The following is a conversation between Dr. Mark Plotkin, Co-founder and CEO of the Amazon Conservation Team, and Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving on AM 970 The Answer WNYM in New York City.


Dr. Mark J. Plotkin © www.skoll.org

Denver: In a world where we hear a lot of bad news, there hasn’t been anything much more distressing than the story out of the Amazon, where there has been an 84% increase in forest fires over 2018. Often referred to as “Earth’s lungs,” these fires are having a devastating impact on the environment and the climate. But there are other stories from the Amazon forest that need to be told as well, such as the toll these fires will take on biodiversity and the indigenous communities that inhabit the region. Aside from those indigenous communities themselves, there is no more knowledgeable expert in the world on this subject than my next guest. He is ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin, the Co-founder and CEO of the Amazon Conservation Team

Good evening, Mark, and welcome to The Business of Giving!

Mark: Denver, good to be here.

Denver: Just to make sure that we’re all oriented, give us Amazon 101 – a brief overview of the size, the country it encompasses, et cetera.

Mark: People tend to associate the Amazon with Brazil, and that’s for a good reason, because Brazil holds about 60% of the Amazon rainforest, but the Amazon reaches its leafy tendril into about nine different countries. For example, the Amazon in Colombia is bigger than New England; that’s a lot of rainforest.

An ethnobotanist very simply is a scientist who studies the relationship between people and plants, usually with a focus on indigenous peoples, usually with a focus on rainforest, usually with a focus on medicinal plants.

Denver: You are an ethnobotanist, and I have to say you were the first ethnobotanist we have ever had on the program. Explain what you do.

Mark: Well, Denver, I’m not surprised that I’m the first ethnobotanist because there aren’t many of us. An ethnobotanist very simply is a scientist who studies the relationship between people and plants, usually with a focus on indigenous peoples, usually with a focus on rainforest, usually with a focus on medicinal plants.

Denver: You started the Amazon Conservation Team, Mark, to fill a gap that existed. What was that gap?  What were you able to identify?

Mark: When we started the organization about 25 years ago, most of the conservation organizations like the World Wildlife Fund where I worked at were focused on rainforests and protected areas, and I saw that indigenous lands were actually greater than protected areas in size and were protected by thousands of people with blow darts, poison-tipped arrows, and shotguns. 

So, I figured this was an incredible niche which was being overlooked, an incredible opportunity for the conservation world, and we set up the Amazon Conservation Team to focus on helping those people protect both their culture and their rainforest. 

Denver: And you almost went out of business in 2001, right?

Mark: Well, we had a couple of…

Denver: Paul Newman came to the rescue?

Mark: Speedbumps. Paul Newman came to the rescue after 9/11 when philanthropy came to a halt, as did much of the Western world. But Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon, who was on our board, came to the rescue, bailed us out, and kept us going.

A shaman is quite simply a medicine man or medicine woman who uses plants and the spirit world to heal.

So, in a sense, the shaman – the medicine woman, the medicine man – is combining the function of the doctor, the psychiatrist, and the priest.

Denver: Fantastic. We’re glad they did. 

Well, there are so many things to talk about. Why don’t we start with shamanic medicine? Western medicine is primarily built around chemistry and technology. What would be the foundations of shamanic medicine? Also, what’s a shaman?

Mark: A shaman is quite simply a medicine man or medicine woman who uses plants and the spirit world to heal. So shamanic medicine is based on two pillars: one is chemistry, just like our own medicine, what’s in the plants, and we now know they’re using insects and other forest substances for healing purposes; and also the whole spiritual realm. 

So, in a sense, the shaman – the medicine woman, the medicine man – is combining the function of the doctor, the psychiatrist, and the priest. It’s one-stop shopping, which is why sometimes we’re able to heal stuff that our own physicians cannot. 

Denver: That is so interesting. Well, you’ve experienced firsthand some of the healing power of these medicinal plants. Tell us a story or two about that.

Mark: I’ve experienced firsthand, or in one case, I’d say first foot on the healing wizardry of the shamans. In my TED talk, I talked about a foot injury which the physicians were not able to heal. I had the injections, I had the pain pills, I had the heat, I had the cold. I walked into the village; the shaman saw I was limping, and he looked me in the face and said, “Take off your shoe and give me your machete.” 

