Hello, everyone,
and welcome to this lecture on local roots
and the connection between herbal medicine
and cultivating a "sense of place".
This is a topic that is close to my heart.
Actually, my first job as a college student,
I was a second-year student in college,
I worked for a nonprofit called the Vermont Earth Institute,
and my job was to put together a discussion group reader
around Vermont sense of place.
So I got to talk with authors over the phone
and get permission to use their articles
and prepare discussion questions.
And this started a long journey
through grad school and up until now
of really looking at the ways
that developing a sense of connection
to the place that we call home,
and particularly the natural environment
and the cultural human communities that are a part of it,
really creates a sense of wellbeing
but also a sense of responsibility,
reciprocity for caring for that place
and making it a more inclusive and healing place
for everyone involved.
So before I talk more about sense of place
and what it means to me,
I want you to pull out a piece of paper,
maybe pause the presentation
if you need a little bit more time to do that,
and consider what sense of place means to you.
And there may be some specific actions,
behaviors, activities, experiences
that you have found help you connect to your place.
So take a moment to jot those down,
and then I'll share my definition,
assuming you've paused it and done that before moving on.
So "sense of place", to me,
are characteristics that make a place special and unique.
And this can involve both the human experience
in a non-human landscape
as well as the local knowledge and folklore.
Usually, it's about identifying to a particular place,
a particular geographic location on a piece of land
on the surface of planet earth.
And there may be many places that we call home
and we connect to,
but cultivating a certain skillset and an awareness
of wanting to connect to your surroundings,
I have found to be extremely grounding
and contributing to health and wellbeing,
but also an important foundation
to being involved as a citizen,
not only a local citizen but a global citizen.
And I wanna share a little bit of background on this concept
of the connection between humans and their place
and particularly their natural environment.
The term "biophilia" has been repopularized,
particularly in the ecological design and landscape design
and architectural design movement around biophilic design.
And this a phrase coined by Edward O. Wilson,
the need to be in contact with or drawn to nature
in order to be happy and healthy.
And this is a place where I talk a little bit
about the privileging of voices in academia.
I consider that many humans,
probably before Edward Wilson, which was in the 1940s-
he's a White man, scholar from Harvard-
there were probably many humans
that understood the need to be in contact with nature
in order to be happy and healthy
since we evolved as beings in a natural landscape.
Edward Wilson was the first White man
with an advanced degree to name it.
-(computer chimes) -So in an academic environment,
it's important to credit him as the primary source,
but I, also, in this class,
want you to start thinking about sources of knowledge
and valuing other kinds of knowledge
besides academic knowledge.
There's also Richard Louv,
who, in the early turn of the century,
talked about this concept "nature deficit disorder".
And Richard Louv was primarily talking about children,
but of course children
in the generation that many of you are in,
children who are born around the turn of the century.
And as one scientist puts it,
"We can assume that just as children
"need good nutrition and adequate sleep,
"they may very well need contact with nature."
And this may seem surprising to those of you
who are naturally drawn to the environment
or who have had the privilege to grow up
with access to green spaces,
but it was really looking at this pattern
of children being more and more raised in home environments,
sterile home environments,
being entertained by screens and human entertainment
rather than spending time in the woods.
The title of his book was "Last Child in the Woods".
So this idea of nature deficit disorder
was specifically about exposure to the natural world.
But when it comes to a plant medicine context,
we're not just spending time in nature,
getting to know the plants.
That's certainly a really important part
of herbal medicine.
But we're also starting to bring those plants
into our homes,
bringing those plants into our bodies,
engaging with them in a deeply intimate and visceral way,
which I think is really powerful,
and it's a really important part of my parenting practice
to get my son out into the woods
and have him identifying things that are edible,
things that he can put on wounds,
and really cultivating
this connection with the natural world
as something that is supportive
-and joyful to interact with. -(computer chimes)
I'm just gonna pause a video for a second
'cause I'm getting a little bit of extra sound.
So another scholar that I really respect his work
is Bill Plotkin, who's an ecopsychologist.
He wrote a number of books,
but one of my favorites is "Wild Mind".
And this is getting more into the concept
of not just connection with nature but,
and not only how connection to nature
supports individual wellbeing,
but also how that deep understanding of our wildness
contributes to our citizenship and our political views.
So Bill Plotkin says:
"We need to preserve and embrace our individual wildness-
"our treasury of ecological intelligence-
"in order to become fully human.
"If a majority of Westerners
"were to viscerally experience the sacred kinship
"they have with all life,
"we'd see an abrupt collapse
"of the extractive, synthetic economy and imperial politics
"on which contemporary Western culture is built."
So this is getting political
and starting to get into a little bit of my political views.
And in this class, I don't expect you to adopt my politics,
but to share a politics
of questioning the Western imperialism and the synthetic.
And particularly, the history of extraction
that the Western world has been engaged in
is something that I take issue with,
and it certainly has been quite harmful to our environment
and to humans and public health as well.
And we'll talk a little bit more
when we get into food systems next week.
But this idea of visceral experience and kinship
is obviously a key theme
that herbal medicine allows us to engage more directly
with these green beings on earth.
And this quote from Permaculturist Megan Durney,
"Nature needs love-filled human participation
"for its progress into the future,"
is kind of a reversal.
It's another perspective.
So the previous quotes spoke to how humans need nature
to experience health and wellbeing,
and here's a permaculturist
saying that nature needs human participation.
And notice she qualifies it by saying "love filled".
So this is an interesting idea,
and I think that Robin Wall Kimmerer
in "Braiding Sweetgrass" also engages this idea
in a really inspiring and cogent way,
that this idea that human participation
can actually be supportive to nature.
And this is something that I really wanna talk about here
in this lecture and in this class.
What are ways that humans
can be in right relationship with the world?
And what are some reasons why humans can get off track
in the way that we engage with the natural world?
