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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] This is Anarcho-Herbalism - an essay by Laurel Luddite
  • Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 07:46:44 -0700


This is Anarcho-Herbalism - an essay by Laurel Luddite
Thoughts On Health and Healing For the Revolution

Laurel Luddite (used by permission of the author)
http://www.swsbm.com/homepage/Anarcho-herbalism.html

My medicine chest is a council of bioregions, with representatives gathered
together as I make my way around the world west of the Rocky Mountains. The
Coptis root was picked out of the churned-up scar left by an excavator, at
the retreating edge of the Idaho wilderness. The tiny amount of Pipsissewa
leaves came from an ancient grove above the Klamath River just feet away from
where the District Ranger sat on a stump talking about his plans to cut it
all down. I am drying Nettles from the California creek where salmon die in
the silt left after a century of industrial logging.


Every jar holds a story (often a ghost story of dying ecosystems and places
gone forever). I am honored to have known the plants in their home places and
to have studied their uses as medicine. But for people not lucky enough to
roam throughout the wilds, purchased herbal preparations such as tinctures
may be the link back to this sort of healing.


Like so much in this consumerist society, it is easy to ignore the
connections between a bottle on a shelf in some store and a living, growing
plant out in the world somewhere. It can be hard to know if the plant grows a
mile away or on another continent. There is much to be said for reconnecting,
for educating ourselves about the herbs we use and gathering our own medicine
when we can. That's how we will be able to build a whole new system of
healing ñ one that can support our movement away from the corporate power
structure that medicine has become.


The development of a new medical system, or the recovery of ancient models,
will be another link in our safety net when industrialism fails. It will keep
us alive and kicking out windows now in the system's last days when so many
people have no access to industrial medicine. And it will reestablish our
connection to the real medicine that is the Earth.

An alternative to "alternative medicine"

The sort of herbal medicine popular these days (presented to us by the media
and so-called green capitalists as yet another exciting fad) has brought with
it very little thought of a new way of healing. The plants, reduced to
capsule form or, worse, to their "active ingredients", are just new tools to
work with in the same body-machine that industrial medicine sees people as
being. They become no different than pharmaceutical drugs or a scalpel blade:
something to pry into the body-machine with and use to mess around with the
parts. Except of course much less effective, because the herbs have been
taken out of the system of healing in which they have their strength.


When the marketers of herbal products get their hands on a new "miracle
cure", it can mean extinction for the plant. This is especially sad when so
many living creatures go into useless products or are wasted on conditions
that they don't treat. (Has anyone else seen that Echinacea shampoo?) The
classic example of this is Goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis, a plant close to
extinction in the wild. It has a couple of amazing actions in the human body
but has mostly been marketed as a cure for the common cold, which it will do
almost nothing to help. By the way, the largest brokers of wild-harvested
Goldenseal and many other big-name herbs are multinational pharmaceutical
corporations. Given american society's obsession with herbal Viagra, weight
loss pills, and stimulants, most of the herbs on the mass market are being
sacrificed to these ridiculous causes.


There is an alternative to "alternative medicine". Southwestern herbalist,
author, and teacher Michael Moore probably said it best in one of his recent
digressions from a lecture: "In this country, the herb business mostly
revolves around recently marketed substances with new research, and it comes
from them to us. Whereas we're trying to establish as much as possible (in
this "lower level" if you will) the fact that we need to create a practice
and a model that's impervious to faddism. We're trying to practice in a way
that derives from practice rather than from marketing. Not from above to
below but from below around. Bioregionalism uber alles. Keep it local. No
centralization because centralization kills everything."


Herbo-primitivism


So we need another way of looking at our bodies and the plant medicines.
Seeing the two as interconnected and in balance is new to industrial culture,
but in reality it is the most ancient healing model on earth. We knew it
before we were people. Animals know how to use plants to medicate themselves.
Their examples surround us, from dogs eating grass to bears digging Osha
roots. Probably every human society has had some way of explaining how the
body works and how plant medicines work in us.


