Medicine Quest | Mark Plotkin | Talks at Google

Google. You may be wondering why somebody who's working with preliterate cultures is doing here at the cutting edge of 21st century technology. But the Amazon conservation team is all about marrying this ancient shamanic wisdom to 21st century technology to make a better life for all of us. Whether it's new wonder medicines for your kid or oxygen and for your grandchildren. That's what we're all about. And I'd like to start out by introducing two invaluable members of my Amazon conservation team. Liliana, where are you? Ah, okay. Liliana Madrigal, executive director in charge of our women's projects, has just come back from the Colombian Amazon organizing the most ancient and powerful female shamans of the northwest Amazon into a guild to protect their knowledge in their forests. And Vasco Van Ruysmallen, who is director of our Brazil program and really has been in charge of indigenous mapping and has worked in partnership with Indians from 25 tribes to protect 48 million acres of rainforest. We've been using a little bit of Google Earth in the process, but it is really revolutionizing the conservation movement. Now I'm supposed to give a talk on Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice is a book I wrote a few years back. It just rolled into the 27th printing last week. It's in six languages, been made into an Academy Award nominated IMAX film, and made into an Emmy winning children's TV show. So the book lives on. Most important about that is everybody gets a free copy and I'll sign every darn one of them when I'm done. So stick around. Hey, talk's not over yet. Now, I'm an ethnobotanist, that's a scientist who works in partnership with indigenous peoples to study their use of indigenous plants. And ethnobotanists are very different than botanists. Botanists look down on ethnobotanists, and ethnobotanists look down on botanists. And I'll give you an example why. I was in the Northeast Amazon a few years ago with a botanist and we were working with a shaman of the Sikiana tribe. And this guy's quite a pistol. And I'll tell you some more stories about him when I show you his picture and a few images, but the botanist was interviewing him in Portuguese because we were very close to the Brazilian border and I'm eavesdropping as I'm pressing my plants, and the botanist says to the shaman, what? What?

What?

You've killed people. You've actually killed people. And he said, sure. And he said, well, how many people have you killed? This many. And so the botanist is totally freaked. He turns to me and says, oh my God, he's killed people. He's killed 10 people. And the Wai Wai Indian in a red breech cloth growing up in British Guiana, speaks beautiful English, better than the president of the United States, says to me, oh, no, he's killed way more than 10. He just ran out of fingers. Now, you may wonder what this has to do with finding new medicines in the rainforest. And the fact of the matter is that poisonous plants are medicinal plants and medicinal plants are poisonous plants. Don't take my word for it. Paracelsus said this 500 years ago. So the fact of the matter is that the pharmaceutical industry is about to be revolutionized with this new focus on toxic plants and their toxic plants used by indigenous peoples. If the rainforest is a library, the indigenous peoples are the index. Now, I first started working in the northeast Amazon, and that's going to be the focus of my talk this afternoon. In 1982, I was in the country of Suriname, formerly known as Dutch Guiana, on the northeast shoulder of South America, and a revolution broke out and it was led by the Cubans, who were egging on the leftists in charge of the government. They killed all the members of the opposition leadership and closed down the country. And I could not get out. So, thinking I was clever, I went down to the local airstrip and found a bush pilot who would fly me to the closest airstrip to the Brazilian border, thinking that, well, if things got hot, I could just walk into Brazil. Now, Americans don't arrive in Brazil on foot, but that's another lecture. Anyhow, the guy flew me to this little airstrip in the middle of the jungle. Three hours over pristine rainforest until the spot opened up. And I got out and I got my little backpack and I got my plan press, and I was surrounded by Indians in red breech cloths painted blue. And the pilot called me over. He didn't even turn off the engine. He was so anxious to fly off, he said, let me give you some advice. He says, stay away from the women, because if you don't, all the men will come after you and all of their arrows have poisoned tips. Have a good trip and I'll be back in two months. And he flew off. But I'll get more to that. First I want to talk about my favorite fungus, which is what you see here. This is not a picture of. Of a spider. It's a picture of a fungus. This fungus is Cordyceps. Cordyceps lives quiescent on the forest floor and waits for insects and arachnids to go past. Once they've done so, the fungus attaches itself to the exoskeleton of the insect. Once it's done that, the fungus burns a hole in the skin of the exoskeleton. Once it's done that, the fungus inserts itself inside the exoskeleton. Once it's done that, the fungus proceeds to devour virtually all of the insect's non vital organs. Once it's done that, the fungus invades the insect brain, eating only a part of the insect brain, thereby causing the insect to climb to the top of the tallest tree in the forest. Once it's done that, the fungus eats the rest of the insect brain, thereby killing the insect, thereby causing the exoskeleton to split open, thereby allowing the fungus to Release its spores 110ft above the forest floor. Scientists refer to fungi as lower organisms. I think you can see why ethnobotanists don't read science fiction. Because no science fiction writer can come up anything weirder than this shit right now. This fungus produces cyclosporine. Cyclosporine is what reduces the human immune system. This fungus is what makes organ transplant surgery possible. When they first did this 30 years ago in South Africa with Barney Clark, his immune system rejected the implanted heart. Now this is an everyday occurrence in every hospital, every major hospital in the U.S. thanks to this fungus. So you have to remember that when people talk about the drugs of the future. Mother nature has been inventing wild and wonderful kick ass compounds for 3 billion years. And we're still learning what she has to offer us. Here's another favorite drug of mine, Statins. Like Lipitor. This is the biggest, most important, most valuable drug class that's come to market in the last 30 years. Worth billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars every year. Lipitor is the single most widely prescribed prescription drug in the U.S. 15 page cover story in Newsweek. One problem. They didn't mention where it came from. It comes from fungi. The biggest class of drugs in the last 30 years comes from nature. And when you talk to the pharmaceutical industry, it's like, no, no, it's all about synthetic chemistry. It's all about synthetic chemistry. Bullshit. Nature has been, nature is, and nature