THIS IS ANARCHO-HERBALISM

Thoughts On Health and Healing For the Revolution Laurel Luddite
(used by permission of the author) My medicine chest is a council of
bioregions, with representatives gathered together as I make my way
around the world west of the Rocky Mountains. The Coptis root was
picked out of the churned-up scar left by an excavator, at the
retreating edge of the Idaho wilderness. The tiny amount of
Pipsissewa leaves came from an ancient grove above the Klamath River
just feet away from where the District Ranger sat on a stump talking
about his plans to cut it all down. I am drying Nettles from the
California creek where salmon die in the silt left after a century
of industrial logging. Every jar holds a story (often a ghost story
of dying ecosystems and places gone forever). I am honored to have
known the plants in their home places and to have studied their uses
as medicine. But for people not lucky enough to roam throughout the
wilds, purchased herbal preparations such as tinctures may be the
link back to this sort of healing. Like so much in this consumerist
society, it is easy to ignore the connections between a bottle on a
shelf in some store and a living, growing plant out in the world
somewhere. It can be hard to know if the plant grows a mile away or
on another continent. There is much to be said for reconnecting, for
educating ourselves about the herbs we use and gathering our own
medicine when we can. That's how we will be able to build a whole
new system of healing ñ one that can support our movement away from
the corporate power structure that medicine has become. The
development of a new medical system, or the recovery of ancient
models, will be another link in our safety net when industrialism
fails. It will keep us alive and kicking out windows now in the
system's last days when so many people have no access to industrial
medicine. And it will reestablish our connection to the real
medicine that is the Earth. An alternative to "alternative medicine"
The sort of herbal medicine popular these days (presented to us by
the media and so-called green capitalists as yet another exciting
fad) has brought with it very little thought of a new way of
healing. The plants, reduced to capsule form or, worse, to
their "active ingredients", are just new tools to work with in the
same body-machine that industrial medicine sees people as being.
They become no different than pharmaceutical drugs or a scalpel
blade: something to pry into the body-machine with and use to mess
around with the parts. Except of course much less effective, because
the herbs have been taken out of the system of healing in which they
have their strength. When the marketers of herbal products get their
hands on a new "miracle cure", it can mean extinction for the plant.
This is especially sad when so many living creatures go into useless
products or are wasted on conditions that they don't treat. (Has
anyone else seen that Echinacea shampoo?) The classic example of
this is Goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis, a plant close to
extinction in the wild. It has a couple of amazing actions in the
human body but has mostly been marketed as a cure for the common
cold, which it will do almost nothing to help. By the way, the
largest brokers of wild-harvested Goldenseal and many other big-name
herbs are multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Given american
society's obsession with herbal Viagra, weight loss pills, and
stimulants, most of the herbs on the mass market are being
sacrificed to these ridiculous causes. There is an alternative
to "alternative medicine". Southwestern herbalist, author, and
teacher Michael Moore probably said it best in one of his recent
digressions from a lecture: "In this country, the herb business
mostly revolves around recently marketed substances with new
research, and it comes from them to us. Whereas we're trying to
establish as much as possible (in this "lower level" if you will)
the fact that we need to create a practice and a model that's
impervious to faddism. We're trying to practice in a way that
derives from practice rather than from marketing. Not from above to
below but from below around. Bioregionalism uber alles. Keep it
local. No centralization because centralization kills everything."
Herbo-primitivism So we need another way of looking at our bodies
and the plant medicines. Seeing the two as interconnected and in
balance is new to industrial culture, but in reality it is the most
ancient healing model on earth. We knew it before we were people.
Animals know how to use plants to medicate themselves. Their
examples surround us, from dogs eating grass to bears digging Osha
roots. Probably every human society has had some way of explaining
how the body works and how plant medicines work in us. One thing all
herbalists know - dogs and bears included - is that a health problem
is best treated before it begins. In more primitive societies where
people have the luxury of listening to their own bodies it is easy
to spot an imbalance before it turns into an acute disease state.
This is where herbs are most effective. They work at this sub-
clinical (and therefore invisible to industrial medicine) level
of "imbalances" and "deficiency" and "excess". This old/new healing
system is subtle and requires a lot of self- knowledge, or at least
self-awareness. It uses intuition as a diagnostic tool. Emotion,
spirituality, and environment become medicines. The spirit and
environment of the plants we gather affects their healing
properties, and our relationship with those plants becomes very
important. Green Herbalogy When we take herbal medicine we are
taking in part of the plant's environment. Everything it ate and
drank and experienced has formed the medicine you're depending on,
so you better make sure it gets all the best. When we are healed by
plants, we owe it to them to look out for their kind and the places
where they live. Traditional plant-gatherers often have a prayer
they recite before they take anything from the wild. I usually say
something along the lines of "OK, plant. You heal me and I'll look
out for you. I got your back. No one's gonna build over you, or log
you, or pick too much while I'm around." So this true herbal healing
system has at its heart a deep environmentalism and a commitment to
the Earth. The bioregional concept is important to this model of
healing. Plants' actions in our bodies are really quite limited by
the chemicals they can produce from sunlight and soil. For every big-
name herb on the market cut from the rainforest or dug from the
mountains, there is most likely a plant with a similar action
growing in your watershed. Some of the best medicines to maintain
good health grow in vacant lots and neglected gardens around the
world. Anarcho-herbalism A society of people who are responsible for
their own health and able to gather or grow their own medicines is a
hard society to rule. These days we are dependent on the power
structure of industrial health care - the secret society of the
doctors, the white-male-dominated medical schools, the corporate
decision makers with their toxic pharmaceuticals and heartless greed
and labs full of tortured beings. That dependence is one more thing
keeping us tied down to the State and unable to rebel with all our
hearts or even envision a world without such oppression. With a new
system of healing, based on self-knowledge and herbal wisdom, we
will be that much more free. Offering a real alternative health care
system will help to calm some people's fears about returning to an
anarchistic, Earth centered way of life. There is a false security
in the men with the big machines, ready to put you back together
again (if you have enough money). What is ignored is the fact that
industrial society causes most of the dis-eases that people fear.
Living free on a healing Earth while surrounded by true community
and eating real food will prove to be a better medicine than
anything you can buy. What steps can we make now towards creating
this new system of medicine? We all need to learn what we can about
our own health. This can be through training in one or more of the
surviving models of traditional healing and/or through self-
observation. How do you feel when you're just starting to get a
cold? What kinds of problems come up repeatedly, especially when
you're stressed out? If you're a womyn, how long is your cycle and
what does the blood look like? Understanding how our bodies act in
times of health can help us recognize the very early stages of dis-
ease when herbs are the most useful. People who have some background
in healing (in the traditional or industrial systems) can be a great
help to those of us just learning. Healers who are working to form
this new model, whether collectively or through their individual
practices, should keep in mind that commitment to the Earth and a
decentralized form are central to truly revolutionary medicine. In
these times of change, everything is being examined and either
destroyed, rebuilt, or created from our hearts. Industrialism has
affected every aspect of our lives - we are just starting to realize
how much has been lost. Medicine is just one part of the machine
that we have to take back and re-create into a form that works for
the society we will become. Every herb, pill, and procedure should
be judged on its sustainability and accessibility to small groups of
people. We can start with ourselves, within our communities and
circles, but should never stop expanding outwards until industrial
medicine rusts in a forgotten grave, a victim of its own imbalances.