emergence as a species, human beings possess a
genetic predisposition for wild nature and for other
life-forms--though it must, through specific experiences, be
activated. Edward Wilson calls this innate feeling or caring for
living forms and systems, for nature, biophilia. See also
endosymbiosis.
Wilson's description of the nature of biophilia recognizes that it is
primarily an emotional affiliation with other life, not a mental
process of recognizing the connections between bits of mechanical
parts of the Universe that happen to inhabit a ball of rock in space.
We are, by species history and genetic tendency, encoded for
recognition of the aliveness of the world and an emotional bonding
with it.
* * *
> If you kill off the prairie dogs there will be no one to cry for
> rain. --Navajo warning
Amused scientists, knowing that there was no conceivable relationship
between prairie dogs and rain, recommended the extermination of all
burrowing animals in some desert areas planted to rangelands in the
1950's "in order to protect the sparse desert grasses. Today the area
(not far from Chilchinbito, Arizona) has become a virtual wasteland."
--Bill Mollison, Permaculture
> Water under the ground has much to do with rain clouds. If you
> take the water from under the ground, the land will dry up. --Hopi
> elder
Burrowing creatures, such as prairie dogs, open millions upon
millions of tubes in the soils of Earth. As Mollison notes, these
"burrows of spiders, gophers, and worms are to the soil what the
aveoli of our lungs are to our body." As the moon passes overhead the
underground aquifers rise and fall and Earth breathes out
moisture-laden air. This exhalation of negative-ion-charged air
through the many fissures and tubes opened by the burrowing creatures
helps create rain.
How could the indigenous peoples have known this? By all our
standards of scientific knowledge they could not. We have neglected
to realize that indigenous peoples have always had access to the
finest probe ever conceived, one that makes scientific instruments
coarse in comparison, one that all human beings in all places and
times have had access to: the focused power of human consciousness.
The continual immersion in nature where the bonding process is
supported and encouraged allows it to deepen into biognosis--direct,
depth knowledge of nature that cannot be reduced to the assembly of a
collection of bits of accumulated information.
It is worth noting that [environmental devastation] is not the work
of ignorant people. Rather, it is largely the work by people with
BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PHDs. Elie Wiesel once made the same point,
noting that the designers and perpetrators of Auschwitz, Dachau, and
Buchenwald--the Holocaust--were the heirs of Kant and Goethe, widely
thought to be the best educated people on earth. But their education
did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong
with their education? In Wiesel's words, "It emphasizes theories
instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction
rather than consciousness, answers rather than questions, ideology
and efficiency rather than conscience."
... It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people
who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time
could not read, or like the Amish do not make a fetish of reading.
--David Orr, Earth In Mind
> A lot of what matters is the power and feeling of the
> experience.. But when you put something in a museum, or even on
> TV, you can see it all right, but you're really looking only at the
> shell. --Barbara Smith, Navaho educator (in Nabhan and St. Antonio)
The neurons and nerve cells, axons and dendrites in our brains
contain the same microtubules that make up the bodies of spirochetes,
or wriggling bacteria.
[Ben's note, this brings to mind naegleriasis. Naegleria Fowleri
normally feed on bacteria, but they will also consume human brain
cells. Naegleriasis cannot be contracted via ingestion nor skin
contact. The amoeba must enter through the nasal passages where the
neurotransmitter acetylcholine stimulates them to follow the
olfactory nerve into the brain.]
# Chapter 6
In 1942, 50,000 U.S. servicemen developed acute hepatitis B from a
contaminated yellow fever vaccine they were given three months
earlier. And it is now known that the tremendously high incidence of
hepatitis C infection in Egypt came from physicians and health care
workers using insufficiently sterilized needles during inoculations
for a parasitic disease (schistosomiasis). ... And on a larger scale,
the polio vaccine administered to 98 million Americans between 1955
and 1963 is now known to have been contaminated with a simian virus,
SV40. It is estimated that at least 30 million Americans were
infected as a result. Monkey cells, contaminated with a virus not
detectable at the time, were used in the production of the vaccine.