will be the major source of our pharmaceuticals for the foreseeable future. Now this is something you should be afraid of, okay? Don't worry about terrorism. Don't worry about global warming as much as you worry about this. This is staph Aureus. Everybody in this room has got this stuff up their nose and, and on their skin. It's not a problem. But when you get an automobile accident and it gets mushed into your bloodstream, or 30 years old triathletes go into the hospital for a little knee tune up and this gets in their bloodstream and they carry them out on a slab. This stuff has got more ways to kill you than the Batmobile. Okay? And it's getting worse. The problem is the pharmaceutical industry has pulled out of the search for new antibiotics by and large. Why? Because they want to give you a Viagra that you're going to take every day for the rest of your life rather than make a drug that you're going to take for seven days. This stuff's gaining on us and it's happening fast. Strep, pneumo. Every one of you that's got kids or grandkids, this is what's giving your kids earache every year. This stuff never developed resistance. Staph Aureus developed resistance so quickly that when penicillin came to market in the early 40s, resistance showed up right away. Alexander Fleming wrote about resistance in Staph Aureus. This stuff never developed resistance for 40 years. All of a sudden it has. So now it's 50% resistant to penicillin and it's gaining on us. It causes 7 million earaches a year that we know of around the world in kids. Drug resistant antibiotics, drug resistant bacteria. The greatest threat to our species is people in this room right now. There's people on the video link in New York that are going to die from drug resistant bacterial infections. How do I know that? Because I did a book called the Killers the Deadly Rise of Drug Resistant bacteria. And. And 40,000Americans die every year of drug resistant bacteria that we know of. Think about that. 40,000Americans a year, that's more than how many times died in nine, 11, 3,000 people. And that's 40,000 people we know of. I think the number is much, much, much, much higher. There's few people that don't know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody who got a drug resistant infection in a hospital. And it's getting worse. Here's the nightmare scenario. Drug resistant bacteria, a flesh eating bacteria is strep, Streptococcus. If this stuff switches genes with Staph aureus and these things are incredibly nasty when it comes to mating and switching genes right across the Board. This is what we're all going to look like. So where are the drugs going to come from? Where the drugs have always come from. 80% of all antibiotics come from nature. And we're just beginning to look for it in a serious way. And here is a Yyindian friend of mine in the northeast Amazon treating his kid for bacterial infection of the ear. Because bacterial infections did not begin in 1942 with Alexander Fleming. Bacterial infections are something that every species everywhere faces. And there's a lot more stuff out there and most of it's in the natural world and much of it's in the rainforest. But just some concrete examples of drugs from nature. This is the rosy periwinkle grows right here in Google in the window boxes. Actually native to southern Madagascar, it's the source of six different antitumor alkaloids which are frontline drug for treating and curing childhood leukemia. Coca from western South America is the source of novocaine. In other words, we're not using the alkaloid itself as a medicine. We're building a synthetic molecule which is as effective but non addictive. Mexican yam. Anybody in this room who has ever eaten a birth control pill, and there may be some of you here, has been ingesting Mexican yams because the active components come from these Central American tropical shrubs. This is my mentor doing what ethnobotanists do best, living and working with indigenous peoples. This is Richard Evan Schultes, the father of ethnobotany, as Jennifer mentioned in the introduction, and taking a highly hallucinogenic snuff with a Yukuna Indian from the Colombian Amazon. Schultes would always say the difference between an ethnobotanist and an anthropologist. When the Indian passes you the hallucinogenic snuff, the anthropologist says, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. I'll lose my objectivity. The ethnobotanist says, yee haw. This is proof of the value of ethnobotanical field research. Schultes went down to Oaxaca in southern Mexico in the late 30s because he heard there were rumors of hallucinogenic mushrooms. And outside of Amanita mascaria from Siberia, there weren't thought to be any hallucinogenic mushrooms, at least those used by people. So he found magic mushrooms, the same ones you find here growing in cow patties after a rain. Now, you may have heard of another name from the ethnobotanical field, Albert Hofmann. How many people know that name? God, you guys are young. Albert Hoffman invented lsd. He's a Swiss chemist. Yeah, okay. The old guy in front, my age, says, yeah, yeah, I know who that guy is. I think I got you beat. Anyhow, Schultes is having dinner with Hoffman in Switzerland and his wife opens a purse and takes out these pills and knocks them out. And Hoffman says, oh, let me see what you got there. And he goes, oh, biscuit. A beta blocker for your heart condition. He says, do you know that I'm the one that synthesized this class of drugs? And you know that I did it based on compounds I collected in the hallucinogenic mushrooms that your husband collected in Mexico in 1939. So when you hear about hallucinogens and you hear about mind altering substances, this stuff continues to revolutionize western medicine. And here is one of my many interests in the ethnobotanical field. In fact, one of my many obsessions with poisons. This is a Hoti Indian from Venezuela with a blowgun over his shoulder. These guys are amazing hunters. I've seen guys knock small birds slightly larger than hummingbirds out of the canopy, but not injure them because they wanted some of the tail feathers to make their headdress. A colleague of mine was working in Ecuadorian Amazon. He was with the Smithsonian Institution. And the Indians saw him with all of his mist nets, which is how ornithologists capture birds. And they said, oh, cool. And they grabbed their blow guns and ran off and came back and handed him, several hours later, a bag full of birds that they blowgun. Well, the scientist was something of a prig and looked at them and said, well, these won't do because I'm collecting for the Smithsonian institution in Washington D.C. and I can't make skins out of these birds because there's holes in the skins. And the Indians were kind of crestfallen, and they went off with their blowguns and came back a couple hours later and very proudly presented the scientists with another bag full of birds that they blowgunned through the eyes. From the ethnobotanical standpoint, the utility of blowguns is blow darts because they coat their blow darts with a poisonous paste. In many cases made from the moonseed family, the menospermaceae, which has revolutionized, revolutionized, revolutionized