| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Reviews Journeyman Shaman Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature's Healing Secrets, by Mark Plotkin. Viking, New York, NY, 2000, 240 pp., $22.95 cloth. Medicine Quest is a delightful surprise. It is not, as some may assume from the title, a narrow argument for "natural" therapies, but rather a compelling tale of the increasingly vital interface between natural compounds and their development into conventional drugs. As it happens, the vast majority of prescribed drugs have been discovered and produced in this way. While the story of the anticancer drug Taxol-derived from yew tree bark-is quite well known, we might not realize until we read this book how often such stories recur. For example, the anticlotting drug (and rat poison!) warfarin is derived from spoiled clover, and a soil fungus was the source of the anticholesterol drug Mevacor. Snake venom has many active ingredients which have been used in the development of important cardiovascular drugs, such as the ace inhibitors and the clotting inhibitor agent tirofiban. Nature has had a long head start in evolving defensive and offensive chemicals that enable the survival of organisms in hostile environments. As described by ethnobotanist and author Mark Plotkin, who also wrote Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, this process often yields compounds of a complexity unimaginable by even the most gifted chemists. By understanding how natural hosts use these compounds, chemical components can be isolated and modified by scientists to increase their potential as drugs. Even better is knowing how people and animals, in their traditional environment, use natural compounds as medicinals. A growing tragedy discussed by the author is the rapid disappearance, through death or assimilation, of indigenous populations that hold knowledge of natural medical sources. Even the languages of these people are disappearing and, along with them, keys to finding potential sources of important new drugs. As new diseases and more resistant infectious organisms emerge, the search for new drugs has become even more critical. Lest it sound as though Medicine Quest is a dry narrative, be assured that it is highly readable and quite entertaining. Who wouldn't be interested to learn more about the origins of Spanish fly, or how maggots, bedbugs, and cobwebs are used in medicine? Plotkin supplements these and many other fascinating stories with important points. Such as why many of these seemingly strange applications have been independently discovered and applied by widely scattered cultures. Medicine Quest can be enthusiastically recommended and should help us understand the precious natural resources we are so rapidly losing. As Plotkin stresses, we must act swiftly to learn from threatened cultures how they benefit from their unique and rich knowledge of natural remedies to prevent or treat illness. Only by investing in the further isolation and modification of natural compounds can we continue a successful pharmaceutical effort that has so clearly been of immense benefit. We must move beyond our artificial concepts of "natural" versus "conventional" medicines and support rather than exploit the complex human tapestry. Encounters With Birds The Gift of Birds: True Encounters with Avian Spirits, Larry Habegger and Amy G. Carlson, Editors. Travelers' Tales, Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1999, 322 pp., $17.95 paper. Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, by Christopher Cokinos. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York, NY, 2000, 359 pp., $24.95 cloth. What is it about birds-their similarities to us, their differences, their ability to take to the sky, or something more intangible-that causes us to travel ridiculous distances and stand transfixed for hours, binoculars glued to our eyes, to see, to experience them? That desire-to connect with birds in some way-is the subject of each of these books. In Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Christopher Cokinos takes that longing one step further, traveling to swamps, prairies, forests, museums, and zoos to visit the last-known whereabouts of six extinct species. Cokinos chronicles the ignorance and greed of hunters, ordinary people, and even scientists that caused the demise of the Carolina parakeet, ivory-billed woodpecker, heath hen, passenger pigeon, Labrador duck, and great auk. He also documents the heroic, but futile, attempts by a few to stop the destruction. In contrast, The Gift of Birds describes encounters with living birds, "avian spirits," who have transformed writers' lives. Most of the stories are brief and immediate; a few, like Pamela Conely's description of swimming underwater amid a flock of diving pelicans, are breathtaking. Some of the encounters take place in exotic settings; others in backyards or even in homes. Pete Dunne watches the gleam return to his recuperating father's eyes as he identifies his first redpoll at a backyard feeder. Bernd Heinrich regales us with the ways in which his everyday routines are turned upside down after he takes in an orphaned owl. Some encounters are momentary but have a lasting impact on the writer nonetheless. Larry Habegger finds himself in awe of a downed hummingbird, a "ray of sunshine," that suddenly connects him to the larger world. For Leonard Nathan, the act of birdwatching is a transcendental event: "...the electric experience...when hope or surprise meets intense presence.... The meaning and mystery of otherness." David James Duncan is changed forever by an encounter with a