[♪♪♪]
[bird tweeting]
-Good morning, Bioneers.
Morning.
That's a phrase
my wife likes to use
when she's here,
and unfortunately
she's not here today
because she has a bad cold.
So I am pinch-hitting,
and I hope
you'll give me some leeway
for improvising a bit
as we go along.
I am here to introduce
Dr. Mark Plotkin,
who is a healer
and a man
whose life journey,
I'll think you'll find,
that combines a great deal
of what
we are all interested in.
And also I want to say
that Laurie and I
have been coming
to the Bioneers conferences now
for about 25 years, and...
-[cheering and applause]
-Thank you.
And it just gets better
and bigger
and more wonderful.
So thank you Kenny and Nina
and everyone.
Okay, so jumping right in.
Two weeks ago,
the world awoke
to the very disappointing news
that voters in Colombia
had rejected the peace treaty
with FARC,
a guerrilla group
which had been fighting
the people and the government
for more than 50 years.
During that time,
tens of thousands of people
died.
The one-time leftist rebels
had made common cause
with the drug traffickers,
and Colombia
became
one of the most dangerous places
in the world.
Still, hammering out
the treaty years in the making
has helped turned the tide
for Colombia.
The mere prospect
was rewarded
with such anticipation
that
President Juan Manuel Santos
was given the Nobel Peace Prize
two weeks ago.
Yet
a slight majority of Colombians
voted against it.
Like the Brexit vote,
the results
are a sobering lesson
of just how wrong
pollsters can be,
and voters too.
Please, God, help us.
-[murmurs and clapping
from audience]
-[Benenson chuckles]
-[applause rises]
-What can I say?
The good news, however,
is the peace treaty
was the stepping stone
for an incredibly
exciting foundation
that is being laid
in Colombia.
Less visual
but equally important
are agreements being signed
that will not only preserve
millions of acres
in the Colombian Amazon Basin
from environmental degradation
but will help to protect
the cultural integrity
of the uncontacted tribes
who live there.
I have the pleasure this morning
of introducing you
to one of the pivotal figures
in that achievement,
Mark Plotkin,
who you will soon hear from.
When Mark was a college dropout,
he happened upon Professor
Richard Schultes' night class
in 1974,
while working
at a Harvard museum.
It was a turning point
in Mark's life.
He made his way
down to South America
and became involved
with indigenous people there,
which he will explain
and I will not trouble you with.
So I would like very much
to introduce you now
to a man who, with his wife,
has, for more than 40 years
worked in the Amazon,
and his activities,
along with Liliana Madrigal,
they created
the Amazon Conservation Team,
which has worked tirelessly
in Colombia and elsewhere,
and has taken the neglected
and often destroyed lands
and the danger
of people being literally killed
because of newcomers coming in,
and they have been able
to preserve more areas
than I know
virtually anyone else ever has.
So please welcome a healer
and a fantastic uniter,
Dr. Mark Plotkin.
-[applause and cheering]
-Thank you all.
Thank you, Bill.
Thank you, Kenny and Nina.
Thanks
to many friends and supporters
in the audience
that make my work
possible.
Thanks
to my indigenous teachers,
who had the patience
to keep instructing me
for over three decades,
and I'm still learning.
Now, I'm here this morning
to tell you
why ethnobotanists like myself
don't read science fiction.
This is not a picture
of a spider.
This is a picture of a fungus.
It's my favorite fungus.
It's called cordyceps.
Cordyceps lives quiescent
on the forest floor
and waits
for insects and arachnids
to go past.
Once they do that,
the fungus attaches itself
to the insect exoskeleton.
Once it's on that,
the fungus burns a hole
in the insect exoskeleton.
It then inserts itself
inside the insect exoskeleton.
It then proceeds
to devour virtually all
of the insect's
non-vital organs.
Once it's done that,
the fungus invades
the insect brain,
eating only a part
of the insect brain,
causing the insect to climb
to the top of the tallest tree
in the forest.
Once it does that,
the fungus eats
the rest of the insect brain,
thereby causing
the insect exoskeleton
to split open,
thereby allowing the fungus
to release its spores
120 feet
above the forest floor.
