Ethnobotanist says life mission to save indigenous culture is native to Judaism

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — From Harvard Yard to the Amazon rainforest, it’s been an unconventional but prolific trajectory for Jewish-American environmentalist Mark Plotkin.

As an ethnobotanist, Plotkin, 64, researches the medicinal plants of the Amazon, as well as the shamans who use them to heal ailments in the world’s largest rainforest. Plotkin also participates in multi-day ceremonies using sacred hallucinogenic plants — some of which, he says, might bring medicinal benefits to the West.

Plotkin and the US-based nonprofit he heads, the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), help indigenous communities protect their knowledge and lands from the encroachment of the modern world. During an interview with The Times of Israel in Harvard Square, he said that some of these communities speak English and wear modern attire, but others have not been previously contacted by Western civilization.

Plotkin has been working with some of the same indigenous communities and shamans for almost 40 years. Now he is getting new recognition. On May 28, he was honored by Harvard with the Michael Shinagel Award for Service, named after the university’s longest-serving dean, a Holocaust refugee, who retired from his deanship in 2016 and from teaching this year.

He has also written about his work in multiple books, including “Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice,” now in its 40th printing. Plotkin’s 2014 TED talk about protecting indigenous communities has received over 1.5 million views, and his IMAX film “Amazon” earned an Academy Award nomination. (He told his TED audience that his own injured foot was cured by a shaman after Western medicine failed.)

But the Shinagel Award carries added significance. It’s the highest honor given by the Harvard Extension School, from which Plotkin received a degree in 1979. And it’s named after a friend and fellow Jew, with a poignant life experience, who was dean of the Extension School during Plotkin’s years there.

“It’s particularly moving as a Jew to even know, or meet, or see a Holocaust survivor,” Plotkin said. “It’s moving, as well, to see somebody who went through hell to be thriving and kicking ass at his age.”

Plotkin sees a connection between the award and the Jewish concept of tzedaka, or charity.

“I suppose the best work is when you want to help people,” he said.

Shinagel said that Plotkin gave a “lovely speech” at the award ceremony during Harvard’s commencement week. The week also included a commencement address from German chancellor Angela Merkel, and a speech from former US vice president, and environmental activist, Al Gore.

From college dropout to researcher

In May alone, the Amazon lost 739 square kilometers (285 square miles) to deforestation in Brazil. Plotkin laments that the Amazon has been overshadowed by broader concerns. When he began working in conservation, the dominant issue was population growth; today, it’s climate change.

Yet, Plotkin said, everything is interconnected: “Population growth drives deforestation. Deforestation is [key to] climate change.”

A recent report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) concluded that environmental sustainability goals might not be met by 2030 unless “transformative changes” occur. Plotkin said that the report’s authors are not “wild-eyed radicals.”

“There are a lot of negative trends right now,” Plotkin said. “Our jobs are more challenging… Many environmentalists don’t get that great challenges need to be addressed immediately.”

According to Plotkin’s Amazon Conservation Team, the IPBES report supports their contention that it is important to work with indigenous communities, who, despite representing five percent of the Earth’s population, oversee 22% of its land and 80% of terrestrial biodiversity. Yet indigenous populations are threatened by such practices as logging, mining and ranching.

Plotkin sees his work as a counterbalance involving the Jewish concepts of charity and tikkun olam, or repairing the world. Growing up in New Orleans during a time of racial segregation in the American South, he noted that Jews were prominently involved in the civil rights movement.

“The Jewish passion for social justice shines through our history,” says Plotkin.

This resonated as he pursued higher education at the Harvard Extension School. Founded in 1910 as an adult-learning opportunity for working-class men and women, the Extension School provided Plotkin, a onetime college dropout, with a path to a degree. It also connected him with professor and biologist Richard Evans Schultes, widely regarded as the pioneer of ethnobotany.

Plotkin said that while he was intrigued by Schultes’s expertise in hallucinogenic plants used by indigenous communities in Latin America, he had a wider interest in the scholar’s work.

“Not only were forests disappearing, knowledge about them was going much faster,” Plotkin said, adding that ethnobotany would help him work with both people and the landscape.

Receiving a degree in natural sciences from Harvard, Plotkin earned a master’s from the Yale School of Forestry and a PhD in biological conservation from Tufts University. Then he put his education to work, beginning with a 1982 visit to civil war-torn Suriname that led to a long-lasting partnership with the indigenous Tiriyo community, whose medicinal plant traditions he compiled into a book. It was the second book written in the Tiriyo language after the Bible.

