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In search of nature's pharmacy
How the indigenous people of Peru are growing medicinal plants to preserve their livelihoods-and their fragile ecosystems.
Sandro waves to me from the crowded arrival gate. He's the cousin of Sergio Cam, whom I first met 10 years ago and with whom I've been working ever since. It's 1 in the morning. My flight landed at the Jorge Chávez Airport in Lima, Peru, hours late, and Sandro is driving me to Sergio's house in Chorrillos.
We roll out of Lima into a sinus-burning miasma of coastal fog, engine exhaust and industrial emissions by the hundreds. We pass blocks of concrete buildings with high security walls topped with concertina wire. Guards in bullet-proof vests loiter in doorways. Prostitutes pose on lonely corners. Lima appears as though Armageddon has taken place, and the few people we see out on the streets are luckless survivors.
I place a quick mobile call to my wife, Zoe, who's staying at home in Massachusetts. "I miss you," she tells me emphatically. Boo, our dog, has apparently been moping around our house since I left. I miss Zoe too, but I'm in the slipstream now, carried by the current of travel, headed to the Andes and the Amazon.
As a medicine hunter, I seek out and investigate beneficial plants, and work with native people, traders, scientists and the media to develop them into popular health products to be distributed on the market. I also teach at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where my course, The Shaman's Pharmacy, is part of the Medicinal Plant Program. An initial interest in medicinal plants during my teens started me on this path, traveling the globe to promote effective plant medicine. Most people don't know that plant medicine is more widely used than over-the-counter and prescription drugs. I'm one of many people spreading the word.
I'm headed to the central highlands of the Andes to visit growers of the super-food maca, with whom we've been working for 10 years. I'll also check in on two community projects we've put together in a small town with the support of French botanical-extraction company Naturex, for which I work. Around the Amazonian city of Pucallpa, Sergio and I will try to help a struggling group of natives get into the medicinal plant supply business.
Places like these are on the frontline of the struggle to provide indigenous people with the means to make a sustainable living and preserve some of the planet's most valuable and fragile ecosystems.
After a night of swatting mosquitoes in Sergio's guest room, I find my host sitting in his dining room with his wife, Jenny, and daughter Amy. Sergio and I give each other a hug, my long frame against his fireplug physique; he's a full head shorter and always wears a baseball cap with his ponytail. We drink coffee and eat toast with jam before taking off for the Andes. "You ready to go, Mister Chris?"
Yeah, I'm ready.
Peru offers great environmental diversity, from its coastal desert to the snow-capped Andes and the verdant Amazon basin. Peru is also unquestionably under siege. Lima offers a scary glimpse of one possible future, rife with poverty, pollution and crime. The Andean and Amazonian cities are little better. But there is still nature, with all its grandeur and splendor.
Exploitation of natural resources is the name of the game in Peru. If it can be caught, cut down, drilled or dug, it will be. Entire mountains are coming down for the mining industry, and the forests of the Amazon have been cut back hundreds of miles. Wildlife is disappearing, and the coastal waters of Peru are being fished heavily. Sustainable business of any kind helps, in at least some small way, to mitigate widespread devastation.
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