Wade Davis's Lecture on Shultes in the Amazon
Posted on Feb 21st, 2008
by 
Innish
Innish
Well, it turns out that the sky was way overcast last night during the full lunar eclipse.
Also, the person who was hosting the monthly fire was ill and so we had the opportunity to attend a free lecture at the SL Library. Wade Davis was the lecturer, and his talk was on his work with the legendary Amazon ethnobotanist Richard Evans Shultes.
Richard Evans Schultes from http://achievement.org
What an amazing lecture and slideshow. Evidently, Shultes was quite the photographer with his antiquated rolloflex. What comes through in his photos is a genuine love of the people and the area he photographs. Shultes still holds the records for most plant discoveries; he lived in the amazon for quite a number of years. (Synchronistically, Howard Lawler, one shaman with whom I'll study this summer/winter wrote an obituary of Shultes. The shaman is the head of the International Biopark Federation -- their website has a fascinating history/study of dragons, which have been appearing in my visions lately.)
Since I'm planning on experiencing the vine of death (ayahuasca) and san pedro on this journey, I found it fascinating that Wade Davis as well as Shultes experienced ayahuasca. His description of the experience pretty much matches what I've heard--horrible taste, not very "fun," and definitely not a recreational drug, but a wonderful teacher and cleanser of personal chaff.
That afternoon at a different branch of the library, I came across Alberto Villoldo's early book, "Dance of the Four Winds" and was surprised to find out that it described his introduction to shamanism in general and ayahuasca specifically.
makuna shaman preparing for ceremony
But back to Wade Davis' lecture. One point that stuck with me was his talk on the rubber boom and how horrible the "rubber barons" were to the indigenous people, but also that some huge percentage of the world's rubber is grown in SE Asia... Thailand and Malaysia are two of the largest producers, with indonesia and China aggressively planting.
However... the South American rubber blight, a fungus that attacks rubber trees if planted too closely, which was absent in Asia has just hit the continent. It threatens to wipe out the rubber industry there, which means major problems for the industrialized nations. I had thought that most items were now synthetic rubber, but it turns out that synthetic rubber is not up to snuff. It lacks flexibility and the ability to go from cold temperatures to relatively high without degrading. Airline tires, for instance, must be 100% rubber or they experience blowouts (think: Aeroflot), and most radial tires contain at least 35% rubber--some as much as 50%.
During WWII, when the Japanese bombed pearl harbor and invaded Singapore and other asian areas, they controlled the world's rubber supply. The US had 6 months to 1 year of rubber stock/surplus, but we were also ramping up for the largest wartime industrialization in history. Shultes was "tapped" so to speak to discover rubber trees that could be colonized; although most trees were susceptible to blight and were therefore spread out to perhaps one tree per 100 acres, he was able to locate a forest of trees impervious to the blight.
In one of those ironic "indiana Jones" twists, a bureaucrat stopped the program, classified the information, and destroyed the research materials, including plant material and specimens.
Access: Public
amazon
July 2008