‘Master’ plants from the Amazon teach how to save the forest – 01/27/2023 – Environment

“I didn’t think I had ‘really’ become a jaguar in any measurable way. I had more of an intense bodily memory of the impression of ‘being a cat’, which I could summon at will and use as a source of strength and courage.” Jeremy Narby, a Canadian anthropologist based in Switzerland heard this description from a Peruvian healer, Carlos Perez, and took it with skepticism, as he recounts in his latest book.

First, because of his previous, disenchanted, materialistic scientific background. Then, because Perez narrated an alteration of consciousness triggered by tobacco, and not by the plants (chacrona and cipó-mariri) used to prepare the psychoactive tea ayahuasca, which is recognized by established neuroscience as a powerful psychedelic.

Such an effect of ingested tobacco, unknown to Westerners who smoke it, was one of several clues that led Narby, in decades of living with the Ashaninka, to become convinced that this and other peoples of the Amazon have much to teach science.

Moreover, not only the natives, but also the “teaching plants” such as tobacco, chacrona and mariri. In their understanding, plants are endowed with spirit and intelligence, they are subjects and not just objects to be known and explored.

“Indigenous societies offer us different ways of inhabiting the earth: they show that it is possible to be human and, at the same time, have a different approach to that idea that nature is this thing that you can use and deplete endlessly, that seems to be fine to the heart of the biodiversity crisis.”

“I wanted to prove that they used their resources rationally and that they had all kinds of knowledge about the rainforest, the plants and the animals”, says Narby in this interview. That’s when the Ashaninka told him that he would only have a true understanding of this knowledge after taking ayahuasca, and he agreed.

“My view of the world collapsed before my eyes, because I started to see things that I thought didn’t exist”, says he, who participated in the Encontro Selvagem event, in Rio, in November, with the support of the Serrapilheira Institute.

At the risk of losing credibility as a social scientist, as a result of this transformation, Narby joined the Swiss organization Nouvelle Planète (New Planet). The NGO’s focus is raising funds to support indigenous projects and protect their lands.

In three decades, the entity managed to obtain resources to preserve 60,000 km^two, about 1% of the Amazon rainforest. A not inconsiderable contribution to curbing carbon emissions and thus combating global warming and the climate crisis —by comparison, under Bolsonaro, around 45,000 km perished^two only in the Amazon, not counting the cerrado and other biomes.

At the same time, the anthropologist continued to publish articles and books, such as “The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origin of Knowledge”. His most recent work in Portuguese is “Master Plants: Tobacco and Ayahuasca”, co-authored with Rafael Chanchari Pizuri. The next one, about cannabis, will deal with “all the misunderstandings surrounding the plant and its potentialities”.

Why Tobacco and Ayahuasca Are Considered “Teacher Plants” by Amazonian Indigenous Peoples? My understanding of what a teacher plant is is based on what the Amazonians explained to me and others. Amazonian plants like tobacco or ayahuasca are what scientists might call psychoactive plants. They can become teachers when a person ingests them and then pays attention to the experiences their body and mind have after ingesting them. When we eat these plants, we have certain experiences that scientists would call modified consciousness, or altered states of consciousness.

The peoples of the Amazon —the Amazonian indigenous people— consider that plants and animals possess a form of intelligence. If we think about the plants that can be found in the rainforest, some communicate more than others. Some plants are more talkative, let’s say, and the plants that communicate the most are these teacher plants.

The way to learn from these plants [professoras] is to make a decoction of the bark and the plant will influence your dreams. So you pay attention to your dreams, and the information conveyed in those dreams is considered a teaching of the plant. However, this is something little studied by science.

Mr. already said that his experience with the Ashaninka Quirishari community changed your life. Why? How did that experience and ayahuasca change your worldview? I lived with the Ashaninka people in a community called Quirishari in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon in the 1980s. At the time, I was just a pretty ordinary Western guy.

The World Bank and various organizations linked to international development financed the confiscation of indigenous territories in the name of development, arguing that these people did not know how to use their resources rationally. I wanted to prove that they used their resources rationally and that they had all kinds of knowledge about the forest, plants and animals.

I was studying the rational uses of the rainforest by the Ashaninka, but they said something to me right at the heart of their system of knowledge: “Brother Jeremy, if you want to understand all these questions, and if you want to understand how we know what we know about plants, you have to drink ayahuasca. It’s the television of the forest. It will show you images and you will learn things”.

I knew that taking indigenous hallucinogens too seriously was dangerous to my career in the field of anthropology. Carlos Castañeda, Michael Harner and several others were practically excommunicated from the profession. Still, I thought it would be a show of cross-cultural courtesy, as it would pester people with questions about what they know about plants.

After ten minutes of experience [com ayahuasca], my worldview collapsed before my eyes, because I started to see things that I thought didn’t exist. Huge fluorescent snakes that began to explain various things to me, starting with the fact that I was just a tiny human being.