And to me, a lot of it is related to cosmology and worldview
and the way that stories
influence how we interact with the environment.
And I first encountered this pattern,
really, as a graduate student.
So I was a few years older than many of you,
although I don't wanna assume
that you're all in your twenties.
And this idea that I was viewing myself
as separate from nature,
that I was nearly following a path as a field ornithologist,
and essentially realizing that the work that I loved,
the field work of being in the mountains with the birds,
was essentially collecting data
to create a case for preventing fewer and fewer humans-
in this case, ski areas-
from being in the natural world
because of this assumption
that human beings are essentially destructive.
And really start engaging with this other question,
are there ways for humans
to engage with the natural environment
where there is a sense of reciprocity,
there's a sense of respect,
there's a sense of perhaps deep reverence?
And this flies in the face
of what I call sort of old school conservation ideology,
which is still pretty active in academic discussions
and definitely active in political conversations,
this idea that in order to protect the natural world,
we need to keep humans out of it.
And where does this idea come from?
And I think starting with the predominant worldview
of the United States as a predominantly-Christian
or Christian-ancestry country
and looking at the story of Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden is a relevant piece.
And even though I wasn't raised Christian,
I certainly have had the stories
of Catholicism and Christianity
in my roots as somebody of European descent.
And I think that it also has colored the way
that the academic field of environmental conservation
orients itself to the world.
And I wanna share a passage from "Braiding Sweetgrass",
and we'll talk a little bit about the Skywoman story soon.
Let me just see what the next slide is.
Yeah, so here's the Skywoman story.
So for me,
reading the Skywoman story was a breath of fresh air
in being introduced to a world creation myth
and a cosmology that was aligning much more
with these principles of,
how can I express my love for the earth
and become a better steward,
a better lover of the earth,
in a way that is reciprocal and supportive?
The first Indigenous principle,
which comes from many First Nations groups,
is respect the earth and have a sacred regard
for all living things.
This is not something that I see as a predominant ideology
in political systems in the Western world,
and I think it's an important thing to consider.
And you all have now read the Skywoman story,
but I wanna draw your attention to a specific passage.
And this is on page 6 in "Braiding Sweetgrass",
and I'm gonna read a couple paragraphs from this.
"On one side of the world
"where people whose relationship with the living world
"was shaped by Skywoman,
"who created a garden for the well-being of all.
"On the other side was another woman
"with a garden and a tree.
"But for tasting its fruit,
"she was banished from the garden
"and the gates clanged shut behind her.
"That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness
"and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow,
"not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits
"that bend the branches low.
"In order to eat,
"she was instructed to subdue the wilderness
"into which she was cast.
"Same species, same earth, different stories.
"Like Creation stories everywhere,
"cosmologies are a source of identity
"and orientation to the world.
"They tell us who we are.
"We are inevitably shaped by them,
"no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.
"One story leads to the generous embrace
"of the living world,
"the other to banishment.
"One woman is our ancestors gardener,
"a cocreator of the good green world
"that would be the home of her descendants.
"The other was in exile,
"just passing through an alien world
"on a rough road to her real home in heaven.
"And then they met-
"the offering of Skywoman and the children of Eve-
"and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting,
"the echoes of our stories."
I think an important piece to point out here
is that history is written by those who are in power.
And some of you, I hope,
have encountered alternate histories of the United States,
and particularly Indigenous history of the United States.
Part of my work as a person of White European descent
who encounters this stolen land of Vermont
that was originally occupied,
or is still occupied by Abenaki people,
and they have not given up this land to us,
is to understand and honor that history,
which is often hidden from me because of my privilege.
And some of you may not know
that it was actually written into Vatican law in 1493
and then readopted into U.S. law in 1823.
So not that long ago.
And this is still used in the court system
to justify displacement and mistreatment
of Indigenous people,
including as recently as the Standing Rock pipeline issue
of a couple of years ago,
which is still a present issue.
And this was essentially a papal-
so it came from the pope-
document that dehumanized indigenous people
by regarding their territories
as being "inhabited only by brute animals",
because the assumption was that if you are not honoring
or following a Christian God,
then you are not human, you are considered a savage.
And this is still used as a document
to prevent rights of Indigenous people,
and I think it's important for us
to understand that history.
I also wanna speak to European history
as relevant to our orientation to the world.
And I'm gonna share a longer passage
from a book by Sharon Blackie,
who is a Celtic ecofeminist and activist,
who wrote a book called "If Women Rose Rooted".
And we'll hear more from Sharon later in the class
when we start getting into indigenous Celtic history
and plant medicine.
Sharon writes:
"Before there was the Word, there was the Land,
"and it was made and watched over by women.
"Stories from almost every culture around the world
"tell us that once upon a time it was so...
"For many native tribes throughout America,
"Grandmother Spider continually spins the world into being.
"For the Andean peoples of South America,
"Pachamama is the World Mother;
"she sustains all life on Earth.
"In Scotland and Ireland, the Cailleach-
"the Old Woman-
"made, shaped and protects the land
"and the wild things on it...
"In these and other Celtic nations,
"Danu gave birth to all the gods
"and was mother to the people who followed.
"Women: the creators of life,
"the bearers of the Cup of knowledge and wisdom,
"personifying the moral and spiritual authority
"of the fertile green and blue Earth.
"Do you remember those days?
"Me neither.
"Other indigenous cultures around the world
"may still respect and revere the feminine,
"but we Western women lost control
"of our stories a long time ago.
"The story which I was given to carry as a very young child,
"the story which both defined me
"and instructed me about the place I occupied in this world,
"afforded no such significance to women.
"In this story, woman was an afterthought,
"created from a man's body
"for the sole purpose of pleasing him.
"In this story,
"the first woman was the cause of all humanity's sufferings:
"she brought death to the world, not life.
"She had the audacity to talk to a serpent.