-[audience murmuring
and clapping]
-This is why ethnobotanists
do not read science fiction.
-[laughter]
-This fungus is the source
of cyclosporine.
This is an immunosuppressant
that makes
organ transplant surgery
possible.
Nature is a deep treasure-chest
of mysteries,
and most of them
still remain.
As I said,
I'm an ethnobotanist.
I've been at this a long time.
I've had
the honour and privilege
of working with Amazon peoples
for over three decades,
and as I said,
I'm still learning.
I'm here to tell you
these people know these forests
and these healing substances
far better than we do,
and far better
than we ever will.
And here's a case in point.
I was co-teaching a class
in conservation and healing
with the great Trio shaman,
Amasina,
a few years ago
in the Brazilian Amazon.
I developed a terrible case
of conjunctivitis, pinkeye,
and there was a physician
taking our course,
and I asked her
if she had any meds,
and she said,
"Yeah, I've got some pills
and some salve.
If you take this stuff,
you'll be better in four days."
I turned to Amasina and said,
"What do you got?"
He gave me this
cat-and-the-canary smile
and said,
"Give me your machete."
He walked over to a palm tree
just a few metres away,
scraped off the bark, peeled it,
squeezed out the sap,
dripped it into my eyes,
and three hours later,
my eyes had stopped itching,
and the next morning
I woke up
and my infection was gone.
-[applauding and cheering]
-Who would you rather
be treated by?
-[laughter]
-This is the magic frog
used by Indians
on the Peru-Brazil border
for healing and divination.
I featured this in the TED talk
I gave in Rio de Janeiro
a year-and-a-half ago,
and when I finished my talk,
I packed up my equipment
and headed to Kwamalasamutu,
our headquarters
in the northeast Amazon.
I took out my computer
and gave my TED talk
in the local language
to the shamans and apprentices
you see here.
I got to the magic frog slide,
and the fellow to my right,
Kamainja, a Waiwai shaman,
said, "Wait a minute,
wait a minute.
"We know that frog!
"We have it here.
We use it for healing
and divination."
And I said, "No, you don't.
"This frog only lives
in the Amazon
2,500 miles west of here."
He said, "Oh yeah,
it lives in the canopy.
You've never seen it."
And I said,
"I've been working here
for 33 years.
Why did you never tell me?"
He said, "You've been working
here for 33 years.
Why did you never ask me?"
-[laughter]
-The point here
being that, as an ethnobotanist,
I was sent to the jungle
by Dr. Schultes
to look for healing plants,
but we're still finding
new things--
new to us, old to them.
This is the great shaman
Nahtahla.
I worked with him
for over a decade,
and one day we took a break
from collecting plants,
and he went over to an ant hill,
stirred it up,
and applied the ants
to the inside of his elbows.
They bit him,
and he knocked 'em off.
And I said,
"What's that for?"
He said,
"For my arthritis."
And I said,
"But I asked you
"if you used anything
besides plants
for ailments."
And he said, "Look," he said,
"You're a plant guy, okay,
"and I don't mind teaching you
a bit more about plants.
"You don't know anything
about insects,
"and I'm not going
to waste my time
teaching you."
-[laughter]
-Here's a fungus collected
by my colleague Wade Davis,
who I know has spoken
at Bioneers in the past,
a fellow student
of Dr. Schultes.
This is actually a lichen, okay.
Lichens are the cross-dressers
of the biological world.
They're kind of fungi
and they're kind of algae,
and they form
this unique combination.
When Wade went to work
with the Waorani
in the Ecuadorean Oriente,
where Lynne Twist's organization
works,
the Waorani told him
that "we use this lichen
as a hallucinogen."
Now, there's no hallucinogenic
lichens known,
but Wade wrote it down
and published it
in the Harvard Botanical Museum
leaflets.
Just a year ago, in Evolve and Ascend magazine,
it gave the account
of people who went back
to the forest,
found this lichen,
looked at it in the lab,
and it's full
of hallucinogenic compounds.
Hallucinogens,
like these magic mushrooms,
in the hands of shamans
are vegetal scalpels
that they use to understand,
diagnose, treat,
and sometimes cure
the human mind.