I realized this by looking at those impressive, powerful and frightening snakes. Hallucinations, perhaps, but so detailed and powerful that they made ordinary reality seem distant and irrelevant. That experience was like taking off your glasses. I could see that people have a common way of seeing things that is limited.

In practical terms, what can we learn from indigenous peoples to avoid the worst outcomes of the climate crisis? Indigenous societies offer us different ways of inhabiting the Earth: they show that it is possible to be human and, at the same time, have a different approach to that idea that nature is this thing that you can endlessly use and deplete, which seems to be right around the corner. center of the biodiversity crisis.

Some people argue that because of the small scale, indigenous people can do this, but a large scale society would have a harder time. Well, that’s possible, but I still think that the true deep value of indigenous cultures lies precisely in this different understanding of nature.

You go to the Amazon and you ask people, “How do you refer to everything that is not human in your language?” They say they don’t see things from that concept. In fact, they believe that all other species are people like us.

It is important, at this point, to start thinking about how to relate to other species. If we define the whole world as just a bunch of things, obviously it’s easy to explore them, but it’s harder to have relationships with them. What can indigenous cultures show us? How to treat the rest of the world like your family, how to relate to others [seres] and treat them like people. We Westerners, industrial people, are just beginning to think about this.

Mr. he also asserts that western science and indigenous knowledge are not incompatible. Here in Brazil, some research initiatives are beginning to promote the inclusion of indigenous scientists. We also have a growing number of indigenous people in universities. In his opinion, what would a “cross-pollination” of these knowledge systems look like? I find this aspect of Brazil very exciting. For the last 25, 27 years, I’ve been talking and writing about the compatibility between science and indigenous systems of knowledge, but when you speak to an audience in France about something like that, it’s a bit of an abstract proposition.

In Brazil, I noticed that this topic really moves people much more quickly: Brazil has advanced science, but it also has real indigenous peoples. This is also true in a country like Canada. We have already started to see dialogues like this in Brazil and Canada.

In Canada, sometimes this has to do with concrete issues, like the health of a river. How can we make this or that river cleaner and more habitable? The idea is to bring together ecologists and indigenous elders, and they start working together on a specific project.

Just to put things in perspective: in the 1990s, a European team carried out a study in the Peruvian Amazon, and they fenced a 10 meter by 2 meter plot in the middle of the rainforest, that is, they chose a place in the forest and delimited it. a plot of 20 m^two. So they invited people from the Ashaninka people to walk around those 20 square meters and identify the plants — and those people were able to do that, they identified something like 97% of the plants.

The links between environmental crimes and organized crime are growing and becoming a very serious problem in the Amazon Basin. How does this affect the Ashaninka people in Peru and how to tackle this problem? This one is hard. In Colombia and Brazil, murders of indigenous leaders have been taking place for a long time, but in Peru this is a relatively recent phenomenon. You didn’t hear about it 10 or 15 years ago, but now it’s started to happen.

Ashaninka leaders were murdered. Shipibo leaders were assassinated. This is happening more and more, and it is extremely regrettable. They feel that they are not considered by the State, by the authorities, by the oil companies, by the criminals who come and kill them, by the loggers or the miners. There is a whole system against them, and it is a serious lack of responsibility.

It’s not just a matter of the Ashaninka people or an area where there has been some illegal deforestation. It’s about how the whole country is run. It’s a very deep problem that clearly has roots in colonial history. In other words, simply blaming the modern Peruvian state does not get us to the roots of the problem. It’s difficult, but I still think that one of the paths to follow is to value the knowledge of the indigenous people, the indigenous people themselves, and the places where they live.

How have you connected your work at the NGO Nouvelle Planète with the topics we talked about in this interview? Our job is to listen to indigenous people and support their initiatives. For 33 years, it has raised funds for the demarcation and titling of indigenous lands. The argument we use here in Europe is that the best way to protect the rainforest is to entrust it to its indigenous inhabitants, who know how to use it without destroying it.

The same applies to bilingual and intercultural education programs. Indigenous people say: “We need to educate our children in our mother tongue and in Spanish or Portuguese. We need to teach them indigenous knowledge and science. If our cultures are going to survive, we need bilingual and intercultural education programs.” So this is something that we’ve been supporting and raising funds for for 27 years.

So far, this small NGO has financed the demarcation of 6 million hectares, which is equivalent to one and a half times the size of Switzerland, it is [cerca de] 1% of the entire Amazon rainforest.

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Jeremy Narby, 63

Canadian anthropologist, for 33 years he has worked as director of Amazonian projects for the Swiss NGO Nouvelle Planète (New Planet), raising funds for projects for indigenous peoples, mainly in the Peruvian Amazon. He had edited in Brazil, in 2022, the book “Plantas Mestras: Tabaco e Ayahuasca” (Dantes Editora), written with Rafael Chanchari Pizuri.

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UNDERSTAND THE SERIES

Planeta em Transe is a series of reports and interviews with new actors and experts on climate change in Brazil and worldwide. This special coverage also accompanied responses to the climate crisis in the 2022 elections and at COP27 (UN conference held in November in Egypt). The project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.