"Wanting the knowledge and wisdom
"which had been denied her by a jealous father - god,
"she dared to eat the fruit of a tree.
"Even worse,
"she shared the fruit of knowledge and wisdom with her man.
"So that angry and implacable god
"cast her and her male companion out of paradise,
"and decreed that women should be subordinate to men
"forever afterward.
"The stories we tell about the creation of the Earth
"and the origins of humankind
"show us how our culture views the world, our place in it,
"and our relationships with the other living things
"which inhabit it.
"And the key consequence of this particular creation myth
"is a belief, prevalent now for centuries in the West,
"that women are naturally disobedient temptresses
"who must be kept firmly in their place.
"We are weak-willed, easily persuaded to think or do evil,
"faithless, untrustworthy, mendacious,
"and motivated purely by self-interest.
"The story of Eve in the Book of Genesis
"is the underpinning for countless measures
"which have limited the actions, rights and status of women.
"No matter what women might achieve in the world,
"the fundamental message of the sacred texts
"of the world's largest religious grouping,
"which for 2,000 years
"have supplied the foundational beliefs
"of our Western culture,
"is that men should not trust women,
"and that women should trust neither themselves
"nor each other.
"As I grew older, I grew angry about other things too,
"things that might seem on the surface
"to have nothing to do with the story of Eve
"or the disempowerment of women,
"but which in fact are profoundly related.
"The same kinds of acts that are perpetuated against us,
"against our daughters and our mothers,
"are perpetrated against the planet,
"the Earth which gives us life,
"the Earth with which women
"have for so long been identified.
"Our patriarchal, warmongering,
"growth and domination-based culture
"has caused runaway climate change,
"the mass extinction of species,
"and the ongoing destruction of wild and natural landscapes
"in the unstoppable pursuit of progress.
"At six years old,
"knowing nothing but somehow understanding everything,
"I sobbed as hazy black and white TV news footage
"showed a bird futilely flapping its wings,
"slowly drowning in a thick, soupy layer
"of black crude oil which coated the surface of the sea.
"Another bird landed next to it,
sank below the surface,
"reemerged for a few final flaps,
"then drifted towards the growing mass of dead bodies
"lining up along the southwest coast of England.
"I was watching one of the first major acute,
"man-made environmental disasters
"caused by the wreckage
"of the oil supertanker SS Torrey Canyon.
"32 million gallons of crude oil dumped into the ocean
"and around 15,000 seabirds killed.
"The sea burst into huge sheets of flames
"as napalm was dropped in an effort to burn off the oil.
"I thought the world was ending.
"It was just an unfortunate accident,
"people said at the time,
"but how often have we done it since?
"The stories we've been living by
"for the past few centuries,
"the stories of male superiority,
"of progress and growth and domination,
"don't serve women,
"and they certainly don't serve the planet.
"Stories matter, you see.
"They're not just entertainment.
"Stories matter because humans are narrative creatures.
"It's not simply that we like to tell stories
"and to listen to them.
"It's that narrative is hardwired into us.
"It's a function of our biology
"and the way our brains have evolved over time.
We make sense of the world and fashion our identities
"through the sharing and passing on of stories,
"and so the stories that we tell ourselves
"about the world and our place in it
"and the stories that are told to us by others
"about the world and our place in it,
"shape not just our own lives but the world around us.
"The cultural narrative is the culture.
"If the foundation stories of our culture
"show women as weak and inferior,
"then however much we may rail against it,
"we will be treated as if we are weak and inferior.
"Our voices will have no traction.
"But if the mythology and history of our culture
"includes women who are wise,
"women who are powerful and strong,
"it opens up a space for women to live up to those stories,
"to become wise and powerful and strong,
"to be taken seriously and to have our voices heard."
So as that sinks in,
I do wanna comment that I take issue with the gender binary
in Sharon Blackie's book.
My orientation to this text
and the way she talks about women and the feminine
is that it's an opportunity
to reintegrate the feminine aspects of all genders
and the aspects of leadership
that demonstrates power in a way that is very different
from the way power has been demonstrated
in our Western culture,
which I consider to be hyper-masculinized
or a manifestation of what I call the "toxic masculine".
So what I feel that Sharon Blackie is calling for,
and what I am strongly calling for,
is the idea of bringing back a culture
of leaders of all genders,
men, women, non-binary,
that have the courage
to speak from their hearts and are unafraid
of demonstrating feeling, empathy, vulnerability
and these aspects of what it means
to be a whole, fully-integrated human being
that has been discouraged in the Western world
for the last 2,000 years at least.
And Robin Wall Kimmerer is another one of those leaders
who shows that integrated approach,
and particularly in the way
that she masters the more scientific, rational side
along with a much more sensitive, empathetic,
intuitive side.
And Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks to this concept
of "living in place",
and I think her voice is particularly potent
as an Indigenous person
whose ancestors are from this land and from this country.
She says in the chapter around becoming naturalized
or indigenous to place:
"Being naturalized to place
"means to live as if this is the land that feeds you,
"as if these are the streams from which you drink,
"that builds your body and feeds your spirit.
"To become naturalized is to know your ancestors
"lie in this ground.
"Here you will give your gifts
"and meet your responsibilities.
"To become naturalized is to live
"as if your children's future matters,
"to take care of the land as if our lives
"and the lives of all our relatives depend on it.
"Because they do."
And this reminds me of a conversation that I had
as part of a panel at the Resilient Vermont Conference.
I was part of a panel presentation,
and this was at Norwich University this past summer.
And I was speaking as an herbalist
and the ways that herbalist are stewards of the land,
and to my left was an agricultural policy representative
from rural Vermont,
and to my right was a forest conservation
and forest policy person.
And getting back to that earlier conversation
about this ethic of old school conservation,
which really feels that the solution
to conserving the landscape
is to control human behavior and often prevent humans
from interacting with these sacred wild places,
really became the predominant conversation in the room.