bird. After coming across and then turning his back on an injured grebe, deeming it too difficult to rescue, Duncan finds himself haunted by its eyes. He becomes unable to walk away from a bird in distress, to the point of occasionally jeopardizing his own safety, darting into traffic to remove a stunned owl, for example. Realizing that he's "in so far over his head [he'll] need wings to get out," Duncan discovers that "the spirit in which we see can be the difference between life and death." Klamath Conflicts Balancing Water, photographs by Tupper Ansel Blake and Madeleine Graham Blake; text by William Kittredge. University of California Press, 2000, 178 pp., $39.95 cloth. Since the 1980s, when conservative political interests dismissed environmentalists as religious extremists and locked them out of government councils, a number of thoughtful environmentalists have tried to show that building sustainable community is part of protecting biodiversity. You might, depending on your personal cynicism or your proximity to an oil company lobbyist, regard this effort as just romantic fancy, a linking of unrelated things like morality and power or beauty and contentment. But at root, there are genuinely common grounds between respect for human diversity and respect for biological diversity, and they include modesty, complexity, generosity, greater resources in the struggle for survival, and vaster spiritual opportunities. William Kittredge has been thinking about these linkages for three decades in books and essays about how the American West redefines itself. In Balancing Water, he looks at the almost insoluble legal, political, and biological conflicts in the Klamath Basin, astride the California-Oregon border. The Klamath still is one of the hemisphere's natural wonders, a spectacular complex of streams, lakes, and marshes that draws huge concentrations of migratory waterfowl and shorebirds. In the first half of the century, despite the existence of large wildlife refuges, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation drained 80 percent of the wetlands and turned them into productive farmlands. By the end of the century, Klamath bird and fish populations were in decline, endangered species listings were lengthening, and everyone was arguing over the allocation and quality of water. Klamath Basin ranchers and farmers are now being urged-and sometimes sued-by Native Americans and environmental advocates to make some tough choices about the cattle, water diversions, and pesticides that degrade bird and fish habitat. Large-scale watershed planning, chancy consensus group politics, and shark-suited lawyers now vie with the West's traditionally rugged cowpoke individualism. Prospects for general happiness are not good. Photographer Tupper Ansel Blake's intimate and spectacular images of the land and its wildlife make the case for protection. Blake's genius is to give us the creature in its setting without urging us to pretend we know what is in its heart. His sermon is simply that we owe it to the world to look carefully, and to consider, and that the relationship between creature and setting is what we need to see. It is a fitting message for this book. His images also continually remind us that spiritual rewards come from looking outward, rather than into the vanities of our own citified hearts. In 1992, Blake and his wife, Madeleine Graham Blake, a photographer and former exhibit designer at the Academy, bought 30 acres of dusty hay ranch in the Klamath and began the work of turning it back into wetlands. They became, in Blake's word, "duckaroos," regarded with some suspicion by their more traditional "buckaroo" neighbors. Blake and former Klamath wildlife refuge manager Robert Fields developed the idea for the book and brought Kittredge, who grew up ranching and farming in the nearby Jordan Valley, in as writer. Madeleine Graham Blake, whose dignified black-and-white portraits of local ranchers and farmers make a visual case for the Klamath's human culture, also grew up in Klamath Falls. All of them bring to the project authentic roots in the basin, and all share their gifts eloquently and gracefully. The Klamath remains an unsolved problem. But Kittredge's text shows that a human sense of "communality" is going to be necessary to solve the Klamath's problems and those of the rest of the American West. Before biodiversity has a chance, respect for human diversity must come of age. Recommended Reading from the Editors' Desks On the Trail of John Muir, by Cherry Good. Luath Press Limited, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2000, 131 pp., U.S. $14.95 paper. Take the title literally, for this thorough guidebook not only takes you along John Muir's path-from his birth and severely disciplined preteen years in Scotland to the many fruitful years of impassioned advocacy of wilderness that made him famous in the U.S.-but gives you directions and contact information necessary to find the many places he called home. Author Cherry Good offers a quick biographical overview with a reverential, yet realistic, portrayal of the life and times of Muir as his path unfolds before him. Muir had a sense of connection with the wilderness that is rare today. Several times he left his wife and children for months at a time to explore untouched lands; yet he was also a dedicated friend and father. Good ventures into Muir's own mind, recreating times of stress and hope with excerpts of the naturalist's own journal writings. The result is a quick read that makes you not only want to follow the many trails John Muir blazed, but to wish he was hiking along with you. |