abdominal surgery. You cannot do abdominal surgery without curare alkaloids because it relaxes the muscles, allows you to cut in and do your work. But we now know they're making curare from other stuff. You've heard of dart frogs. This is why they call them dart frogs because in the Choco in western Colombia, not in the Amazon, they rub the skins of these frogs on their blow darts to give them a deadly effectiveness. Abbott Labs is now developing a completely non addictive painkiller based on skins of these South American frogs. So think about this. This is a billion dollar drug that can replace morphine and other opiate derivatives because they have so many nasty side effects and alleviate immense amounts of human sufferings. Now, you could argue that, well, who needs Indians, because these frogs were there anyhow. But like I said, the Indians are the index to the book that allows you to know where to go, what to do and what to look for. But this is my favorite frog of all. Anybody see my IMAX film Amazon? Okay, somebody. But everybody's seen imax. You know what IMAX films are, right? Okay, typical IMAX film, you're going through the rapids, you want to throw up, you're flying over the mountains, you want to throw up. The end. No science, no story, no character. But the reason I wanted to work on this film was they hired Lauren McIntyre as a screenwriter. McIntyre explored the Amazon for 50 years. Great photographer. And I knew that he would do a real story and make it scientifically accurate. Macintyre was lost on the Brazil Peru border about 25 years ago. Was rescued by a group of Indians who'd never seen a white man. They beckoned for him to follow them deeper into the forest, which he did. They entered a jungle clearing, they took out palm leaf baskets. They opened the palm leaf baskets, they took out these big suckers, these green monkey frogs, and they began licking them. It turns out they're highly hallucinogenic. Well, MacIntyre wrote this up and basically forgot about it. It was read by another friend of mine who's an editor at High Times magazine. Now, one thing I should explain to you is that ethnobotanists have contacts in all sorts of weird cultures, not just tribal ones. So this guy thought he would go down to the Amazon, find the green monkey frog and give it a whirl. Which he did. And he wrote and, and I quote, my blood pressure went through the roof. I thought I was having a heart attack. I lost full control of my bodily functions. I passed out in a heap. I woke up in a hammock six hours later. I felt like God for two days. Okay, not a bad trade off if you think about it. But an Italian chemist with a subscription to High Times magazine said, I'm not really interested in the theological aspects of the green monkey Frog. What about this change in blood pressure? So he is now taking the peptides out of the skin of this frog and developing a new approach to treating high blood pressure, which of course is the major killer of African Americans in our country. And a startup company in Washington state is now looking for treatments for septicemia, that is blood resistant infections, drug resistant blood infections. So this is the kind of stuff you find in this magical place. And just to deviate a bit to another part of the tropics, this is the gastric brooding frog from the rainforests of Australia. When this thing was found in the early 70s, it was found. The female would lay her eggs, she would swallow them up and a couple of weeks later she would barf out her offspring, fully grown. So what's going on here? The mama frog was turning off her gastric juices. Now, when I see the secondary source of caffeine and at Google is a red pipe this big along, I think acid reflux must happen here. Okay, this frog could cure your acid reflux, but it's too late. Because when they figured this out and went back 12 years later, it was completely extinct. It's too late, it's gone. As John Cleese would say, it is an ex frog. Okay? There's no more. That secret has been lost. Now, we do grow things big in the Amazon. This is the Amazon leech lives on black caimans. Leeches have anticoagulants in their saliva. That is how they keep the blood flowing. What we now know is that every single species of leech produces a different list of anticoagulants. The coagulation cascade. How blood coagulates is about 32 steps long, depending on what you're trying to treat or prevent. You want different ways to screw with the pathway along the way. Now, I'm from Louisiana and I haven't had a creationist yet. Explain to me why God took so much time to make sure that every leech had a different collection of anticoagulants. And here's another source of anticoagulants from the Amazon. Vampire bats. Vampire bats drink your blood. And as you'll see in Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, I know this personally. And when they bite you, you bleed like a stuck pig. And that's because their saliva is full of an anticoagulant. But the vampire bats have a better marketing director than do the leeches because their compound is being brought to market trade named Draculin. Now, a bit about the work that we do at the Amazon Conservation Team to protect these resources. We firmly believe you cannot protect rainforests without Indians. And, and you can't protect Indians without rainforests. And our job is to work in true partnership with these indigenous peoples to protect their forests, to protect their waterways, to protect their healing knowledge, and use all tools available, including Google Earth, to help them do it. This is what the rainforest is supposed to look like. This is what the rainforest increasingly looks like around the world. 90% of the original forest cover in the island of Madagascar is gone. 90% of the forest cover in Eastern Brazil, a completely different rainforest formation than the Amazon is gone. What we're trying to do in the Amazon is learn from and not repeat these mistakes. As you see nature's greatest treasure house, not just of drugs, but of biodegradable pesticides, of industrial products being bulldozed and burned into the earth. It makes you want to sit up and do something. So our mission at the Amazon Conservation Team, amazonteam.org, for those of you on the web, the mission of ACT is to work in partnership with indigenous peoples in conserving biodiversity, health, culture, and in tropical America. And Mark was talking to me on the way over, he said, oh, yeah? Well, a lot of these organizations now want to use our technology to work with indigenous people. Said, hey, man, act we're like Gerber. You know, when I was a kid, Gerber used to say, babies are our business, our only business. We are the only ones that work with indigenous peoples and only indigenous peoples. That is what we do. ACT is a microbrewery. We got to produce the best beer around. There might be other people that produce beer as good, but nobody produces it better when it comes to biocultural conservation. Here's why. 25% of the Brazilian Amazon is indigenous lands, okay? 5% of the Brazilian Amazon is national parks. And when you have gigantic organizations like World Wildlife Fund, with whom I worked many years, Conservation International, where Liliana was a co founder, and I worked many years, Nature Conservancy, where Liliana was a co founder. 