Denver: That sounds threatening.

Mark: Not something I’ll ever forget. But he scraped off a forest fern, threw it in the fire, applied it to my foot, made a tea;I drank it. It went away for seven months, came back in seven months, went back to the shaman, he healed it again.  That’s seven or eight years ago, and it’s never come back.

Denver:  My goodness. You had pink eye, too, right? 

Mark: I had pink eye, too. I asked the physician who was on my tour – I was leading a tour – and she said, “I’ll give you some ointment and some pills, and you’ll be fine in a week.” I asked the shaman, and he said, “Give me your machete,” trimmed the leaf off a palm, blip blip blip, dripped it into my eye, and I was good to go in about 45 minutes. So, Denver, who would you rather be treated by?

Denver: I love rhetorical questions.

Also, much of Western medicine came out of the Amazon. For instance, beta blockers. Tell us a few stories of where this stuff originated and how we use it today in our everyday medicine?

Mark: My mentor, the father of ethnobotany, the late Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, collected magic mushrooms in southern Mexico in the ‘30s. Not only have these revolutionized psychiatric treatments because there’s now a new center for psychiatric research based on hallucinogens– another mind-altering substance just set up at Johns Hopkins– but beta blockers owe, in part, their origin to compounds and Shultes’ magic mushrooms from the fungi used by the Mazatec Indians in southern Mexico. 

We are still finding new stuff found in stuff that was collected 80 years ago. Just this week, Denver, we found two new species of electric eels. Remember that electric eels, which have been studied for 250 years, were part of the origin of the battery, studied by Volta. And now, we’re looking at ways to develop hydrogel batteries for medical implants, based on electric eels which have been studied for 250 years.

Denver: When these modern-day miracles occur in our world of medicine, the ones that originated out of the Amazon, do those countries receive any of the financial benefits?

Mark: The simple answer is that in the past, they haven’t. The current answer is that they should. 

So, this new model has been developed for decades, and this sort of “rape and run”  approach is no longer applicable. But the ways things were done 100 years ago, 70 years ago, 80 years ago were different than the ways they are done now. 

So, this idea that any type of development of new drugs or agricultural products from nature is necessarily going to be exploitative – I think those days are long gone.

Denver: Good. I understand that you have just completed a shamanic encyclopedia. Tell us about that.

Mark: I’ve been working with a fellow in the northeast Amazon by the name of Kamainja. He is a Wai-wai Indian married to a Tiriyó (Trio) Indian and trained by a Sikaiana shaman, so it’s like a three-ring circus in terms of his knowledge. He’s trained in three shamanic traditions. 

We have worked together with all these ancient shamans, all but one of whom are dead now. He has now became a shaman himself and has put together the first shamanic encyclopedia of the northeast Amazon to take his 30-plus years of experience and put it into a book in the Tiriyó (Trio) language – not accessible to white guys like you and me – for a handbook of healing in the shamans’ apprentice clinics that the Amazon Conservation Team has set up in the northeast Amazon.

What anybody who studies nature in depth like I do has found is nature is infinitely more wonderful and infinitely more perverse than anything we could come up with.  

Denver: That is fantastic. It really is. 

You have said, Mark, that ethnobotanists do not need to read science fiction just because of the natural wonders you can see every day in the Amazon. Share a few of those stories.

Mark: What anybody who studies nature in depth like I do has found is nature is infinitely more wonderful and infinitely more perverse than anything we could come up with.  

A perfect example is that of the cordyceps fungus. It’s a fungus that lives on the rainforest floor. It attaches itself to insects when they go past. It burns a hole in the insect exoskeleton, inserts itself inside the insect exoskeleton, eats all of the non-vital organs, including part of the insect brain, which then causes the insect to climb to the top of the tallest tree in the forest, eats the rest of the insect brain, thereby killing the insect, thereby causing the insect exoskeleton to split open, thereby allowing the fungus to release its spores 100 feet above the forest floor.

Denver: That is some kind of story. The only thing that can match it perhaps is the green monkey frog. Tell us that story.

Mark: My late colleague Loren McIntyre was on the Brazil-Peru border region in 1969, was rescued by a group of uncontacted Indians. They brought him into a tribal clearing, opened these palm leaf baskets, pulled out these giant green monkey frogs and began licking them and rubbing them into cuts in their arm. When in Rome – McIntyre did the same thing and found these things were highly hallucinogenic. 