There is growing evidence that SV40 plays a role in the development
of a number of diseases, including some rare cancers.
Bacteria are not germs but the germinators--and fabric--of all life
on earth. In declaring war on them we declared war on the underlying
living structure of the planet--on all life-forms we can see--on
ourselves.
Clearly, the assumptions embedded in the germ theory of disease
carried hidden impacts. Accepting that theory as truth has led to
behaviors--industrial, social, and environments--that are now being
recognized as having serious long-term impacts.
There is emerging evidence as well that human beings are supposed to
have one or more species of intestinal worms that coevolved with us
living in our GI tracts. People in developing countries who usually
have these parasites rarely develop inflammatory bowel diseases.
Researchers have found that the worms engage in an intricate
modulation of the bodys' immune system that positively affects bowel
health. When Americans were given the worms by a physician, a
majority of those suffering inflammatory bowel diseases experienced
complete remission of the disease.
The kinds of healing that have been generated out of a
universe-as-machine model are showing the same negative and
long-lasting environmental impacts that are being found with other
reductionist technologies. Modern scientists and medical
practitioners, by assuming that the other life-forms of Earth are not
intelligent and that Earth and its life-forms can be viewed as a
collection of unrelated parts, have initiated catastrophic changes
throughout the living, holistic, life-form that is our planet...
Failing to understand bacteria as our kin, the loss of biophilia in
just this one area, has initiated responses from living organisms
that conventional medical epistemology insisted were impossible.
This profound error has not created a disease-free life with the
major cause of death extreme old age, but an ecosystem in disarray
and pathogenic bacteria more virulent and powerful than ever before.
# Chapter 7
Basically, the little that people currently know about plant
chemistry is not very much. This ignorance is magnified by our
tendency (because of our upbringing) to think of plants as insentient
salads or building materials engaged in chemical production processes
that just happened by accident and, in consequence, have no purpose
or meaning. Phytoexistentialism.
To keep their airways moist, plants transpire: they take up, or
hydraulically lift, water from deep in the ground and breathe it out
when they exhale. On a hot summer day, a mature cottonwood tree can
breathe out 100 gallons of water an hour. It is so much cooler under
a tree or in a forest not so much from the shade cast by the trees'
leaves, but from the incredible amounts of moisture that the trees
are exhaling. Forests breathe out so much water vapor that from
space it is actually possible to see the rain forest creating the
clouds that precipitate later as rain. Forests help cool Earth by
keeping the air moist, by making clouds, by making rain.
Hydraulic lifting goes on 24 hours a day. At night, when their
stomata are closed, the trees, and all deep-rooted plants, deposit
the water they are bring up just under the surface of the soil. Some
they will use for transpiration the next day but about two-thirds is
used by the neighboring plants as their primary water supply. Trees
literally water their community. Whenever forests are
removed--sometimes only half a forest has to be cut--the air and soil
begin to dry up, rain becomes scarce, fires are more common, and the
land starts to become a desert.
# Chapter 8
There is a King's holly in Tasmania that is 43,000 years old, a
creosote bush in the American Southwest that is 18,000 years old, a
box-huckleberry up north over 13,000... 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 millenia.
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.
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.
... Conventional scientific plant naming creates and sustains the
illusion that plants such as osha exist in isolation from the
animals, plants, people, and landscapes among whom and in which
they grow, that no connections exist between them any 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.
[The author discusses ironwood as a fascinating example of a keystone
species, then goes on to explain the importance of keystone species,
biodiversity, and genetic fluidity.]
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-of-the-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. 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 spruce trees in a voracious
desire to breed and feed. Plants maintain neighborhood, community,
and ecosystem health, including insect and animal population density
and health, through their biofeedback mechanisms.
"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 sponins and
phytosterols. Yet, all of 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." --John Duke, Herbal Voices Interview with
Jim Duke
# Chapter 10
> It is not half so important to know as to feel. --Rachel Carson
Scientists have discovered that plant species may possess widely
different chemistries depending on the time of day, week, or month
they are picked. And though the physicians laughed at them, the
Appalachian folk healers would have understood and been unsurprised.