And because I was present
and also was asked to be a speaker,
I interjected and said,
"I just want to speak to this discourse
"and point out the fact
"that there's long been this assumption
"that a way to protect the environment
"is to keep people out of it.
"And I can see that as a temporary strategy
"as we move towards a more respectful way
"of interacting with the environment,
"but how do we, in the meantime,
"create programs to reconnect people
"to their natural environment
"and ultimately to reconnect them to their selves
"in a way that they can learn
"to walk respectfully and reverently in our woods
"in a way that moves away from extractive behaviors?"
So this is a question that I wanna pose to all of you.
How do we do this?
And is there a role that herbal medicine can play
in restoring humans' connection
and really their ability to be naturalized to a place
rather than engaging in an invasive, extractive,
and destructive way?
So community herbalism.
We've been talking about herbal medicine
more in an individual scale,
but what does herbalism look like in a community setting?
And before I was an herbalist,
I was an activist not only for environmental health,
environmental justice, sustainable food systems,
but also social justice in communities,
and then, as I've come more and more into herbalism,
feeling really drawn to addressing issues
of vulnerability in our public health system,
which we'll be talking much more about next week.
And I believe that sustainable
and healthy communities thrive
when there's access to affordable,
high-quality local medicine,
and that plant-based medicine is essential to this.
And this has become even more clear
when we look at the COVID-19 crisis.
And I think the most acute example
is not here in the United States,
but I was just speaking with a colleague
who is watching a crisis in Bangladesh,
and this is current news.
In Bangladesh, they're having their first COVID cases.
They have stockpiled their medicines for,
and their testing kits,
for COVID in one part of the town,
and they're in the middle of a huge typhoon.
And not only are those supplies isolated
because of the damage from the typhoon
from being distributed to the population that needs it
to respond to the COVID cases,
but there also are monkeys
that are occupying the building with the medical supplies,
and the monkeys are making it really difficult.
They're being aggressive
and preventing humans from coming into the space.
And to me, this is a really key example
of what happens in a population
when people forget or mistrust the local plant medicines
that are supportive for immune and respiratory health.
And part of the work I've been doing here in Burlington
is to reestablish people's knowledge of,
for example, using cedar as a lung steam
to prevent bronchitis and pneumonia
as a secondary infection,
which can lead to COVID-related fatalities,
and reminding people that cedar grow all over the place.
It's a very abundant medicine and really effective
for supporting respiratory health in this case.
So that's just a specific example for our times right now.
And this is also about wellness sovereignty.
So wellness sovereignty
builds on the discourse around food sovereignty
and that it's not just about access.
It's not just about access to medical supplies.
It's about access to medicine
that aligns with your value system.
And value systems are complex.
They're based on your cultural upbringing,
to whatever extent you remember
and are connected to ancestral forms
of medicine and healing practices.
It connects with your political value system.
Are you someone who would prefer to have dandelion leaf
as a diuretic to lower your blood pressure
rather than buying a pharmaceutical diuretic
that has a much higher carbon footprint
for being produced in a lab and shipped across the country?
So what types of wellness strategies align with your values
and are effective?
And I think herbal medicine is a great way for people
to find joy in gathering food and medicine
that supports their health and wellbeing,
and not only supports their bodies
and the health and wellbeing of their family,
but also builds community.
You can see, in all of these pictures,
herbal medicine really lends itself-
you know, pre-COVID,
but we're finding ways to do this with just six feet apart-
to be out in nature with other people,
harvesting plant medicine.
And there's something inherently human about that practice,
and I'm really delighted that you're getting to do that
as part of this class.
The other important piece
around connecting people to sense of place
is that the idea of connection requires presence.
And I think we all have felt this even more acutely
in the time of COVID
as we plug into our screens much more
to connect to other people.
The idea of being in nature with plants is an opportunity
to restore a sense of presence and mindfulness
and being in our bodies.
And this is a key part of the embodied research
that I'm inviting you to do.
And the aromatic nervines, in particular.
So lavender is one of my favorite.
But the aromatic nerve nervine herbs
are any of the aromatic plants
that contribute to aromatherapeutic benefits
of restoring a certain sense of presence
in the nervous system.
And you all have now read Guido Mase's chapter on aromatics,
so this is a bit of review.
But these aromatic plants,
one of the ways that they're effective
is that they reset the physiology of our nervous system
back to a flexible, resilient, responsive state.
For those of you who have studied nervous system physiology
and the autonomic nervous system,
basically, if you are in fight or flight mode,
in sympathetic nervous system mode,
they reset you back to sort of a midpoint
so that you're able to oscillate more flexibly
between fight or flight and rest and digest,
which is considered a healthy nervous system.
And in times of stress,
and I would say that living in the 21st century
already puts us often in survival or fight or flight mode
most of the time,
but certainly living through a pandemic
is a more heightened version of that.
So more and more,
these aromatic nervine herbs are really critical
for bringing us back into our bodies,
bringing us back into the present moment.
And heart rate variability.
If you didn't understand that part of Guido Mase's book,
I invite you to go back and read it
because his discussion of heart rate variability
is really important.
And heart rate variability, or high heart rate variability,
is a state of being in which humans
experience deep appreciation and satisfaction,
highly creative and adaptive thinking,
and feelings of strong connection to their environment.
So the first point I wanna make here
is that when we care for our nervous systems-
and plants are really wonderful at helping us do that-
we're much more able to connect in a deep and meaningful way
with our surrounding environment as well,
and that could include other humans,
but also the natural world.
It also supports adaptive thinking, creativity,
appreciation.
These are qualities of a divine feminine leadership style,
which I think is strongly lacking
in many of our primary leaders in this country.
And I won't get too political,
but most of the leaders,
even leaders who identify as women,
are modeling a certain type
of toxic male style of leadership,
which isn't responsive
and isn't serving the needs of the population
and the needs of the earth.