These are now being studied as a treatment for drug-resistant bacteria and as a treatment for certain psychiatric disorders like PTSD, which seems to be responding well in some cases to these entheogens, these mind-altering substances. Whether it’s ayahuasca from the Amazon, whether it’s green monkey frogs from the Amazon…who cares? They have therapeutic potential.

Dr. Mark Plotkin and Denver Frederick inside the studio

Denver: That is incredible.

Mark, these indigenous communities make up maybe 5% of the world’s population, so why do you believe it’s so important to work with them?

Mark: These indigenous peoples don’t have a whole lot of friends in the outside world, and as a Jew, I believe in Tzedakah and giving back and healing the world. The irony here – and I call this my spiritual boomerang theory – that the more you throw things out there in ways of good intention and good actions, the more it comes back to you. When I’ve had medical problems, I’ve been cured by these shamans. Can they cure everything? No. Can they cure some things that Western physicians cannot? Absolutely.

Some estimates say that 5% of the world are indigenous peoples, and they’re protecting about 80% of the world’s biodiversity. So, if you are a conservationist, you know these indigenous peoples are your best partners.

Denver: And they also oversee an incredible amount of the Earth’s land.

Mark: Some estimates say that 5% of the world are indigenous peoples, and they’re protecting about 80% of the world’s biodiversity. So, if you are a conservationist, you know these indigenous peoples are your best partners. These indigenous peoples are an overlooked opportunity to protect large ways of biodiversity; and like I said, they need the help.

Denver: Well, you talked about they don’t have a lot of friends on the outside world, but they do have some enemies who are encroaching upon these communities in these lands. What’s happening?

Mark: There are those who couch this in terms of “We want to help these people. We want to help the uncontacted tribes of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.” But when the big typhoon swept through a few years back, they emerged unscathed, where there were billions of dollars of damage on the mainland. 

The bottom line is that people who claim they want to help, like missionaries, actually want to turn them into little white people. So, this kind of “help” – I always put that help in quotation marks because it usually involves helping yourself and destroying them in the process, which is a different model than the one we’re trying to develop at the Amazon Conservation Team. 

Denver: And there’s an awful lot of development going on. I imagine you have loggers, you have miners, you have drug runners, you have everybody who are just running into their land. 

Mark: “Development” needs to be put in quotation marks as well, Denver, because this “development” usually means destroying the natural ecosystems and the original people that live there. I’ve just come back from the soy fields of the Amazon. There’s not a whole lot of jobs there; it’s all mechanized. So, what do you want: an Amazon rainforest with hallucinogenic frogs and potential treatments for cancer?  Or more cheap soybeans for making tofu?

Denver: One of the greatest contributions that ACT, as you’re known as, has made is helping the Tiriyó (Trio) Indians first and then others to create their own maps to protect their land. Tell us how that all came to pass.

Mark: Technology is seen as the great savior by a lot of organizations, but any technology can be helpful or destructive depending on how it’s used. So in 2000, the Tiriyó (Trio) Indians of the Northeast Amazon asked us to map their lands, and I said, “We will help you, but we won’t map your lands.” And they said, “We don’t understand.” I said, “Because we’re going to train you to map your lands.” We have now done this with 55 different tribes throughout South America, the perfect marriage of ancient shamanic wisdom and 21st century US technology and know-how.

Denver: What are some of the benefits of them mapping their land? 

Mark: First of all, they learned to use technology for their own benefit instead of the old Western model of “We’re going to give you stuff,” we’re saying, “No, we’re not going to give you stuff. We’re going to train you on how to use stuff.”

Denver: Such a great lens you have in terms of saying “We’re not going to do it. We’re going to show you how to do it. You do it. You have ownership of it.”

Mark: A very important distinction. There are two schools of thought here. One is: Give them technology because we know it will be good; the other is give them no technology because we’re going to spoil them. We like to see this as a middle ground. It’s helping them empower themselves.

Denver: Tell us a little bit about the fires that are going on in the Amazon now. Did you see this coming?