5% national parks. Hundreds of millions of dollars going to national parks. It's great. But you know what? This is the missing part of the equation. You got to protect indigenous lands. It ain't gonna work otherwise. 95% of the Amazon, you can write it off. Indians live in headwater areas. And when you have to work with third world governments to talk about the value of resources and the value to them headwaters, nobody can question. Indians know these forests far better than any PhD from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Yale, right? The best bang for the conservation buck, this is the single most effective and cost effective approach to rainforest conservation that exists. And I've been in this business 25 years. And there are other effective approaches. This is not the only tool in the conservation toolbox. You need national parks, you need buffer zones, you need extractive reserves, you need endangered species management. But this is where the rubber meets the road, and here's why. Light green are indigenous lands, dark green are national parks. National parks, 5% indigenous lands, 25%. So here's an example. In the northeast Amazon, Suriname, formerly Dutch Guiana, where much of Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice is set, these guys went to the government and said, gold miners are showing up. We want title to our lands. We've lived here since the dawn of creation. The government said, where's your map? These Indians looked around and said, what's a map? So they asked the Amazon conservation team to map their lands. And we said, we don't work that way. We're not going to map your lands. We're going to teach you to map your lands. Okay, different approach difference between a handout and teaching self reliance. Well, we did this. We trained them and they mapped their lands. But we did something very clever, which is we invited these Indians over here to observe. And once these guys had finished, these guys in the east said, we want the Amazon conservation team to map our lands. We said, no, we don't work that way. We sent these guys over to train them. But we did something very clever. We invited these Indians from Brazil across the border and the same thing happened. The result, 20 million acres of indigenous lands which is now mapped, which is now managed, and which is now protected better than ever before. And this is what it looked like when I first got there. As pristine as it gets. And one thing about working with indigenous peoples, you can't do it in a hurry. You can't get there with $5,000 or $15 million and say, I want results and I want it now. You know, we like quick gratification, but it don't work that way. These guys work in Indian time. This is my buddy Yalawifa, a tadio shaman. This picture was taken in 1982. This picture was taken two years ago. So we're still at it over 20 years later, we're still working together. I was talking at lunch over the fact that I worked with this one shaman for 24 years and he started pulling out treatments for cancer two weeks ago, 24 years, telling me he didn't know nothing about this stuff. So these people work on a different timeline than we do. So it may seem counterintuitive to go to people like this to learn how to manage the forest, how to protect the forest, how to map the forest and find biodegradable pesticides and wonder drugs and everything else, but these guys know far more about it than we do. And this is my favorite chainman of all. Okay, I took this picture, 1982, right on the Brazilian border. And I got there and I said, does anybody speak Portuguese? Because I studied Portuguese in college. We're really close to the Brazilian border. This little boy wants running off, comes back with this fellow, o amigo como bay tudo ben. He speaks very good Portuguese. So we're chatting, chatting, chatting, and he stops and he smiles and he says, well, a white man, huh? He says, you know, I've killed about 20 of them in my time, but you seem to be rather an okay sort. I made him repeat this three times, make sure my Portuguese was good enough, that I was getting this straight. And I asked a local missionary and he said, take this fellow very seriously. He's a renowned warrior who's killed many white rubber tappers and in particular Indians from other tribes who've trespassed in his lands. A year later, I was back in the village and this fellow had an argument with his son in law. And he said, you will not live long enough to regret having this argument with me. Two days later they found his son in law dead in his hammock. Not a mark on him. The missionaries took tissue samples and sent it back to the capital city. They found nothing. So I asked the Indians what happened. And they said, magic. And I pushed harder and I said, what does that mean? And they said, black magic. And I pushed harder and I said, what does that mean? They said, poison. Now remember back to that Paracelsus quote I gave you at the outset. The difference between a medicine and a poison is often a question of dosage. But when I asked this guy if he knew anything about poison, he said no. And when I asked this guy if he knew anything about medicine, he said no. And when I asked him if he knew anything about shamanism or was a shaman, he said no. Now, this went on for 12 years and I was back in the village and. And just to test their knowledge, I brought a medical dermatology textbook, because if these people know a disease, they'll have a name for it in their language. So I was going through this stuff and I was showing them what herpes looks like, and I said, you guys know this? They said, yeah, we know that a little bit. Not much. So will you have a name for it in your language? Because if they don't have a name for it, they don't know it. So, yeah, they have a name for it. So this trio shaman gives me seven plants, and this trio shaman gives me five plants. And in wanders this guy with this big old smirk on his face. And I said, what are you smirking at? It was very distracting. What are you smirking at? He goes, I know that disease. And I said, well, we have a name for it in your language. He says, yeah, I call it insikia. And I call it mutaiga. And I said, you know how to treat it? He said, sure. I said, well, how would you treat it? He said, well, I would use this plant and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and 18 plants, okay? Three times what the shamans of the neighboring tribe use. And he admitted that he was indeed the paramount shaman. And he spent 12 years posing me, okay? And so when I said, why did you spend 12 years, you know, telling me you weren't a shaman? He smiled. I'll never forget this. As long as I was living. He had this big old smile, pressed his nose up against mine and said, because I was just pushing your leg. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I've never played a practical joke where it took over a decade to deliver the punchline. So I'm in the village a couple years later, and this woman shows up with classic diabetes. Now, I'm not a physician. Spent a lot of time studying healing. Not a physician, but I was with a physician. The woman had the sores between her toes. She was weak. She was losing her eyesight. And when she urinated, the ants came to drink the urine because it was full of sugar. So this guy whips together a potion and drops her blood sugar level from 536 to 136 in 12 hours. Now, there's not a physician alive from Stanford Medical School, from Harvard Medical School, or anywhere else who can do this using local plants. And these guys do this stuff over and over and over again. And now he's the director of our shaman's apprentice clinic, which is designed to provide indigenous health care so the tradition doesn't die out. The real problem is when these guys come into contact with Our religion or our technology? Our technology. Their cultures can begin to disintegrate in a frighteningly short period of time if the technology is not presented in a culturally sensitive way. Here's proof positive. Here are my friends Coita and Kamana, with whom I've been working very closely since 1982. Okay, look very closely because I'm going to show you the same guys in the same pose ten years later. Ready? Rainforests are disappearing, but rainforest cultures are disappearing much, much faster. And the people that asked me a while back, what's the most endangered species in the rainforest? Is it the harpy eagle? Is it the jaguar? I would have said the shaman, but now, a few years later, it's not the shaman. It's the female shaman, as Lilianas are working with, because there's even fewer of them. This is the clinic that was set up to capture that knowledge. So they practice their own medicine. I want to be crystal, crystal clear. We are a not for profit organization. We are not looking for new drugs. We are not working with pharmaceutical companies. Our thrust is to make sure this knowledge and these plants and these forests and these cultures are protected. So the knowledge is written down by the Indians in their language, and they're practicing their medicine on their own people. And this is right next door to the Western clinic set up by the missionaries. We originally envisioned that the simple diseases like diarrhea or constipation would be treated by the shamans. And the shamans, both men and women, would refer their most difficult patients to the physicians. Well, guess what? The physicians start referring their most difficult patients to the shamans. So they're about 10 years ahead of where we are in Western medicine because you have doctors and you have nurses and you have shamans and you have shaman's apprentices. So knowing how Google is reinventing the world, I fully expect to come back here in a couple years and see shamans setting up their office. And then 25 years from now, this is what the Western medical office will look like in the rest of the world. The problem, though, with shamanistic medicine is it's almost impossible to understand through the prism of, of Western science. They work in the invisible world, they work in the spirit world, they work with the placebo effect. And that is why sometimes, sometimes, sometimes they can cure stuff that Western medicine cannot. And I can come back and give lots of lectures on examples of that. The basic issue, though, is that Western medicine has two major concerns regarding shamanistic medicine. Number one, it doesn't work, okay? So you develop a curable form of cancer and you go to the masseuse, or you go to the herbalist, or you go to the crystal therapist and you die. The other basic concern that western medicine has about shamanistic medicine, it does work. So these guys are working with invisible two headed black jaguars and curing stuff that no doctor can. And that is a whole different paradigm shift for western physicians to get their mind around. So in this clinic, as I said, they're practicing their traditional medicine. If you look at the lower right hand corner, you see them treating leishmaniasis. Anybody know what leishmaniasis is? Anybody see Papillon? It's this protozoan that gets in your blood and if you don't treat it, it eats all your mucous membranes and basically your nose falls off in your soup. If you get leishmaniasis in southern Suriname, the physician sends you to the medicine man because he can cure it. If you go to the doctor, she or he is going to give you 40 injections of antimony, which is a heavy metal. To me, it's an easy choice as to which one you prefer. Botfly. Everybody knows what botfly is. Anybody see the movie Alien? First one, remember the thing that popped out of that guy's belly? That's a bot fly, okay? Except in Hollywood it's this long, and in the Amazon it's this long. Who says size doesn't matter? So these are the spectrum of conditions that are treated in the shaman's clinic on a regular basis. And as I said, they're now treating cancer as well. Here is Liliana being treated for a fungal infection of the skin by one of the shamans. And let me tell you, if you live in the hottest, most humid environment on earth and you can't cure fungal infections of the skin, you are a fungal infection of the skin. That's how effective their medicine is. We set up shaman's apprentice program, so this knowledge is passed on within the tribe. And we're not just working with indigenous peoples. On the right, you see maroon. You guys know who maroons are? Bush Negroes. These were brought over to the Northeast Amazon 200 years ago as slaves. They got off the slave ships, they looked around and said, hey, this is equatorial rainforest. We'll see you white boys later. Boom. They went off into the depths of the jungles of the northeast Amazon and set up traditional West African societies. And if you go there today, you think you're in 18th century West Africa. So let's finish up then with a few words on mapping, because this is fundamental to everything we do. I'm always told by my chairman of the board, keep it simple, stupid. All right, well, what do we do? We map, we manage, we protect. That doesn't sum up everything we do. We do ethno education, we have indigenous radio stations, and so on and so forth. But mapping is fundamental to protecting these cultures and their rainforest. And these maps are not just maps. They're management plans, they're risk assessment plans, they're legal documents. You see the fellow on the right, funai, that's the Brazilian Agency of Indian Affairs. We go into their office and say, hey, you guys interested in NASA satellite maps of your country? Sure. Guys interested in Google Earth? Sure. How about some free American made GPSs? Sure. Well, we work together, the Indians, the Indian agency, Amazon Conservation Team. And. And the FUNAI logo goes right on that map, making it a legal document. Remember what Bruce Lee said, the art of fighting without fighting. This is an iconic image of what we do. And here you see one of our cartographers not mapping, but training the Indians how to make their own maps. And let me tell you, when you see guys in red breech cloths or less in some of the other areas we work walking through the jungle with GPS units painted red and blue, that is the perfect marriage of ancient shamanic wisdom and 21st century Silicon Valley technology. Some concrete examples. This is the Xingu in southeastern Brazil. The pink is