So your embodied plant research
is a chance to practice experience.
And this William Blake quote
about experimentation through experience
is what this exercise is really designed to do.
So this is an excerpt
from a previous student's embodied plant research journal
working with calendula.
So getting close and recording the fine details
of these plants,
and making medicine with them,
and then using the medicine on your body
is an opportunity to establish a connection
with these plants in the environment
in a really potent way.
And I really invite you to,
as you're having these experiences,
to reflect on how has your connection to your own body,
but also your connection to your surrounding environment,
deepened through these exercises.
So I wanna speak a little bit to some specific examples
of how plant medicine can support our society
and our sense of community herbalism,
our sense of wellness sovereignty,
and our sense of place in our community.
And I also wanna share an example
of how plant medicine supports our bodies
to operate in a much more optimal fashion
and therefore have a greater capacity for connection
and a greater capacity for citizenship and activism.
So first, I'm gonna speak about this idea of whole food
and the importance of super foods as medicine
as opposed to taking vitamins or supplements
for health and wellbeing.
And the power of bioregional herbalism
is not just about phytochemistry-
although I am gonna talk from a phytochemistry
and very scientific lens soon-
but this idea of having herbs
that come from the place where you live
is really powerful.
And this is based on the idea that plants provide medicine
in the form of secondary metabolites.
So these are chemicals that the plants are producing
not for basic structure and function,
but specifically to adapt to their surroundings.
So a dandelion in a very dry place
will have slightly different chemistry
than a dandelion growing in a very moist place
because they're adapting to the micro-climates
that they're existing in.
And then when we consume that plant,
it's the secondary metabolites
that exhibit the pharmacological reactions in our body.
It's the secondary metabolites that create plant medicine.
So you could argue that when you are consuming plants,
and this could be vegetables as well,
from your surrounding environment,
you're embarking on a biochemical conversation
with those plants
that give you clues about your surrounding environment.
So you could even say it's a way to adapt to climate change,
in some ways.
So there's this power of consuming plants
from your local environment,
where you're not only getting nutrient-dense food
because you're choosing to consume plants,
but the specific array of nutrients
actually contributes to you
being more biochemically informed about your environment.
And I wanna talk specifically about super foods,
which I consider to be similar
to these tonic food-like herbs.
So this is a nutrient-rich food
considered to be especially beneficial
for health and wellbeing.
And some of my favorites are the Brassicas,
the dark berries, garlic,
medicinal mushrooms, such reishi or shiitake.
And these are safe and food-like remedies.
They often show up in prominent ways on our plate.
And they enhance function
rather than directly treating disease.
So this is the idea of a tonic,
something like "an apple a day keeps the doctor away",
and it's often something that isn't discussed
in a conventional medical setting,
which is very focused on treating disease.
There is not as much of an emphasis
on wellness and preventive healthcare.
So specifically, I wanna talk about berries as a super food.
And this is a picture of my son when he was three.
So he's now nine. That's six years ago.
But he was harvesting berries from my backyard
and bringing it to me because I had just had knee surgery.
And berries are a really excellent source of vitamin C
as well as anti-inflammatory properties.
So he was bringing me medicine,
but it also suggests the idea that medicine
is not just the encapsulation of phytochemicals in a berry.
It's also who is harvesting the medicine,
who is bringing the medicine, what is the context?
And as you can imagine,
my receptivity to berries from my cute little three-year-old
is going to create a different response in my body
than if I had just bought some from the store, for example.
So that's an important consideration.
But for the purposes of this conversation,
I am gonna get rather reductionist
and talk about the chemistry.
So the chemistry that has been shown
to be most potent in the berries
are these bioflavonoids.
So this is the class of phytochemicals
that are in all terrestrial plants.
They provide structure and sunscreen,
and they are considered anthocyanidins or anthocyanins,
depending on if they've been deglycosylated or not.
And these are the red, purple, and blue pigments.
So you all have seen these,
and if you get curious or have not done this before,
these red, purple, blue pigments respond to pH
and shift their color.
So they work essentially as a signal to the animal kingdom
that is consuming the seeds and are seed dispersers.
And as the fruit-
they're often in fruits-
become ripe and sweet,
they shift from red to blue.
Think of a blueberry.
And you can actually play around with this
if you have a little bit of blueberry juice
or cherry juice or elderberry syrup.
You can add lemon juice and you can add baking soda,
and as you shift the liquid from acid to alkaline,
the color's going to shift as well.
So it's a very simple pH-based pigment pattern.
And the berries provide...
We often think of berries as antioxidants.
So this is a comparison of the antioxidant capacity,
which is basically their capacity to quench free radicals,
or unstable electrons,
that might be present in the environment.
And as you can see,
elderberries, blueberries, or aronia berries,
which are all really able to grow in Vermont
and other temperate climates,
have really high antioxidant capacity.
And the part of me that wants to push locally-grown berries
is really happy with this chart,
because the more non-local berries,
like the noni berries, the goji berries, the cherries,
aren't scoring quite as high.
So don't just lean into the exotic berries.
You can also grow the local ones
and get the same potent medicine.
But saying that barriers are antioxidants
is really just speaking to one small part of their benefit.
They really act as a whole...
In a complex human body,
they act in a really complex and holistic way
to prevent oxidative damage in the body.
And I'm gonna speak specifically to cardiovascular disease.
So cardiovascular disease
is one of the leading causes of death in this country.
The disease of atherosclerosis,
or the hardening of the arteries,
the formation of plaques in the arteries,
leads to heart attack
when blood flow is occluded to the heart muscle
or stroke when blood flow is is blocked to feed the brain.
And I find that most of the general population
doesn't understand how plaque formation happens.
There's usually some understanding
that it has to do with cholesterol,
and that's why people are taking cholesterol-blocking drugs.