For among them it was common knowledge that this plant must only be
picked in the morning before the dew is off the leaves, or that one
only by the light of the full moon.
... The solution is reconnection to the natural world and the
living intelligence of the land.
Many people believe we should first establish this reconnection in
the young. But i think the best hope for restoring biognosis is with
the grown--those in whom the impulse for biophilia has been stunted,
those in whom the interior wound is deep, those in whom the need is
the greatest. Though children express biophilia most naturally and
it awakens most easily in them, industrial society has a deep and
vested interest in its dominant epistemological perspective. It will
not look kindly on any effort to alter it in those future employees
who are being trained to carry it on.
The restoration of our capacity for biophilia begins with restoring,
and supporting, our capacity for feeling. And not just feeling in
the grossest sense--feelings of anger or sadness or joy or fear--but
the subtle feelings it is possible for us to perceive, if we desire
to, in everything around us.
We are born with a sophisticated capacity for detecting emotional
nuances in the world around us. ... Restoring biophilia means
exploring these nuances. It means "coming to our senses," especially
the sense of feeling--of touch--of being touched by the world. ...
The experience cannot be written down nor found in books. It can
only be developed by opening up to the sophisticated capacity for
feelings that we possess, by allowing ourselves to be touched by the
livingness in the world, and exploring the meanings we encounter.
[The author then proceeds to describe a series of exercises to
reconnect and tune into ones feelings in order to access previously
suppressed information. You can read these exercises in the
following linked post.
* Techniques For Restoring Biophilia
]
# Chapter 11
Thinking will never restore caring. No matter how elegant the
theory, the territory must still be entered and experienced. It is
deeply ironic that one of the most powerful antibiotics Alexander
Fleming ever discovered is in human tears.
"In true scientific fashion, let's look to the lab rat for
understanding. Instead of the variable warmth and textured surface
of a wild home nest, it has a constant temperature and a stiff,
unyielding cage floor. Instead of a variety of smells changing
according to the time of day, weather, and season, it has the
chemical scents of a laboratory. Instead of the kinesthetic
experience of a social animal that lives in intimate physical contact
with other members of its family, it is often placed in isolation.
"Lab chow," hard, dry, and lacking in multiple chemistries, replaces
the complex foods of various textures, moisture levels, and content
that it would eat in the wild. And what about the absence of wind,
rain, and full-spectrum light? Suddenly the "truth" of objective
scientific data becomes curiously distorted."
"Inspiration is like a wheel. One person, if inspired and determined
to learn all they can and let it radiate, will inspire another. The
wheel of inspiration, like that of destruction, has begun its
downhill roll, and is gaining momentum.
Inspiration can start a chain reaction when the elements of the
moment are just right. Inspiration is a force that often comes from
some unconscious source, flowing into the conscious mind of a human
and creating new ideas and ways of being."
"A phenomenon evolves when someone is healed by a plant. A
connection begins and usually develops into deep respect and caring
for that plant. When wandering through the forest, if one comes
across one of these plant allies, one instantly feels the connection.
A bond evolves between plant and person, a love grows, and it is
shown by the enthusiasm expressed when seeing it in flower. This is
how plants can weave us back into the web of life. Then once again
we know our place. Once again are home. Not only are our bodies
healed but our spirits as well."
"I spent two years living in what i now call 'a state of grace,' but
which my parents called 'out of her mind.' I found little cabins in
the woods, lean-tos with moss-covered beds. I stretched the levels
of my comfort, walked barefoot through three seasons, and learned to
receive nourishment on every level from the surrounding wilderness.
I would lay on the ground, face close to the tip of a fir, and let
the drops of water slowly filtering through the tree nourish me. I
ate nothing but what i gathered: fungi, berries, lichen, and fresh
greens. I became what i ate. I was happy."
author: Buhner, Stephen Harrod
LOC: RS164 .B785
tags: book,non-fiction,outdoor,spirit
title: The Lost Language Of Plants
# Tags
book
non-fiction
outdoor
spirit
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