deforestation. This picture is three years old. It's basically now the bottom half is pink. The top half is the Xingu reserve. Where you have Indians, you have rainforest. Where you don't have Indians, you have deforestation. This is the single most important image I'm going to show you today. Vasco and I took this in a small Cessna or over the eastern edge of the Shingu reserve. You see that horizontal line that runs through the middle of the picture? That's the eastern border of the reserve. Top half of this picture, Indigenous reserve. Bottom half of the picture is where the white guys live. Not a single tree. Those little blips in the bottom on the left, those are cows. No trees. Why are they cutting it all down? To grow soy. To grow soy. When I speak up in Berkeley, I say, okay, before I start talking, let's see a show of hands here. How many people eat tofu to save the rainforest? All these hands go up. And then I show this picture. So these are the Shinguanu celebrating the completion of the mapping of their lands. This is one of the chiefs of the Olapiti tribe being presented the official map of his lands presented by act because we funded it, but the Indians themselves did it just to finish up on Tamukumaki. This is a northeast Amazon where the book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice is. Is set. That's the Suriname Brazil border region. And let me show you the power of some of the technologies we've been able to harness to take this wisdom out of their heads and put it into the computer. Look at the state of Amapa right there. Northeastern most Brazilian Amazon. So we zoned it. These are state forests in dark green. And the national park in the northwest next to that, actually in another state, but adjoining that is, is the Tamukumaki Indigenous Reserve. 10 million acres. Now, you have people now in the Brazilian Congress saying a couple of thousand Indians don't need 10 million acres. That's ridiculous. Why? When I was a kid, I grew up on a farm, and it was just this big. These Indians can't possibly know and use all these lands. So we mapped it, we got satellite images of the rivers and said, hey, you guys have names for any of these rivers? So I had to make it in a little map. How about hunting grounds? How about a little logo? How about religious sites? How about medicinal plants? Where do you hunt? So what? Looked like this now looks like this. Ain't nobody saying these guys don't know and use this land. There's over 2,000 icons on this map. And let's zoom in a little bit. Every one of these icons has a story behind it. Look at this lake on the left. When you click on the icon, boom, there's the story. And if you look close, it's in Apala' I and in Portuguese. So it's an incredible education tool as well. And so you see this from the air in a small plane, and you think, pristine rainforest. But the Indians say, no, there's an airstrip. Can't see it. Okay, take the plane down lower. Right there. Here's what we saw. An airstrip. Now, why should we here in California care about this airstrip in the Brazilian Amazon? Let me tell you why. What's happening now? The gold miners come in and they cut a little airstrip, and they start cutting down the forest and shipping out gold. Then the Colombian drug runners come in and give these guys money to make themselves scarce for a couple of weeks. And they start running guns, okay? They start running drugs into the airstrip up to the Caribbean, and then they either into the US or to Europe. Now there's other gun runners showing up. Who's that? Is it Brazilian gangsters Is it Colombian drug runners? Is it Al Qaeda? We don't know. But these Indians, if properly equipped and prepared and with access to stuff like Google Earth, are the best eyes and ears we've got. We took the coordinates, we gave it to the military to shut it down and just to show you the power of this stuff. This is Bruce Babbitt on the right. Okay? Bruce Babbitt saw these maps and he was so blown away, he came down in his own dime to help these Indians manage their land and their resources. Because when you map it, you own it. More land has been claimed with maps than bullets and swords combined. Here you go. Here's a chief of one of the Guianan tribes with his son on the computer, 8 years old. You know what he's looking at? Anybody seen this before? What you're looking at here is the indigenous reserve in the top of the picture with cloud cover and at the very, very edge, some airstrips being set up. And actually they discovered a gold mine in the reserve. So thanks to you guys, and thanks to we guys, these Indians can take control of their cultural and environmental destiny. And this eight year old is now spending time on the web regularly scanning the skies and scanning Google Earth to make sure that the bad guys are kept at bay. And by bringing different tribes together to do stuff like this. These are medicine men from seven different tribes who were brought together for the first ever shaman's gathering in the northwest Amazon, who, as I said, decided, in their words, I was actually quoting them, to seize control of their cultural and environmental destiny in ways never before possible. When people talk about the rainforest, typically this is what they show you and this is what they talk about. And let me be crystal clear here, okay? I think conservation, whether it's San Francisco Bay, whether it's the Redwoods or whether it's the Amazon, should be about, first and foremost, spiritual reasons. I don't think we protect nature because there's new medicines, because there's no fruits, because it's good for us in terms of water quality. I think we need to protect the Earth because it's good for us spiritually, first and foremost. However, I know from experience, whether you're dealing with the knuckleheads currently in the Interior Department right now, whether you're dealing with people in Madagascar, Brazil or Suriname, wherever you money talks, when you can put conservation in utilitarian terms, it makes for a much more convincing argument. But what I don't want to do is come up here and think and give some sort of presentation that says yeah, we got to save it because it's going to cure cancer. No, we need to save it because it's there. And we need to save it because we want our kids and our grandkids to live in a world as rich and beautiful as the ones in which we were all born into. And, you know, I gotta tell you, there's a lot of problems in the Amazon. There's a lot of problems with global warming. There's a lot of problems with water quality. There's a lot of problems in the ocean. Sometimes it's really rather daunting. But I firmly, firmly, firmly believe that these problems are caused by people and these problems can be solved by people. But the only way that's going to happen is if we listen to the people that live there and we combine that with the cutting edge of technology and that guarantees a a better world for all of us for the future. Thank you very much. I'll do some Q and A and I'll sign some books and then we have a meeting with a technical term which we're happy to talk to anybody about anything, anytime. So from our perspective, the more the merrier. But put questions in the back.