So I wanna take a moment
to just explain the physiology and the etiology,
pathophysiology of atherosclerosis
or cardiovascular disease,
and then explain specifically how the flavonoids in berries
help to prevent it
because I think it's important to know all of that
as a citizen in this country
where that disease is so prevalent.
So plaque formation is essentially
in response to irritation in the blood vessels.
So when we have high blood sugar,
which is related to diet, but also to stress,
when we are consuming poor-quality fats,
such as fried foods,
and when we have high blood pressure.
All of those are stressors
on the inner lining of the arteries.
And the way the body responds to irritation over time
is to form essentially a bandaid,
or something like a callous on your foot,
or a plaque.
An important thing to point out
is that the primary ingredient in the plaque is cholesterol.
So cholesterol is used as a building block
for plaque formation.
And when I learned about cardiovascular disease
in herbalism school,
my herbalism teacher Larken Bunce said,
"Think about this situation:
"Blaming cholesterol for heart disease
"is like when you're driving by a car accident
"on the side of the highway
"and there are ambulances there,
"and you blame the ambulances for the car accident."
Cholesterol is not the root cause of heart disease.
It's actually showing up to try and help the situation
after it's gotten off course.
The root cause of heart disease-
and this is now well substantiated in the literature-
is a combination of poor diet and stress
and inflammation in the vasculature.
So we're gonna talk a little bit more
about chronic inflammation
and the role that it plays in many diseases
throughout this course because it's really important.
But I wanna talk specifically
about how the flavonoids in berries
help to prevent this process of plaque formation
and ultimate blockage in the arteries.
So first of all,
flavonoids and berries have been shown
in the primary academic literature
to tone and protect the lining of the arteries.
It's basically a process of thickening
and making the arteries more resilient
and less prone to irritation and damage.
And they've actually shown
that a regular diet and exposure to flavonoids
actually thickens the arterial lining
in a way that is supportive to health
and helps to prevent plaque formation.
The flavonoids in berries also promote relaxation
of arterial walls.
And this photo down below of Hawthorne berries,
taken on UVM campus,
is an example of a plant that is effective
for lowering blood pressure
when taken in relatively large doses,
like a spoon full of Hawthorne jam every day.
And relaxation of the arterial walls
helps to prevent some of the mechanical damage
that can happen from high blood pressure.
The flavonoids and berries,
because they're antioxidants,
they can also prevent the oxidation of fats in the blood,
the blood lipids, and specifically the LDL,
which is correlated with heart disease.
These berries have a mild anti-clotting effect.
So a lot of times heart disease, heart attack,
and stroke can be caused by a clot,
and not only does plaque formation occlude the arteries,
but there's also a process that can happen
where the blood becomes more prone to clotting.
And so clots can also make the problem worse.
So there's a mild anti-clotting effect
provided by the flavonoids in dark berries.
Garlic or ginger
actually has a really potent anti-clotting effect.
So that's another super food that could be employed.
And these berries are anti-inflammatory at multiple levels.
And what I mean from a physiological perspective
is that they're anti-inflammatory at the tissue level.
I just described a couple of examples
that refer to kind of the tissue and organ level.
But they also are anti-inflammatory
through the epigenetic level
and actually interacting with the machinery
in the cell nucleus
to produce proteins and a certain environment
in the cell nucleus
that is anti-inflammatory rather than pro-inflammatory.
And Guido talks a little bit more about that
in his chapter on tonics in your textbook.
There's also a role that dark berries play
in increasing insulin sensitivity.
So insulin is related
to the body's processing of blood sugar.
And if there's less blood sugar
or sugar being stored in the blood
and the insulin helps the sugar move
from the blood into the cells and the tissues of the body,
then there's gonna be less damage from sugar
in the arteries.
And much of the research related to heart disease
and the strongest evidence
based from the perspective
of the primary scientific literature
speaks to Hawthorne berry.
So Hawthorne is this photo here.
It's in the rose and the apple family,
and there are about 50 Hawthorne trees
growing on UVM campus.
And I hope to share some photos with you
as the class progresses,
but will definitely be sharing a video of Hawthorne berries
that Beyla and I produced last semester.
So an important thing about super foods
is that they really only work if you can digest them
and prepare them adequately.
So I wanna speak a little bit to medicine-making
for enhanced bioavailability of these flavonoids.
And often, the traditional way of preparing them
actually aligns with the bioavailability,
so making jam, making syrup, making blueberry pie.
The heat, and ideally, using berries
that have been previously frozen
and then putting them into a pie
is the best way to use it.
These flavonoids are caught up in the cell walls,
or inside the cells of the skins of the berries,
in many cases.
So the freeze-thaw and the heating process,
the shifts in kinetic energy
actually helps to break open to cell walls
and release those flavonoids into the matrix
so that they can be better absorbed in your gut.
So aiming for frozen or processed as jam or syrup.
The dose is about 1/3 of a cup daily.
I prefer wild blueberries because they are smaller
and therefore have more skin-to-flesh ratio.
If you think about a smaller berry,
then there's gonna be much more skin
in 1/3 of a cup of wild blueberries
than 1/3 of a cup of conventional blueberries
because there's so much more pulp and flesh
in the fatter, big, plump berries.
And then combining with pungent.
So herbal pungent,
you know, there are things like garlic
which don't actually blend very well with berries,
but things like ginger and cinnamon,
which are traditionally included in elderberry syrups
and blueberry pies,
actually help by warming the digestion,
slightly irritating the skin of the digestive tract
and bringing blood flow to the area
to help better absorb these flavonoids,
which are actually quite hard to absorb on their own.
So having something warm and spicy
helps to absorb them better.
So the main takeaway with super foods-
and I have taught an entire class on super foods,
this is just a a subset of it-
is that these foods are super
at reducing chronic inflammation.
So they help to prevent these patterns of,
really, ultimately, irreversible tissue damage
that can happen over time,
often related to stress and poor diet
and certain lifestyles
that are ultimately damaging to our tissues.