Working from Mexico to Argentina over the ensuing decades, Plotkin has been privy to a great deal of indigenous knowledge. Along the way, he has raised a family with his wife, Liliana Madrigal, who is Costa Rican; their two daughters have participated in indigenous ceremonies.

The shamans’ apprentice

Central to Plotkin’s work are the shamans who perform important roles among the 400 or so indigenous communities of the Amazon, representing over one million people.

Shamans can be male or female, said Plotkin, and their specialties differ by region, yet the paths to their position are similar: “Typically it’s a long and grueling process that can involve fasting, a vision quest, hallucinogenic plants.”

He said that one hallucinogenic plant mixture, ayahuasca, is attracting worldwide interest for its emotional and psychological healing properties, including in Israel. As he explained, healers in the northwest Amazon use ayahuasca as “a vision line to consult the spirit world” about “what’s wrong, what’s the cause, what to prescribe?”

Plotkin has taken ayahuasca 92 times, saying, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” During one ceremony, Plotkin said, “a very powerful shaman” gave him ayahuasca to clear his energy. Plotkin experienced the indigenous tradition of encountering a spirit animal, which gives protection in a region filled with predatory creatures.

For a shaman, the typical spirit animal is the jaguar — “the biggest, smartest, most dangerous animal roaming at night,” Plotkin said. “Some claim they turn themselves into jaguars.” As for himself, he said, “I felt like a harpy eagle, the biggest [raptor] in the Amazon. I felt I was flying over the canopy looking down.”

“Was it a silly dream?” he reflected. “Was it chemicals in my brain? My shoulder muscles were sore the next morning… There was an ache in my back. I was sore where my wings would have been.”

Ayahuasca is “not something to do for fun,” he emphasized. “I’d typically vomit, or had the runs.”

In the West, it is “oversold, like many plant medicines,” he said. “Does it cure everything? No. Does it have no side effects? It has lots of them, especially for somebody who is not a master.”

“I just come back to the idea that shamans have everything connected,” Plotkin said. “We can learn from preliterate people in an age of modern medicine, the internet, high tech. If Western medicine is so successful, [why is there no] cure for prostate cancer, insomnia, stress? People [in the Amazon] know stuff we don’t, that can be valuable to us.”

In a panel talk at the Boston Museum of Science three years ago, Plotkin recalled telling the audience that “possibly really intractable diseases like PTSD, in some cases there could be cures — not all — from hallucinogens, sacred plants.”

“I heard of a traditional healer who could analyze, diagnose, treat, and sometimes cure the human mind in a way Western physicians cannot,” he said.

Plotkin disputes the assertion that only a few useful substances have come out of the Amazon.

“You think it’s just rubber, quinine, coca?” he asked. “What about ayahuasca? It’s revolutionizing psychology. And there are other hallucinogenic compounds, not just plants but from frogs.”

He added that “pineapple, orange and grapefruit juice, ketchup on a hamburger, each one is from a rainforest plant. Each one was learned from indigenous people.”

Pineapple, orange and grapefruit juice, ketchup on a hamburger, each one is from a rainforest plant

Plotkin said that the work that makes him proudest is helping pass legislation protecting previously uncontacted indigenous communities — including a declaration of indigenous rights issued by Colombia last year. Previous such achievements include Chiribiquete National Park in Colombia, the largest park in the Amazon and the largest rainforest park in the world. Chiribiquete is home to three isolated, uncontacted communities, and to a trove of priceless pre-Columbian art, Plotkin said.

In the Colombian highlands, Plotkin teaches indigenous children to work with elders to monitor bird populations, giving the children a skill set that potentially could be monetized through ecotourism, he said. In Suriname, he helps indigenous Matawai communities, who are descended from runaway slaves, map riverside sacred sites using GPS technology and, through an app, record oral histories, songs and collaborations with other cultures.

Overall, he’s helped about 50 communities in Suriname, Colombia and Brazil secure 80 million acres of their rainforest lands.

“The future of indigenous communities is all conjecture in my opinion, but it ranges from total obliteration to learning how to deal with the outside world on their own terms,” Plotkin said. “The sweet spot is for them to honor traditions, protect their ancient land and traditions of healing, culture, language, have a foot in both worlds.”

“Our job is not to tell them what they should do, but to help them make an informed choice,” he said.

“In the best possible world, indigenous lands will be protected, with better protection,” Plotkin said. “In the worst of all possible worlds, a lot of it will go, and everyone — not just indigenous people — the world will pay a price.”