This was great, Mark, thanks very much. As a vegan who eats low on the food chain, though, I've got to take issue with you on the soy statement. My understanding is actually that soy, which is a huge problem, people are getting killed over it in the Amazon right now, is that it's actually being grown for food, for feed, for cattle and other livestock here in the US for meat eaters. Now, could you just clarify that for me? I just really honestly want to know.

Sure, I'll talk about that and I'll turn it over to Vasco, who's just here from Brazil. Of course, the soy growers want you to think it doesn't end up on our plate or it's going to China, whatever. It's a big stink right now. There's a big hue and cry in Europe because of that. And I think the whole point of where we need to go to whether it's soy, whether it's beef, whether it's timber, is we want to know where it's coming from. Because corporations are very good at saying, well, not really, not quite this and that and the other. And meanwhile we're all eating this stuff. So we need to move to a world in the information age where we know that our market dollars are doing the right thing. Perfect parallel in the herbal market. The herbal market is a real mess. Why? Because the Chinese are selling us stuff where they're dumping all sorts of terrible pesticides on it, where people are ripping stuff out by the roots, where you're not getting the right species of the plant you want. So it's up to us as educated consumers to say, if I want to eat soy, if I want to eat tofu, and I am a tofu eater, I. I want to know that I'm getting it from the right place and not the wrong place. Bosco, you want to talk about the situation in Brazil.

You are completely right. And actually, most of the soybeans today which come out. Most of the soybeans today which come out of Brazil go to Europe and China. Holland is actually the second biggest importer of soybeans in the world. And the biggest problem is the common agricultural policy in. In Europe, which. Where they put the soybeans into intensive farm farming, specifically cattle and pigs. But. And there are initiatives now in the Amazon to do certification of soybeans. So you get, and thanks to some of the campaigns to show to consumers in Europe and specifically in Europe, that the soybeans that are being imported are causing direct deforestation. Because right now, the way deforestation used to be, you would have the loggers come in, they would start putting in the roads, they would cut out the trees that were useful to them. They'd be followed up by the cattle ranches, they would put in the cattle. And then after the infrastructure was there, now you have soybeans. Except the soybeans have become so profitable that they're skipping the other steps and they're going straight to soybeans. So they're cutting down huge swaths of rainforest and putting in soybeans. But the issue is knowing where it comes from and knowing the goods you buy here, the energy you use, the water you drink, the stuff you're putting out into the air, and the stuff you're putting into your body, where it's coming from. And that's the biggest. That's the biggest issue. And that's part of the communication revolution. And that's one of the reasons that we help these groups and indigenous groups go on the Internet. And not to get them out of their villages, but the world is coming to them. And what we need for them is. And what they need is to get their message out what's happening in their villages. And so you now have indigenous filmmakers, documentary filmmakers, making documentaries about how they live. And they want to get that out there to everybody, to show that they have things to contribute to society. And that's part of the work that you guys do, which is so marvelous, is the fact of, of allowing people in different areas to communicate and being able to pass, cross over the geographical boundaries. And just like we just held the shaman meetings of seven different tribes from North America, South America, in the middle of the Xingu. And one of the first things they said is, it's great we all met up and now we can continue to meet up in our own plane and we won't need passports and we don't need planes. And that's exactly what the Internet does. And also that's exactly what the type of work is that we like to do with them, is to be able to get their message out and for people here who consume these goods to know what effect these things are having on people living so very, very far away. And so, yeah, you're completely right. And one of the big campaigns, actually Greenpeace did in Europe, which had an effect because now the big soybean consortiums which buy up soybeans, have said that they're going to stop buying soybeans from newly deforested areas. But then again, in the Brazilian Amazon, people count on nobody monitoring them. Brazil has some of the best legislation, environmental legislation in the world, but you're living in the wild West, California, 200 years ago. Nobody is there. There's one government official responsible for an area the size of France, and he doesn't have a car. And if he has a car, he doesn't have the gasoline to put in his car. So how is he ever going to enforce those laws? Now that's why, again, where information technology comes in, when the local people can look directly on the Internet and then they can see what's happening, and they can then write their congresspeople or go to the government or go to international groups and say, look, this is happening. This is happening right here. And again, countries like Brazil are very, very sensitive to their international image, which is why they have this great legislation on their books. And so when you can go to the government, you can go to the president at an international conference and say, no, you say, this is not happening. But here's the proof, it is happening. And that's when people start taking action. So that's all other questions.

Yes.

Thank you for coming here. In your book, you talked about how pharmaceutical companies have used alkaloids derived from plants that were found in the Amazon to create products that have then become multibillion dollar success stories. And in the work you're doing, you're documenting very systematically some of these Potential medicinal benefits of the plants. How are you ensuring that the IP that's generated and that the benefits derived are actually translating back into benefit for the communities you're working with?