And this is really important
in a time where many of the degenerative disease
that our population is suffering from
has its root in chronic inflammation.
And I spoke a little bit in the last video,
which was produced before COVID,
that COVID is an infectious disease,
but there's a correlation between these complications
of high blood pressure and diabetes
increasing risk of death from COVID.
So, they're definitely related,
and you could say that these chronic inflammatory diseases
are a risk factor as far as the severity of COVID
in this time of the pandemic.
Just gonna pause for a second.
So not only is there complexity to the pharmacology
of how plants interact with our bodies,
but to me, I see it as a grace and a beauty
that really comes out of the way
that humans and plants have co-evolved together.
And our bodies really have evolved with plants,
with plants being sort
of the first living organisms on this earth
and then animals emerging from plants
in this constant reciprocal relationship
that started with just the exchange
of carbon dioxide and oxygen in that relationship.
There's also this idea that I mentioned
about local plants helping us to adapt
to our local environmental conditions,
and so seeing our local plants as allies
in that bioregional adaptation.
And I think that thinking about these traditional remedies
for a modern public health context
is also relevant as well
when we're thinking about individual and family-level health
and local food as medicine
as well as a source of sustenance for our bodies.
And I love this quote from Guido's book
which you'll get to encounter later:
"The tonic, in its most positive sense,
"is an expression of love from the plant world to our own.
"It is evidence of our coevolution.
"Everywhere we look,
"we find locks in our bodies
"that are opened by these botanical allies."
And I wanna share some examples
about the ways that community herbalism
and plant-based medicine and local food
are enhancing at least the Burlington community
in the ways that I have found to incorporate herbal medicine
into my work in social and environmental justice
and community health and wellbeing.
And as I'm sharing these examples,
I really invite you to share some of your own.
You can be jotting them down
and also adding them to the class discussion platform,
but I'd really like to be building a list of examples
from all of the communities that you call home
of ways that plant medicine, and even food as medicine,
is relevant to your surroundings as well.
So I mentioned in the intro presentation
that I'm part of a long tradition of Vermonters,
starting with Adele Dawson,
who was a teacher for Rosemary Gladstar.
And Rosemary Gladstar was a teacher
for my Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism
class teachers, including Guido,
who's the author of "The Wild Medicine Solution".
You'll also have a chance
to learn from Carl Brokenhorse Koehler,
who is a Seneca medicine keeper.
And Carl and I first started out
as herbalist colleagues learning from each other.
I came to his class first.
He heard a little bit about me,
started coming to my classes.
And we've now crafted a friendship,
which includes being in the woods together
and doing wildcrafting,
but also teaching workshops together.
So you'll get a chance to learn from Carl in a few weeks.
And so seeing my sense of place rooted through herbalism
and other people in my community
that are plant lovers, plant advocates,
and also advocates for human health
and wellbeing and social justice.
One of the ways that I started,
this was actually something I started
in my final year of herbalism school back in 2013,
was creating a herbal "CSA",
so "community-supported herbalism",
which is based on the model of farm share CSA,
where members join an organization or a farm
at the beginning of the season,
and then, as members, they get shares throughout the season.
So this has now been running for five years now,
our herbal CSA through Spoonful Herbals.
To me, this was an opportunity to,
through providing remedies
such as elderberry syrup and wound salve
and bundles of sun tea in the middle of the summer,
it's an opportunity to introduce people
to how easy and delicious plant medicine is.
And these are all locally-crafted plant plants.
It's really just a way to introduce them to what's possible
and then provide recipes and inspiration and information
so that they can start to build these practices
into their own toolkit and into their own lives.
And I've absolutely seen that happening.
A number of our CSA members from the previous years
are now making their own batches
of fire cider and elderberry syrup
and encouraging their neighbors to do the same.
So this idea of wellness sovereignty
as a ripple effect of skill-sharing and re-skilling
is really important,
and also, again, this idea of embodied.
I don't just want to teach herbalism to people's brains.
I want them to also taste these plant preparations
and really experience it at that level
because that's the fundamental place where change happens,
is when we actually start consuming the plants.
After the first year of offering the CSA
where it was just myself
and one of my herbalism classmates, Rachael Keener,
we were pretty exhausted producing 40 bottles of,
15 different bottles of....
Well, so it was 40 bottles of 15 remedies.
So multiply that. That's a lot of medicine.
And ultimately, realizing that many of our CSA members
wanted to learn how to make the medicine.
So we started an apprenticeship program,
and it was at this time that Rachael transitioned out
and my colleague Kara Buchanan,
who's my coworker at Spoonful Herbals,
started the Community Herbalism Apprenticeship Program.
So this was really
just employing herbal medicine enthusiasts
who wanted to learn about growing and harvesting
and making plant medicine.
They became sort of our labor force for creating the CSA.
So this is a teaching and work study program.
There's a photo of us on Lake Champlain
out at Rock Point Beach,
braiding sweet grass that we've grown
in the garden together.
And that's the sweet grass
that came in your home medicine kits,
which you should save for the last week of class,
if you can bear it.
So this is a really great place to build those deeper skills
of wellness sovereignty.
So not just elderberry syrup works for a cold,
but here's how to identify elderberry,
here's how to harvest it and when to harvest it,
here's how to make it into medicine,
here's how to store it for my family,
and hey, I can teach my neighbors how to do this.
So the vision of Spoonful Herbals
is really to keep that skill-sharing going
so that the population has this level of knowledge.
I also was noticing just an abundance of plant medicine
that was growing on organic farms in Vermont
in the form of weeds,
also on UVM campus.
That's me on the right
harvesting Hawthorne flowers from Votey.
And some of those trees were taken down
in the recent construction,
but there are still a few Hawthorne trees around Votey
and more around Marsh Life Science.