And that is why
they can sometimes do things
that our own shamans cannot.
However, they sometimes
have different uses
in our own hands
because beta blockers,
a multi, multi,
multi-million dollar
class of drugs
came
out of these magic mushrooms
first found and used
by the Mazatec Indians
of southern Mexico.
Unfortunately,
none of the monies
ever flowed back
to the Indians
or to Mexico.
This is not an acceptable way
of doing business.
-[applause]
-Shamanic medicine
is based on two pillars,
as is our own medicine.
Our own medicine is based
on chemistry,
what's in the pills,
and technologies--
MRI, CAT scans,
bloodwork, X-rays.
And shamanic medicine
is based on chemistry as well--
what's in the plants
and the lichens
and the insects.
It's also based on magic--
spirituality,
the placebo effect,
the invisible world,
whatever you want to call it.
It can't be explained
through the prism
of Western science and language,
but sometimes, sometimes,
sometimes it works
when our own medicine
falls flat.
-[applause]
-This is my mentor,
Professor Schultes,
on the scene
of his greatest discovery,
ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca was discovered--
discovered,
as white men find things...
-[laughter]
-Like Columbus
discovered America,
same principle--
but Schultes
always paid his debt
and gave thanks
to the people who taught him.
What you see
to his right-- or, left,
is the first shaman,
Salvador Chindoy,
who is the one
who taught Schultes
about ayahuasca.
Schultes raced back to Harvard,
published this
in the Harvard Botanical Museum
Leaflets
where it was read
by about 12 people
and nobody else
for about 40 years,
and all of a sudden
it's being argued
in front of the Supreme Court,
and you can buy it
on the Internet.
This is revolutionizing
the way we treat many diseases
around the world.
This is an ayahuasca master,
one of the seven
original ayahuasca tribes
who taught Schultes
the use of the sacred vine.
I brought this man
to meet a foundation official
in Los Angeles
to get some support
to protect his rainforest
and protect his culture.
And the foundation official,
who spoke pretty good Spanish,
turned to the medicine man
and said,
"You didn't go
to medical school, did you?"
-[laughter]
-And the shaman said,
"No, I'm a medicine man."
And the guy looked at him
and said,
"Well, then, what can you know
about healing?"
-[audience murmuring]
-I still don't believe this.
And the shaman looked at him
and he smiled, and he said,
"You know what,
"if you get an infection,
go to a doctor,
"but many human afflictions
"or diseases of the heart,
the mind, and the soul,
"Western medicine
can't touch that.
I heal it."
-[cheering]
-So the most pristine
rainforests
of the world
are in the Amazon basin,
where I have the privilege
to work.
And the rainforest
has not revealed
all of her mysteries.
Here is the greatest
archaeological discovery
of the 21st century,
the Lost City of the Monkey God,
searched for
for 500 years,
and found using LiDAR
by Bill Benenson,
who introduced me.
-[applause and cheering]
-But the wonder drugs
of tomorrow
are being turned
into a wasteland today
with the felling of the forest,
uncontrolled mining.
The wonder drugs
are being turned into smoke
and nothing more.
This is the most important image
I'm going to show you.
I took this
in a single-engine Cessna
flying over the Xingu reserve
in southeastern Brazil
in the state of Mato Grosso.
At the top of the picture
is where the Indians live.
That's the reserve.
The horizontal line
running through the picture
is the border of the reserve.
It doesn't get any clearer
anywhere in the world
in any image you have ever seen
about why indigenous culture,
in many cases, has it right,
and we need to learn
from them.
-[applause and cheering]
-At the top of the picture,
top of the picture,
14 tribes
in pristine rainforest.
Bottom of the picture,
white guys.
Top of the picture,
biodiversity.
Bottom of the picture,
just a couple
of skinny-ass cows.
Top of the picture,
carbon
sequestered in the rainforest
where it belongs.
Bottom, carbon released
in the atmosphere.
In fact, we know
that the #2 driver
of climate change
is destruction
of the world's forest.
You want to fight climate
change?
Protect the forest.
-Yeah!
