“There’s no plant that isn’t medicine,” my Yoga teacher Leslie Hanks once told me.
The great biomes of the earth have been coevolving since the dawn of time, creating billions upon billions of varieties of organisms, all of which interact together in the highly codependent dance of niches and ecosystems.
We, as humans, have also been co-evolving within these systems, having drawn all of our nourishment and medicine from the plant, animal and fungi kingdoms since time immemorial.
And yet, we have only begun to scratch the surface of what is knowable about the complexities of life on this earth.
In Western Capitalist culture, there is a lure towards the mythos of the panacea, the magic pill, the superfood that can fix all that ails you. This false narrative that one single crop- or extract, or medicinal compound- can be a one-size-fits-all solution has created consequences as far-reaching as deforestation and desertification, to nutritional imbalances, deficiencies and starvation.
This tendency to miss the forest for the trees (pun intended) is at the very heart of the mass extinction event and the ecological shifts that we are living through right now.
Any type of complex and mature ecosystem- a forest for example- doesn’t just contain the large plants and animals that are most obvious to the eye. There are also millions upon billions of other species living in niches at every level of that ecosystem.
At the New Moon Mycology Summit, a young PhD candidate explained to me that one square centimeter of moss can contain the same biodiversity as an acre of Amazon rainforest.
Microscopically, of course.
Tardigrade in their Moss habitat, via Scientific American
It is these plentiful, mysterious, microscopic beings that truly create the foundations of life for all those who live on the land.
Just as the largest creatures of the sea ultimately depend on phytoplankton at the bottom of the food chain, so too does the mightiest tree rely on the microbiome to process nutrients into their bioavailable forms.
These complex relationships exist between all organisms, at every level of evolution, in every type of biome and ecosystem on the planet.
Because they have coevolved, these organisms dance together, the survival strategies of each being kept in balance by the others. This diversity keeps the ecosystem as a whole functioning and flourishing, and less vulnerable to environmental and pathogenic events.
When we cut down a forest for the sake of a monoculture, we are killing off all of the potential for evolution from every single species that was once present in that complex ecosystem. Monocrops are extremely vulnerable to disease, pests, and weather. If one of the plants in the field dies, they’re probably all going to die.
In the fields of mono crops, long gone are the microbes and mycelia that processed organic materials, pumping nutrients into the soil.
Long gone are the root and fungal networks that held all of the topsoil in place.
When we cut down the forest to grow a single crop, not only do we destroy a network of billions of organisms that took thousands- maybe millions- of years to evolve, but we also kill the land itself. Within a few years it will lose all of its ability to sustain life.
Earth without the microbiome is just dust.
So when Leslie said to me,
“There’s no plant that isn’t medicine,”
she did not mean that one could consume absolutely ANY plant for medicinal value, but rather that all organisms serve their purpose in the grand scheme of things.
She meant that the dance of the global ecosystem is a complex unknowable web that must be respected, not exploited.
She also meant that there are tools for healing available to us absolutely everywhere, and that they take a multitude of different forms.
If we, as humans, want to look forward to a sustainable future with multitudinous options for healing and nourishment, we have a vested interest in protecting our global biodiversity, and not irreparably altering the balance of ecosystems.
About the Author:
Sarah Penello holds a B.S. in Anthropology and Biology from Florida State University, and has sometimes been referred to as an ecofeminist kill-joy.
She studied Ayurvedic Herbalism under Leslie Hanks, and became an Ayurvedic Practitioner under Dr. Naina Marballi, at Ayurveda’s World in New York City.