So this idea of medicinal plant gleaning
and a partnership we have with Salvation Farms
and their Vermont Gleaning Collective.
We are the only organization
that's supporting gleaning of medicinal plants.
There are many food gleaning organizations in Vermont,
but with the idea of closing a distribution gap
and acknowledging that there's an abundance
of plant medicine in the landscape,
and if we can bring a lot of volunteers,
folks who are interested
in learning about harvesting herbal medicine,
to a site and harvest it,
provide the infrastructure for drying and processing it.
And a lot of our local herbs get sold
to Railyard apothecary at market price.
And I hope I'll get to show you some comparisons.
A lot of the quality of the herbs that we're able to provide
because they're harvested with such care
and they're processed really effectively,
we have much higher quality of herbs
than what can be bought in the marketplace.
Things like the red clover that you buy in the marketplace
often looks more brown rather than the purple-red clover
that you'll see in the campus herb walk video this week.
So it's exceptional quality
but at the same price
as what they would be paying market rate.
And it's also a way to just make that local medicine
available to the local community.
We're also in a new partnership right now,
led by Carl Brokenhorse
and his activist colleague and friend Arthur Blackhawk,
creating a new initiative called Free Pharm,
spelled P-H-A-R-M.
And that's specifically working with local Indigenous groups
and leaders in the Abenaki community
to provide opportunities for medicinal plant gleaning
for Indigenous people that are living here in Vermont,
and not only providing them
with access to clean lands for harvesting their medicine
if they don't have access to it,
but also harvesting culturally-appropriate medicines
and processing it for them
so that they can use medicines
that feel culturally appropriate for them.
And then, of course, Railyard Apothecary,
which helped me to produce your home health kits
and ship them out.
I'm one of the co-founders of Railyard Apothecary.
Guido and I are the original founders,
and then we've since recruited other amazing herbalists
to work with us there at the clinic in the apothecary.
And this is really designed to be a hub year-round
for this type of movement.
So providing the herbs
in a really delightful retail setting.
There's also a browsing library,
where you can go and sit and have free tea
and read the library books once we reopen from the pandemic.
And a lot of classes right now available online,
but in person once we reopen,
that is really around supporting this concept
of plant-based wellness and social justice
and herbal justice.
So all of these just connect to a vibrant local food
and a local medicine system,
which is something that I've been trying
to cultivate for years,
and we're just at the beginning here.
There are many other initiatives
that my herbalist and activist colleagues
are engaged in here in Burlington.
These are just a few that I'm contributing to
and have been involved in leading directly.
There's also Jeff and Melanie Carpenter,
pictured here on the right,
who I worked with them several years ago
to create Vermont Herb Growers Co-Op.
So this was a way for folks who are farmers
who are growing medicinal plants
to team up together, ensure a certain level of quality,
and aggregate their supply into larger batches
so they can sell to big companies, such as Urban Moonshine.
So also trying to create a market
for producers of herbal medicine.
So there's lots of different ways
that you can look at a system,
look for opportunities and threats,
and try and create and strengthen that system,
which is like probably a lifetime of work,
and I'm only about five or six years into that.
There's the distribution system.
And I wanna end here with a quote
and then some more resources.
And this is a quote from D.H. Lawrence,
and of course ending with this beautiful sunset here
over the ridgeline.
"Oh, what a catastrophe,
"what a maiming of love when it was made a personal,
"merely personal feeling.
"taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun,
"and cut off from the magic connection
"of the solstice and the equinox.
"This is what is the matter with us.
"We are bleeding at the roots,
"because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars,
"and love is a grinning mockery,
"because, poor blossom,
"we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life,
"and expected it to keep on blooming
"in our civilized vase on the table."
So I wanted that quote to land with you
before sharing what it means to me.
And to me, this is a fundamental piece of herbalism.
It's that, is acknowledging this disconnection
from ourselves and from the natural world
that modern life continues to encourage.
And herbal medicine to me is a modern pathway
back to being connected to the earth
and being connected to our bodies.
And it opens up lots of cans of worms,
as you'll find in this class.
And I'm grateful for your patients and your courage
for engaging with these issues as we move forward.
But my hope is that herbal medicine
is about all of you finding your roots in some way
as you engage with these plant teachers.
So here's some resources to get involved beyond this class,
which I highly encourage.
The UVM Herb Club is an active club on campus,
and Beyla, the TA, can provide more information about that
if you're not already involved.
There is a Facebook group,
and they were meeting weekly on campus.
I'm not sure if they've continued to meet with the pandemic,
but definitely something to look for in the fall semester,
either online or otherwise.
Railyard, I mentioned,
as a resource for ongoing classes and events,
and they do offer a student discount
for their classes and events.
You can check out Spoonful Herbals.
I think that's actually...
You've already looked at the website
'cause it was assigned to you as a reading,
but that's where you can find out
more about some of our programs
to promote access and connection to backyard plant medicine.
And then, if you're interested in,
I definitely encourage you
to do a one-on-one consultation at some point
around specific wellness goals
or specific health concerns that you might have.
And they're essentially personalized wellness lessons
with a focus on herbs.
I don't see my students as clients,
and I'm actually not seeing clients this summer
because I'm home with my son
and have limited time to see clients,
but I would encourage you
to set up a remote consultation with one of my colleagues
if you're interested in getting more information.
And there's sliding scale clinical consultations
available through the Vermont Herb Center, .org,
which is basically conducted by clinical herbalist interns,
so students who are in their final year
of learning to be a clinical herbalist.
Guido is one of the instructors and supervisors
of that clinic,
and that's a great way to get information,
but they also offer herbs on a sliding scale.
So you can get that information for 10 or $20.
You can get a full comprehensive wellness consult.
So something to look into
if that's something that you're interested in.
And with that, I'm gonna end this presentation,
and I look forward to your thoughts and discussions
on the class discussion board.
Thanks, everyone, and be well.