The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth

By Stephen Harrod Buhner

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Book learning doesn't inspire any caring for the plants and animals in the environment, and doesn't engage emotion, inspiration, or purpose. As Reed Noss puts it, "Scientific abstraction and fancy technologies are no substitutes for the wisdom that springs from knowing the world and its creatures in intimate, loving detail." This conflict between "scientific abstraction" and living knowledge is quite obvious in the area of pharmaceuticals versus herbal medicines. Humans used plants as medicine for millenia before the 1900s when the medical profession started to denounce them. Then, a collaboration between the American Medical Association, medical colleges and universities, and pharmaceutical companies made herbal medicines and their practitioners illegal and unlicensed. These organizations claimed that synthetic medications were more reliable and therefore more effective. Our experience over the last 100 years has not shown this to be true. The truth about pharmaceuticals:

• They are produced to control symptoms, not cure diseases.
• They are synthetically derived chemicals that human bodies do not recognize as food, so they are mostly excreted from the body.
• These excreted chemicals end up in the environment in a form that is more dangerous than the plants which contain them.

• Industrial wastewater from Indian rivers and oceans was found to contain toxic amounts of chemical residue by Greenpeace researchers. Because the waste came from a variety of industries, the resulting mix has "wholly unpredictable toxicological properties."
• A pharmaceutical plant in England was found to be causing large quantities of dioxin to appear in the milk of cows from nearby farms. The dioxin came both from the plant's wastewater and from the air via the incineration of wastes from the plant.
• The Germans found traces of drugs in the water supplies of their country and surrounding countries.

The fact is that pharmaceuticals are polluting water supplies through manufacturing, human waste, hospital waste, and the dumping of expired medicines into landfills. No environmental testing has been undertaken on the effects of this. "Evidently we're going to find out, learning by doing," notes Peter Montague. Following are examples of the environmental effects of some drugs that have been noted:

• The residue estrogen from birth control pills has been found to affect the reproduction of fish, alligators, and frogs. It also seems to be causing fertility problems in men and early puberty for girls.
• The residue of depression drugs (SSRIs) in the oceans has been found to affect the toxic defense mechanism of shellfish and bottom-feeders like shrimp and flounder.
• The scents from personal care products enter the body and settle into muscles, fat, and glands. In this way, they end up in breast milk. When bathing, these scents enter the water supply and affect the health of fish.
• Chemotherapy drugs that would burn a hole in the skin if touched are dumped into the water supply by hospitals and excreted by patients. Water treatment doesn't change their composition.
• Low-level radioactive substances from hospitals and their patients are released into the environment; they actually increase their radiation levels as they move up the food chain from water and air to plants and animals.

The majority of the medical, infectious, and pathological waste from hospitals and clinics is incinerated at the facility - in incinerators that are not regulated and have no pollution control devices. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about 15 percent of the waste is infectious. Dioxin, a by-product of the burning of organic and chlorine-containing waste, has been found toxic in miniscule amounts. The EPA states that the maximum exposure is equal to one drop of dioxin in 600,000 railroad cars full of water. However, current research shows that humans are ingesting more than 300 times that amount on a regular basis. Dioxin quickly moves through ecosystems and increases its intensity as it travels up the food chain.

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