Mark: It’s a terrible situation. There were 74,000 fires in the Amazon documented in the last year. So, in a sense, I saw it coming because as it destroys the Amazon, as it dries out, it becomes more susceptible to fires. So it’s been a worrisome situation, and it sets off an unvirtuous cycle of more fires, more destruction, more drying, more fires, more destruction. However, it’s not too late, and there are creative ways of addressing this, which we at the Amazon Conservation are trying to do. 

For example, I’m trying to raise the money to create an indigenous fire brigade, indigenous firefighters. So once again, using the ACT model, it’s not the white guys over the black guys, or the yellow guys parachuting in and fixing the problem. It’s training them how to seize control of their own environmental destiny and battle it on their own terms with the help, with the training, with the equipment that they need from the outside world.

Denver: And these trees are so susceptible because they’re not fire-resistant because there have been so few fires there that they have thin barks, and therefore those protective tissues really can get damaged.

 Mark: In a virgin rainforest with lots of rain, fire is not an immediate threat. As things dry out and as you get what we call “the edge effect,” which is drylands all around, it creates a greater threat. But virgin rainforest, when it burns, for the most part, burns slow and burns low, which is why you really can’t document it from satellites because it’s along the ground. So, it’s more complicated than some in the media have portrayed it, but it’s truly a dangerous situation. It’s a downward spiral of fire, drought, and tree death that we’re battling.

Denver: That’s really interesting. Is there anything else about these fires that somebody like me who follows the news might be missing because it’s not being covered in the mainstream media?

Mark: One of the untold or under-told stories is the impact on the indigenous peoples because this is their home, so obviously it impacts them. One of the essentially untold stories is about 30 of the uncontacted tribes, which we think there are about 70 in the Amazon, are indirectly threatened by these fires. So everybody’s focused on the fires and the great graphics, but it’s the uncontacted people that frankly are worrying me the most.

The answer to questions we have not even asked are in the minds and the souls of some of these indigenous people, in particular some of these uncontacted people.

Denver: I know another one of your favorite lines. You said, “The Amazon holds the answer to questions that we haven’t even asked yet,” and those answers are disappearing along with these fires.

Mark: The answer to questions we have not even asked are in the minds and the souls of some of these indigenous peoples, in particular, some of these uncontacted peoples. I just published a paper called “How We Know What We Don’t Know.” How do you know what uncontacted peoples don’t know or do know? The answer is: look at the people that have been recently contacted and extrapolate from there. 

I give the example of a new drug, which could revolutionize the treatment of high blood pressure, which is a real problem in a rapidly aging society. I give the example of the magic frog, which could revolutionize certain aspects of the treatment of psychiatric diseases like PTSD or stress or insomnia. And so, by that, we can extrapolate and know that these uncontacted peoples know a lot, even if we don’t know exactly what they know.

Denver: Right. You lick that magic frog, and all of a sudden, your blood pressure goes through the roof, right? 

Mark: So they say.

Denver: So they say. 

Mark, how do you respond to the idea that we have learned everything that there is to learn about the Amazon? 

Mark: Denver, in the last week, we found the tallest tree in the Amazon. When world records were exceeded, it’s usually by a foot or a meter; this is 100 feet taller than any tree known in the Amazon. In the last week, we found two new species of electric eels. Electric eels were described by Linnaeus over 250 years ago, and these offer the potential to create new hydra-cell batteries. This is in the last week.

If you can find new species 100 feet taller than anything known, and you can find new species of electric eel, which are eight-foot-long slabs of meat sending out electric charges, imagine what’s out there in the microbial world.

Denver: Where was the tree found?

Mark: The tree was found in the northeast Amazon, actually quite near where I work, in the Jari River Basin. The electric eel was found in the southern half of the Amazon, which is where most of the fires have taken place. 

Denver: You make it sound like we’re in the early innings still.

Mark: Well, hopefully, we’re in the early innings. They don’t close down the game early because of rain or because of fire. 

I think a mentor can be a teacher; a mentor can be your mom, your dad, somebody you meet at a cocktail party, but we all need mentors. We’re all conducting our hero’s journey; we’re all the protagonists in our own movie, and the mentor plays a fundamental role.

You mentioned a moment ago about Professor Richard Schultes, so I’d be interested in terms of what is the importance of somebody like you or anybody having a mentor?  And tell us a little bit about him.