-Whoo!
-Whoo!
-So let me take you
to the northeast Amazon,
where I've been working
for many decades,
to the country of Suriname,
formerly
known as Dutch Guiana,
one of the most pristine
rainforest countries
in the world,
and to the village
of Kwamalasamutu,
which is the indigenous capital
of the northeast Amazon.
The Trio Indians
came to my organization,
the Amazon Conservation Team,
and said, "We want title
to our lands,
"and we went
to the government
"and they said,
'Where's your map?'
"And we didn't know
what a map was.
"So now we know,
"and we want
the Amazon Conservation Team
to help us."
And I said,
"We will help you."
And they said,
"So you'll make a map for us?"
I said, "No."
They said,
"But you said you'd help us."
I said, "We will."
They said,
"So you'll make a map."
And I said,
"No, we won't make a map.
You'll make the map."
We trained them
to map their own lands,
and what you see here...
is the perfect marriage
of ancient shamanic wisdom
and 21st-century technology.
-[applause]
-When we started 15 years ago,
this was the best aerial imagery
we could get.
Each pixel is 30 metres across.
Thanks to our partnership
with DigitalGlobe,
these Indians have access
to the best
aerial photography and imagery
on the planet.
A single pixel
used to be 30 metres across.
Today it's 30 centimetres.
-Whoo!
-We went
from a third of a football field
to a banana leaf.
This gives the Indians
the upper leg, the upper hand
in dealing
with the outside world
on their own terms.
-[applause]
-So the original maps,
made by Westerners flying
over these rainforests,
were blank,
a few rivers.
These maps show
that these are rainforests
full of wonder and meaning,
and these people know them
far better than we do.
A single map
can have a single icon on it,
and when you click
on the icon,
it opens up with a story,
a legend,
or ecological information
or medicinal history.
Our organization,
the Amazon Conservation Team
now,
has now taken this methodology
and partnered with 35 tribes
to map, manage, and improve
the protection
of 80 million acres
of ancestral rainforest.
-[applause and cheering]
-And as Tiffany said
at the outset,
we need to think
about education,
starting with youth.
We've taken these maps
and turned them into textbooks.
Schools and remote villages
are usually built
by missionaries,
so the kids are learning
all about cows, pigs, and Jesus.
-[laughter]
-With these maps,
they're learning
about shamans and matriarchs
and healing magic
and legends and handicrafts.
-[cheering]
-But we work from the inside out
and the bottom up.
We start
with the indigenous cultures.
We then move
to the neighbouring cultures.
This is a Maroon
from Suriname.
They live north of these Indians
in the northeast Amazon.
These are descendants
of escaped slaves
who got off the slave ships
and said,
"Equatorial rainforest?
See you white boys later."
And they ran off
in the interior
where these warriors
maintain independent lifestyles
to the current day.
And we've sent in
our indigenous cartographers
to teach the Maroons
how to preserve
their oral history,
their culture,
and their rainforest
as well.
And we've done this now
throughout South America
so that the Indians
are working with the Maroons,
the other Afro-Americans,
the Campesinos,
the peasants, the caboclos,
the Brazilian peasants,
and the governments
as well.
Good conservation
is about building alliances
and bridges
and bringing people together
to make a better
common tomorrow.
I want to take you
to the most important
protected area
in northwestern South America,
land of the Kogis,
the so-called Dalai Lamas
of South America,
the most traditional peoples
who live at the top
of the Sierra Nevada
de Santa Marta.
These
are the most traditional people
I have ever met.
These are the people
who came down
from their mountain fastness.
This is a Kogi village.
If you went there
5,000 years ago,
it would look
exactly the same.
25 years ago,
they came down
from their glaciers
and said, "Hey,
"what are you little brothers
doing down there?
Our glaciers are melting."
And everybody said,
"Ha, ha, ha,
look at those funny little
white hats."
Well, we didn't listen.
We ignored the canaries
in the coal mine
talking about climate change.
And using these types
of Google flyovers,
we can put
the power of technology
in their hands.
This mountain
is the ultimate
rain and water source
in northwestern South America.
