Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

ANARCHO-HERBALISM
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.