Mark: I think that everybody needs a mentor. I was very fortunate to, at the age of 19, discover mine. I wandered into a classroom at Harvard in the night school, a course on the botany and chemistry of hallucinogenic plants, this being the end of the ‘60s and a cultural appeal of the time. But I fell under the sway of this extraordinary man who’d gone to the Amazon in 1941 and essentially went native for over a decade, and that set me on my life’s path.

I think a mentor can be a teacher; a mentor can be your mom, your dad, somebody you meet at a cocktail party, but we all need mentors. We’re all conducting our hero’s journey; we’re all the protagonists in our own movie, and the mentor plays a fundamental role.

Denver: Well, it’s great to have you here now, but you’re going back to the Amazon quite soon again. What’s your day-to-day life like when you’re down there?

Mark: The best part when I’m down there is when I’m in the villages, and you wake up when the sun comes up before it gets hot.  You have a quick bite of something, and you head into the bush following the shamans in search of the plants or the frogs that heal.  You’re in the bush until about two- or three o’clock when it starts to get really hot. You wander back to the village; you jump in the river, you jump in the hammock, you take your siesta – it’s very civilized – and you wake up when it cools off, and then you document the information.

…people ask me: When it comes to the Amazon, is the glass half-full, or is it half-empty? And the obvious answer is that any glass that’s half-full is half-empty, and vice versa. So, there’s reasons for hope; there’s reasons for pessimism.  The battle has been joined, but the outcome has not been decided.

Denver: Are you an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to the future of these indigenous communities?

Mark: Denver, people ask me: When it comes to the Amazon, is the glass half-full, or is it half- empty? And the obvious answer is that any glass that’s half-full is half-empty, and vice versa. So, there are reasons for hope; there are reasons for pessimism. The battle has been joined, but the outcome has not been decided. And that’s my battle every single day.

…my job is to give these people the megaphone to address the world, to address the tech community, to address the philanthropic community, and let them work their very real magic on their own behalf, and ultimately on ours as well.

Denver: I got you.

Let me close with this, Mark. At the heart of what you do is changing the landscape of power as it currently exists. Through decades of working with the indigenous cultures of the Amazon, is there anything that you’ve learned about changing that dynamic that would be relevant and applicable to the inequality and wealth gap that exists in this country and around the world today?

Mark: Denver, I recently saw a meme that I’ll never forget on the internet, and it was a picture of a bunch of people basically protesting against immigration, and they’re all holding iPhones which were invented by the son of a Syrian immigrant. The point being is that people have a natural genius, and the indigenous peoples with whom I’ve had the honor and pleasure to work have simply not had the opportunities that you and I have had. 

So, in terms of changing the landscape of power, it’s giving voice to these people, it’s giving them access to technology. A colleague of mine during an ayahuasca vision, during a ceremony in the Amazon said she saw me and other ethnobotanists as Trojan horses who would go into the corridors of power like the headquarters of Google or Apple, and open would be the stomach, and out would pour the shamans.

So, in a sense, my job is to give these people the megaphone to address the world, to address the tech community, to address the philanthropic community, and let them work their very real magic on their own behalf, and ultimately on ours as well.

Denver: Give them voice.

Mark: Give them a voice.

Denver: Well Dr. Mark Plotkin, the Co-founder and CEO of the Amazon Conservation Team, thanks so much for a fascinating discussion. Where can people learn more about your work, some of the things that you’ve just described?  And how can they financially support this if they’re so inclined to do so?

Mark: The easy way to look at more of the information which I’ve presented in our interview is to look at our website, www.amazonteam.org or look me up – Mark Plotkin. I’m easy to find on the web. Look at my TED talk on how to protect uncontacted peoples. 

I hope people will help us develop an indigenous fire brigade so these people can combat their fire on their own land, in their own forest, on their own terms. 

Denver: You have a new book coming out. What’s that going to be?

Mark: I have a new book called “The Amazon: What Everybody Needs to Know.” The publication date is March of 2020.

Denver: Well, thanks, Mark. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show.

Mark: Denver, great to be here. Thank you;

Denver: I’ll be back with more The Business of Giving right after this.

Dr. Mark Plotkin and Denver Frederick

 


The Business of Giving can be heard every Sunday evening between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Eastern on AM 970 The Answer in New York and on iHeartRadio. You can follow us @bizofgive on Twitter, @bizofgive on Instagram and at www.facebook.com/businessofgiving.

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