One thing all herbalists know - dogs and bears included - is that a health
problem is best treated before it begins. In more primitive societies where
people have the luxury of listening to their own bodies it is easy to spot an
imbalance before it turns into an acute disease state. This is where herbs
are most effective. They work at this sub-clinical (and therefore invisible
to industrial medicine) level of "imbalances" and "deficiency" and "excess".


This old/new healing system is subtle and requires a lot of self-knowledge,
or at least self-awareness. It uses intuition as a diagnostic tool. Emotion,
spirituality, and environment become medicines. The spirit and environment of
the plants we gather affects their healing properties, and our relationship
with those plants becomes very important.


Green Herbalogy


When we take herbal medicine we are taking in part of the plant's
environment. Everything it ate and drank and experienced has formed the
medicine you're depending on, so you better make sure it gets all the best.
When we are healed by plants, we owe it to them to look out for their kind
and the places where they live. Traditional plant-gatherers often have a
prayer they recite before they take anything from the wild. I usually say
something along the lines of "OK, plant. You heal me and I'll look out for
you. I got your back. No one's gonna build over you, or log you, or pick too
much while I'm around." So this true herbal healing system has at its heart a
deep environmentalism and a commitment to the Earth.


The bioregional concept is important to this model of healing. Plants'
actions in our bodies are really quite limited by the chemicals they can
produce from sunlight and soil. For every big-name herb on the market cut
from the rainforest or dug from the mountains, there is most likely a plant
with a similar action growing in your watershed. Some of the best medicines
to maintain good health grow in vacant lots and neglected gardens around the
world.


Anarcho-herbalism


A society of people who are responsible for their own health and able to
gather or grow their own medicines is a hard society to rule. These days we
are dependent on the power structure of industrial health care - the secret
society of the doctors, the white-male-dominated medical schools, the
corporate decision makers with their toxic pharmaceuticals and heartless
greed and labs full of tortured beings. That dependence is one more thing
keeping us tied down to the State and unable to rebel with all our hearts or
even envision a world without such oppression. With a new system of healing,
based on self-knowledge and herbal wisdom, we will be that much more free.


Offering a real alternative health care system will help to calm some
people's fears about returning to an anarchistic, Earth centered way of life.
There is a false security in the men with the big machines, ready to put you
back together again (if you have enough money). What is ignored is the fact
that industrial society causes most of the dis-eases that people fear. Living
free on a healing Earth while surrounded by true community and eating real
food will prove to be a better medicine than anything you can buy.


What steps can we make now towards creating this new system of medicine? We
all need to learn what we can about our own health. This can be through
training in one or more of the surviving models of traditional healing and/or
through self-observation. How do you feel when you're just starting to get a
cold? What kinds of problems come up repeatedly, especially when you're
stressed out? If you're a womyn, how long is your cycle and what does the
blood look like? Understanding how our bodies act in times of health can help
us recognize the very early stages of dis-ease when herbs are the most useful.


People who have some background in healing (in the traditional or industrial
systems) can be a great help to those of us just learning. Healers who are
working to form this new model, whether collectively or through their
individual practices, should keep in mind that commitment to the Earth and a
decentralized form are central to truly revolutionary medicine.


In these times of change, everything is being examined and either destroyed,
rebuilt, or created from our hearts. Industrialism has affected every aspect
of our lives - we are just starting to realize how much has been lost.
Medicine is just one part of the machine that we have to take back and
re-create into a form that works for the society we will become. Every herb,
pill, and procedure should be judged on its sustainability and accessibility
to small groups of people. We can start with ourselves, within our
communities and circles, but should never stop expanding outwards until
industrial medicine rusts in a forgotten grave, a victim of its own
imbalances.





  • [Livingontheland] This is Anarcho-Herbalism - an essay by Laurel Luddite, Tradingpost, 12/30/2003

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