All of the major rivers
come out of there,
and the Kogis
protect these forests,
protect these glaciers,
and go down to the ocean,
the source of all life
in their cosmology,
to protect
their sacred sites,
the spots you see here,
and do it, now,
in partnership with our work.
This is Liliana Madrigal,
our co-founder,
sitting with a political leader
of the Kogi, Santos Sauna,
to plot the future together.
And they are always
making pilgrimage
from the sea
to the mountain top
to provide offerings
to the gods,
to make it down to the sea
to collect sea shells to crush
to chew with their coca,
which is their sacred plant,
which releases the alkaloids.
And they're now doing it
with tablets,
with mapping apps...
-[audience murmuring, chuckling]
-And with smart phones,
the perfect marriage
of ancient shamanic wisdom
and 21st-century technology.
Kenny talked
about how it's all connected.
Here it's mapped.
They're mapping
spiritual connections
that we can't see
because we're not Kogis,
and they're using technology
to do it.
So I want to finish
by going
to Chiribiquete National Park
in the Colombian Amazon,
which is the most important
protected area
in South America.
Chiribiquete was first explored
by my mentor, Schultes, in 1943.
He found a wonderland
of biodiversity
and sacred sites.
So just like with the Kogis,
we need to protect
these sacred sites
and the biodiversity
and the artwork.
Schultes found
the richest repository
of pre-Columbian art
ever discovered.
There's 200,000 paintings.
There may be as many as 900,000.
And something else--
isolated and uncontacted tribes.
Isolated and uncontacted
tribes
hold a mystical role
in our imagination.
These are the people
who know nature best,
these people who truly
are part of the ecosystem.
These are the people
that embody
the secrets of the rainforest
and know it far better
than any one of us ever will.
Unfortunately,
these people are under threat.
This
is the most threatened species
in the Amazon rainforest,
isolated, uncontacted people
surrounded on all sides
by loggers and miners
and narcotraffickers.
These are Mashcos,
who stumbled out of the jungle
seeking help
because they were being shot at
and their malocas
were being burned.
Chiribiquete, fortunately,
is now twice the size
of what it was,
thanks to our work,
and with Colombian colleagues
to protect the isolated
and uncontacted peoples,
who,
thanks to President Santos'
bold leadership,
now have protection
they never enjoyed before.
-[applause and cheering]
-There are at least three
isolated tribes
living in the boundary
of this protected area,
and we suspect there may be
as many as 14.
Now, if this picture,
in conclusion,
looks a little out of focus,
it's because
it was obviously
taken in a hurry.
-[laughter]
-Why don't you fly low and slow
over isolated Indian villages?
-[applause and laughter]
-But this looks
like it was taken in a hangar
in the Brazilian Amazon.
This is an art exhibit
in Havana, Cuba,
their perception
of why you don't fly
low and slow
over isolated Indian villages.
So let me conclude
on a note of hope.
We're building guard posts
to keep the outside world
at bay--
no miners, no loggers,
no missionaries.
-[applause and cheering]
-We're manning that post
with the Colombian
national park service
and local indigenous peoples.
Here, the Witoto tribe
to the south of Chiribiquete
are mapping their lands
using our methodology
to keep the outsiders out
and protect their isolated,
uncontacted brothers and sisters
safe.
And we've created
an indigenous park guard force
to protect these rainforests,
these plants,
these animals, these lichens,
these healing,
magical mysteries.
So, in conclusion,
the question
is what's the fate
of these people?
Shamans
say it's all interconnected.
I believe--
and I know
I'm not the only one here
who believes this--
that it's all interconnected.
Their fate is our fate.
We're Bioneers.
That's better than pioneers,
because we don't leave
environmental destruction
and cultural genocide
in our wake.
So, as Bioneers,
let's blaze a trail
to a world
in which indigenous peoples map,
manage, and protect their lands.
Let's blaze a trail
to a world
in which climate change
is for the better,
not the worse.
And let's blaze a trail
to a world
where these shamans
live in luxuriant forests
and cure themselves and us
with their magical plants,
their hallucinogenic lichens,
and their sacred frogs.
Thank you very much.
-[cheering]