Right. Well, the pharmaceutical firm you're mentioning is Shaman Pharmaceuticals, which was set up here by a very dynamic woman about 15 years ago. And. And they ran out of money. They don't exist anymore. It's unfortunate, but, you know, to bring a new drug to market is anywhere between $120 million and $200 million. And it's hard to start a startup and bring things to market. They just ran out of money. The drug they were focused on is still used throughout the Amazon very successfully. Our focus is protecting intellectual property rights, the ipr, by making sure the knowledge is passed on to generations and it stays there. I've been criticized time and time again for not publishing more academically. The hell with the academic world. It's these Indian secret information. I'm not going to share it. You know, if they want to do it, let them do a deal with the Indians, which benefits the Indians, which benefits the state government, which benefits the national government even before they do the investigation. Not to wait 15 years when they bring some new age drug to market. And that hasn't caught on in many places yet. But in the meantime, we're keeping the Indians options open by making sure grandpa and grandma pass that knowledge on to junior and to the grandchildren and to make sure those forests are there. Other questions? Yes.

So similar to that, I've been seeing lots of programs on TV about bioprospecting and in particular people who are going and finding very rare parts of genomes that don't exist other places and then trying to get patents on those. Do you have any comments on that practice and what does your group do?

I'm totally against using people's resources, whether it's in their blood or whether it's in their gardens, unless they know about it, unless they've signed a consent form and unless they share in any profits. But I will tell you, much is made about bioprospecting. Much more is made about it than is really an issue because the pharmaceutical companies by and large aren't doing this stuff anymore. They're not working with indigenous peoples because they're scared off and their commenced synthetic chemistry has all the answers. There are some really nasty cases and they're all over the Internet of taking blood from Panamanian Indians and selling something useful they found on the Internet. That's disgusting. It should be illegal. It shouldn't happen. But the idea that every step I take in the Amazon, I'm tripping over somebody from a pharmaceutical industry who's ripping off is just simply not the case. So absolutely, their rights need to be protected. Absolutely. Benefits need to be returned at the outset, during and after any of this exploration. But the idea that the rainforest is being ruined by people finding new cures for aids, I don't see it. Other questions as we wind up.

I had one question. Has there been any attempt to, like, in some kind of Wikipedia way, record for local people to kind of have their own online records of, you know, shamanistic wisdom for, you know, it'll happen.

But it's not going to happen yet even. I'll tell you a story. We applied for a grant from the US government, from the Agency of International Development, and they sent this guy who'd never been to the jungle to do the due diligence. I didn't think he was the best choice for the job, so they sent him down to Xingu, which is the place I showed you some of the pictures of where the Indians wear no clothes, okay? And I said. So he came back and he said, wow, this is great. And it's even better than I heard about act. And I said, well, Kevin, tell me about the one thing that sticks with you. One thing you saw, one thing you learned, one thing you heard that you'll never ever forget. And he said, oh, two things. Absolutely two things. He said, number one, I've been trained in poverty alleviation, okay? And I go there, these guys have no tractors, no cars, no agricultural implements, no clothes, and they didn't want anything except to be left alone. This is not supposed to exist. He says, number two, I was getting on the plane to fly out of there and the chief son comes running up buck naked, painted red, and says to the translator, hey, Kevin, you forgot to give me your email address. So the chief son is the guy who's designated to leave the village once a month. Do the email, you know, do the correspondence, deal with the outside world. So, yeah, the outside world is coming to them. But at this point in time, I'm a great believer. I know it's heresy to say it here. I believe in the paper and the pencil because it doesn't go down, it doesn't crash. If it gets rained on, you dry it out. And eventually they'll all have their websites and they'll all have their private storage digitally, but we're not there yet. It's going to happen, but it should be storage for them themselves. You know, what they want to share with the outside world should be up to them. But right now the focus is getting that knowledge out of the old people's head on paper for their use in their language. You know, it's like I was talking at lunch. It's like watching the last of the woolly mammoths walking around and the question is, are they going to mate or are they going to die out? When you have these shamanic geniuses with 50,000 years of wisdom in their head and if they go junior in the breech cloth or junior in the gym shorts and the Michael Jordan and Bob Marley T shirt isn't writing it down, we want to bridge that gap. So, okay, I want to make one last point then, and then I'll sign books. And that is this. Look, the greatest political tragedy in Washington to a processional environmentalist is a politicization of the environment. The environment was never a political issue, okay? It wasn't a left wing issue, it wasn't a right wing issue, it wasn't a Democratic issue, it wasn't a Republican issue. The two greatest environmental presidents we ever had were both Republicans. Imagine that. So all of us with an interest and a love for the environment have to make sure that we get past this idea that this is some sort of fringe element. And, you know, thank God for Al Gore's movie. It's reaching the masses in a way it hasn't in a long time. But we all need to push. Otherwise the environment will be seen as something of limited interest to a small portion of the population. The other thing I want to point out is our website. It's amazonteam.org and those of you who want more information on the organization, check us out. I brought some annual reports here. And I'm very proud of the fact that Amazon Conservation Team was just declared the most effective and efficient environmental organization possible. Four stars. Okay? This isn't something, this isn't something you can pay for. This is isn't something you can advertise for. They just come to you. And so all of you, when you want to support organizations, I hope you'll consider supporting us. I mean, how many people have done this? You found some great cause, rainforest illiteracy, AIDS. And you send them a check for 15 bucks or 100 bucks and you get a letter back from them and you think, oh, my, thank you. And my tax form, and you open it up and they're asking you for more money, right? And then they take that and they hire some schmuck to call you at dinner and ask you for more money, Right? And then you're getting a piece of mail every two weeks asking for more money. How can you be a conservationist and crank out this kind of trash that ends up in the garbage can in the dump? So we don't do direct mail. We don't call you up at dinner time and ask you for more money. All of our reach is done on the Internet or in person. So we need your help, and thank you very much.